Pay to playtest

>Pay to playtest
AHAHAHAHA PATHFINDERFAGS
AAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

In fairness they're releasing the PDFs online for free, you only have to pay for a physical copy, and they couldn't exactly hand those out for free.

I don't know why there's a physical copy of a playtest in the first place and I don't know what kind of people would pay for it, but whatever.

>I don't know what kind of people would pay for it
Paizofans. People who will buy ANYTHING to support their beloved company, especially if it’s something that gives them the illusion that they helped “contribute” to the creation of PF 2e.

Paizofags pretty notoriously hate any kind of change and vehemently oppose the idea of Pathfinder getting a new edition.

The only reason they’d buy it is to stage a fucking book burning because yes, they are that stupid.

4e did a similar thing, with two physical 'preview' books. Still weird, but before the new-media explosion and easy internet saturation.

Do people actually hate the system or is it just the player base? Like, what's up with the hating on Pathfinder?

Because it is a bad system. It's so bad you're either a troll or new.

The people who made D&D3E the "caster edition" and "an overcomplicated mess" and sold out to third parties to create "incompatible garbage" splats announced that they were going to save us from all that and made Pathfinder. Which primarily buffs casters, nerfs melee, is an even more overcomplicated mess, often for no reason but for flavor, and the incompatible garbage is both abundant and part of official Paizo materials. Then, in the midst of this rules-heavy system that they made even more rules-heavy, they dropped ambiguous rules, not only in splats but in the core rules. Paizo has declared this ambiguity part of their intention. There are over 1000 feats, it's impossible to play the game over level 10, and if you try you'll be spending an hour taking a single turn. Also did I mention there are dozens of monsters that attack by impregnating you? And no you don't have to be a girl to get impregnated by these things.

In addition to these problems with the game, there are problems with the publisher and the fans. If you take issue with any of this on their website, it will be a race between the mods to ban you and the fans to terrorize you.

I just hope they don't nerf casters.

>it's impossible to play the game over level 10
Having run a game of Pathfinder from levels 1 to 15, I can confirm this. 10-15 were a goddamn nightmare to GM for and the rules rapidly broke down while numbers spiraled wildly out of control, and the casters went from "stronger than the entire rest of the party combined" to "actively controlling the narrative"

as for Paizo themselves, the devs have a history of completely ignoring feedback and treating criticism like personal attacks, and when responding to criticisms, contradicting themselves not only in the same paragraph but even in the same sentence.

In addition, you need a computer to play the game. There's so many mechanics you can't expect to keep track of the math on your own. And the software to do so is proprietary and expensive. Paizo is so bad they aren't even aware that the game they made that they think is a TTRPG is actually a CRPG.

I sat down to play Kerbal Space Program about the same time I started playing Pathfinder. I learned rocket science and accomplished literally everything in KSP in 3 months. I still don't pretend to have a mastery of Pathfinder. It gives "rules lawyers" a new meaning because as in real law there are a vast number of rules and many of them are so open to interpretation you NEED to get in an argument just to build your character. As such, the same character with the same mechanics will be completely different from one DM's table to another.

Pathfinder is the ultimate in American game design: An overcomplicated mess, made by mathematically illiterate people, that has a random agglomeration of ideas rather than design elegance, with thousands of rules and no strategic depth, run by sociopathic corporate robots who promised to save us from the mess that they themselves had made, with a fanbase that acts like the membership of a snake-handling rural church.