Quote Originally Posted by Kurald Galain View Post
Seriously? We had regular "why rituals suck" threads on this very forum, it's the equivalent of 3E's perennial debates about monks, and 5E's about its skill system. It's heavily controversial, is the point.

While a lot of players like the general idea of having codified non-combat encounters, I've never seen anyone who wasn't a hardcore 4E fan actually like 4E's implementation (and a lot of hardcore 4E fans dislike that part of the game, and it was widely mocked in the LFR public campaign). Of course, this is exactly why both of 4E's successors (5E and PF2) haven't reused anything resembling 4E's ritual system, except reusing its name for something that works completely differently.

Anyway, the forum search button is right there, so feel free to look for some old threads here at GITP
I primarily was on the WotC (Gleemax) forums during the 4e era. I saw a lot of the edition warring there. But rituals usually weren't a major complaint about 4e on those boards. The math being wrong, encounters being too long, the PHB1 classes being too homogeneous...these were things I saw complaints about.

And on these forums, some of the complaints I've seen about 4e (usually not this subforum) don't sound like informed complaints. That is, they're the generic "it was an MMO on paper" tripe that even gets repeated by people who never played it. But I guess I just haven't seen these controversies about 4e rituals.

I've only ever heard one (former) poster on these forums have a lot to say negatively about Skill Challenges (which you didn't mention by name, but did say something about non combat encounters). And most of what that person said was unmitigated trash. He kept insisting that the "only way to do" a Skill Challenge was for everyone to sit around and do nothing while 1 person with a good modifier in one of the Primary Skills made all the checks for success.