Biggest Headache For Game Developers: Abusive Fans 381
chicksdaddy writes "Haters keep buyin' — that appears to be the dynamic playing out in the ever-hot video game industry, where game developers say harassment and trolling from their rabid fans is turning them off of development completely, according to a report over at Polygon.com. 'Fans are invested in the stories and worlds that developers create, and certain design decisions can be seen by fans to threaten those stories and worlds,' said Nathan Fisk, lecturer at the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and co-author of the book Bullying in the Age of Social Media. 'Harassment silences and repositions content creators in ways that protect the interests of certain fan groups, which again is no justification for the kinds of abusive behavior and language seen online today.' The problem is widespread enough that it may even pose a threat to the future of the industry. Developers, both named and those who wish to remain anonymous, tell Polygon that harassment by gamers is becoming an alarmingly regular expected element of game development. Some developers say the problem was among the reasons they left the industry, others tell Polygon that the problem is so ubiquitous that it distracts them from making games or that they're considering leaving the industry."
Blizzard seems to have gotten a handle on it (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, it is nice if you have the developers actively communicate with the fan base, but many times, those fans that post on forums the most end up making demands, and in many cases don't fully appropriate the fact that the game developers know what they are doing much more so than the fans do.
Blizzard has CMs (community managers) that act as a buffer between the developers and the fan base. They are trained and hired to deal with the various disagreeing opinions, while being able to recognize when there is a clear consensus that is sensible and something the devs should be aware of. Most people know 2 of the developers: Greg Street, who has taken it upon himself to meet this challenge, and Chris Metzen who primarily works on Art, voice, and lore, which people generally don't complain about too much (although it does happen).
I see way too many game companies let their developers just openly communicate with the fan base unbuffered, and they need to take a hint from Blizzard to let the professionals handle it.
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Re:Blizzard seems to have gotten a handle on it (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, did they force everybody into RealID?
I'd say that the "RealID fiasco" is exactly representative of a company responding to the concerns of its player base.
It seemed like a good idea "in-house," so good that they could "push all users into the RealID system!" Then they started talking about it to fans, and fans said, "hold the fuck up. hold the fuck up. I do not want that." And... Blizzard moved away from forcing everybody into RealID. I have it disabled, though I do like the BattleTag features, so I use that instead.
I'm not sure why you seem to think that their response to the RealID concerns are an example of "not understanding and communicating player base needs."
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By definition, pretty much. If the users don't like the game, then it isn't a good game. Two points to keep in mind, though: make sure that a majority (or at least a large minority) don't like the game, not just a vocal, abusive few. Also, while the gamer's overall opinion of the game is not only valid but in the end the only one that counts, that doesn't mean his diagnosis of w
Welcome to Fiction writing. (Score:5, Insightful)
It sounds as if game developers are learning what sci-fi/fantasy writers already knew; fans can be rabid and irrational. For most authors this isn't a problem because they sell in the 5 or 6 digits and there may be just one crazy fan. But every AAA video game has millions of players, so the number of crazies can be much larger.
This is why Neil Gaiman was forced to tell people that 'George R. R. Martin is not your bitch.' Because rabid fans wanted GRR to be their bitch, and because he now has such a large audience their harassment was getting out of hand.
The solution to this is to grow a thick skin and/or to get a secretary that will read and filter your mail for you. Or you could make games that only sell 10k-100k units, so the fanbase doesn't reach a critical mass of craziness...but if your company is addicted to money then being a smaller part of the market isn't an option.
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To be fair, Martin asked for such fan reactions. In the second to last book of the "Song of Ice and Fire" ("A Feast for Crows"?), he wrote that he had divided the story, and that the companion volume covering the other characters in that timespan was written and in the pipeline. This was a lie. That volume hadn't been written, and it took Martin an unexpectedly long time to write it. Many fans were not only disappointed at not getting what they wanted, but angry because they had been lied to. They fel
Sounds like typical press hype (Score:3)
You see stories like this on other topics. They tend to be hyped up. It's a crisis! Won't someone please think of the children!?
Yeah, it's probably a real issue. No, it's probably not a crisis.
Gamers shouldn't have an entitlement mentality. Game developers shouldn't have a victim mentality. People should be nicer to each other.
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Correct response to obnoxious fans (Score:4, Insightful)
STFU, n00bs!
In other words, ignore those kinds of fans: they'll yell and scream and complain, and in the end buy the next version of the game.
I think.. (Score:2)
It's all part of the Eternal September playing a rush to the bottom.
Trolls have discovered there's very little (if any) consequence to them being as obnoxious as possible, and many have come to realise that if you troll and upset people, they can't let it go as well as a well reasoned argument.
Thus, it seems that if you Troll, you get a response, so more people troll, and the more abusive you are, the more attention is paid (and god forbid, someone deletes the abusive post, as that then ends up noted on all
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This doesn't seem limited to the online world either. I've heard of many instances of female geeks being harassed at conventions and other areas for not being "real geeks." Apparently, in the minds of some self-proclaimed "real geeks", one cannot be a woman and a geek at the same time... any women that claim to be geeks are pretending, likely to try to seduce a "real geek." (Yes, these people have actually claimed this!) Now, I'm not female and have never gone to a convention, so I haven't seen this per
As a geek? Seduce me! (Score:2)
any women that claim to be geeks are pretending, likely to try to seduce a "real geek."
Does it make be a bad person, or geek, that my first thought was 'Seduce Me!'?
On reflection there's the 'pretending to be somebody that you're not' problem though.
Don't feel the trolls. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Some of the harassment is deserved... (Score:3, Interesting)
... from the F2P scam, DRM, and taking away peoples ability to own games by making everything F2P or online, where Diablo 3 introduced us to the DEFECT of SINGLE PLAYER LAG. The entire industry at present and the corrupt whiny little bastard game devs (those who are among the corrupt) deserve everything they get.
The Game industry is among the most corrupt on the planet:
-Taking the ability to own and mod games away from players
-Enclosing games by using MMO/F2P server chaining strategy
-F2P/MMO games are locked down and that makes a suffocating environment for fan creativity, mods, hacks, etc, to the original game and more and more games are being completely locked down and gamers being locked out.
Nanny corporation is trying to make people dependent on it in the exact same way as an overbearing totalitarian state would. They want to force a relationship where they continually draw money from people and you never own anything.
This is just more of a trend of game industry not aware of the industry wide corporate corruption that people are getting sick and tired of and the are too oblivious to the justified anger people have at price gouging, bank bailouts, and wars based on lies.
Re:Some of the harassment is deserved... (Score:5, Insightful)
So don't buy or play the game if you know it's got issues. Request a refund if it's a defective product you already purchased. Tell the developers in a constructive way what bothers you about the game.
whiny little bastard game devs [...] deserve everything they get.
No, they deserve appropriate criticism and lower sales for the poor development choices they made. They do not deserve threats against them and their families. Stop being the problem.
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"So don't buy or play the game if you know it's got issues."
That's not the way the world works. This is a typical american go-to statement that americans use to shut down serious analyses about how the world actually works. As an adult you can go ahead and not buy the game, but how many kids and teens/20 somethings who never grew up in the PC game era of doom, quake, etc are going to know the game industry is totally corrupt when they never experienced or lived through gaming during the 1990's?. Kids who
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I'm pretty sure those "features" were put in because management dictated that they be implemented. Not because game devs thought they would be cool things to put in the game.
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Right because a laggy game totally justifies you to threaten to butcher the developers family and vivisect their children.
It's not just game fans (Score:3)
Hyperbolic insults, rants, threats and bullying are commonplace in every type of communication over the internet. The anonymity and pseudo-anonymity enable a culture where there is rarely any significant penalty for even the worst insults.
Gabriel from Penny Arcade really summed it up nicely with his Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory [penny-arcade.com]
Re:It's not just game fans (Score:4, Interesting)
Yup, I've heard this happening in conventions or online communities where female geeks are told they aren't "real geeks" because they aren't guys. (Other reasons are given because the self-proclaimed "real geeks" don't want to admit to being sexist, but it all boils down to "ewwww girls" attitude.) A vegan friend of mine online has been harassed by people who claim she's not a "real vegan" because she doesn't follow X, Y, or Z and only by following all of this can you be a "real vegan." And then there's the political arena where you can't be a "real" member of the party without following EVERYTHING that the party stands for TO THE EXACT DEGREE that they stand for it. Any variation or independent thought means you are a traitor to the party and should be shunned.
Sadly, I think this is a basic fact of human nature (forming groups then protecting those groups from perceived "outsiders") which the anonymity/pseudo-anonymity of the Internet helps to push to extremes.
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And on top of that the people most likely to respond in an adult fashion are those with least time to talk to you. A lot of the people you find trolling the net are fourteen, unemployed, unemployable or have some kind of mental condition or personality disorder which lead to them not having much better to do than to spread bile. That great developer who'd know the answer? He's probably busy designing and writing code after he got home from work while the bastard with no social life who can't figure out why
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A topic I have some interest in... (Score:5, Insightful)
MMO devs often take a fairly hands-off attitude about their community, don't do anything about harassment and griefing... then are confused that their community is dominated by toxic people.
Yes, it's a great thing to be thick-skinned, but it's not a moral virtue, it's just really useful. The people who are trying to offend other users and mock them for being sensitive are not really good for your community, and if you keep tacitly endorsing them, you end up with a community of people who have learned that abuse works, because the people it worked on mostly left. Then they do it to you too, and suddenly it's a problem...
You can't please all of the people all of the time (Score:2)
Two simple suggestions (Score:4, Interesting)
Alternatively, the most straightforward way to stop criticism from disaffected "fans" would be to give them what they want, rather than assuming that some designer somewhere knows better.
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That's easy. Just implement a god mode in the game.
The problem is the players want themselves to be in god mode, while other players are not.
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The first rule of PvP is that if you are killed then the other player must have cheated.
The second rule of PvP is that if the devs don't fix this cheating then the devs are playing favorites.
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You cannot possibly give "The fans" what they want, because you have lots of fans, which often want very contradictory things.
I have worked in the MMO industry, and every time we'd do an update, you'd hear the hard-core people screaming in the forums that we should only do high-end raid dungeons, because Real Players all had max level characters, and so there was no point in catering to clueless noobs who didn't know how to play the game. And at the same time, user surveys and in-game data revealed that we
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So following on from knowing that there is lots of in-game data collection and profiling the question becomes even more relvant: why bother hanging our on forums with a bunch of disaffected attention seekers, when you are getting reliable information about game play and users from more your own, objective, sources?
It probably goes something like this:
1. The "hardcore" players are the most vocal and visible.
2. Their posts/reviews/comments are the most likely to be seen because the casuals and less-hardcore don't post as much.
3. Which means that prospective new players only see what the hardcore have to say about the game. Which might be things like:
a. The game has gone carebear since the Pandas
b. The game has no high level content the devs are ignoring us hardcore l33t who have been playing since beta.
c. The devs c
Re:Two simple suggestions (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a very insightful comment. And to take your "rock star" mentality a bit further:
"Dimebag Darrell", the guitarist of Pantera was assassinated ON STAGE by one of the band's fans.
If you go to metal shows, you'll see that - even though most fans are actually really nice (but scary-looking) people, there's a certain subset (that you're not going to see as prevalently at say, a Tom Jones concert, for example) who are just angry scumbags looking to stir up shit. This is precisely why a friend I know, (and very talented guitarist) quit his metal band, got a haircut, and started doing studio work and teaching. His fans were getting creepier and scarier, the mosh-pits were becoming very violent, and no matter what they tried to tell the crowds about "staying cool", they just got worse and worse. People just apparently don't know how to behave civilized anymore.
This is a really simple to solve problem (Score:2)
Fez 2 & Phil Fish (Score:4, Interesting)
Game devs need to not be such whiny babies (Score:2)
I've been on a lot of game dev forums and the thing is that they don't start out hostile.
What happens is that the devs will frequently ignore the fan base who are their customers... do stupid things that pretty much everyone hates... insult the fan base by either saying people really want the thing they don't want or say they don't care what people want and do it anyway.
In addition to that, you'll have bugs that won't get fixed for MONTHS to YEARS despite many updates... simple things... that just get ignor
Get Out of the Gutter (Score:2)
Customers are Stupid (Score:2)
1. You haven't even played the game, or haven't played it enough yet to understand why X feature is/isn't in the game.
2. You are directing your unjustified hate at the wrong person.
Instead of letting the hate flow through you and writing a stupid forum post to feel good from the endorphins it releases you should take some time to understand why the decision was made. It was probably made by people more inform
Good preparation for political work (Score:2)
So, I guess game development is pretty good preparation for a career in politics, after all.
Speaking of abusive fans... (Score:4, Interesting)
I work in the video game industry and have experienced this first hand.
A few years back we shipped the latest instalment of a popular game franchise. Our online publishing partner, who won't be named but their name rhymes with TONY borked the capacity planning for game servers based on their projected demand which was 10x less than what we saw on launch day.
Their servers crashed and the fans came down on us like the fist of an angry deity.
The online abuse was one thing -- being slagged in the forums and on YouTube was to be expected. What we didn't expect was how quickly certain fans escalated their abuse.
It began with complaints to the Better Business Bureau -- complaints that we'd ripped people off by selling them a game that was unplayable. This was annoying but not unexpected.
Then the calls started when one fan found our front desk number and hundreds of frustrated teenage boys began calling, threatening to rape and murder our receptionist and anyone else who was involved in the development if the game. To her credit, she handled them with aplomb but when someone posted our office address, the "fans" began to send "gift baskets." Boxes full of animal (we hope) feces, soiled XXL BVDs, and rotten food. One fan waited outside the office, then confronted her. That was the last straw and she understandably quit the next day.
The most unsettling instance happened when I was walking towards the front door, a police car pulled up and demanded to know if I was an employee of the studio. The officer got out of his cruiser and adopted an intimidating demeanour suggesting that we should fix the "god-dam" game and stop ripping off gamers. When cops start stalking you, you know it's time to find a new line of work.
Re:Who else should comment on your games? (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, that's exactly what the article is about and not stuff like:
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=call+of+duty+death+threats
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=bioware+death+threats
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We are talking about millions of customers. Because of the numbers involved I'm sure that includes beside people who are well ... dead by now also people that pee on themselves, people who have both AIDS and cancer and (gasp) people who leave in a fantasy world that involves running around killing as many people as possible.
Sure, bad mouthing on a forum, sucks. Death threats, sucks much more. But in the end that's it, do your best to prepare for the worst, hope for the best and life goes on (until it doesn'
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Except if you go to gaming forums, the amount of abusive posters is a sizeable fraction. Either all the happy gamers are not posting ever, or people just go into rage mode online. Yes the death threats are low but the negativity is rampant. And advice of "you shouldn't be a game dev without a thick skin" does not help the problem. Who wants to be in an industry where they know they'll regularly get abuse? It's much simpler to get a job somewhere else, especially as being a game developer is already a
Re:Who else should comment on your games? (Score:4)
man if you haven't felt "OMG WHAT THe FucK I PAID FOR THIS SHIT WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS FUCKING INVISIBLE WALL DOING HERE AND WHAT THE FUCK BUGGED MENU tOOK MY ITEMS" then you really haven't played at all.
anyways, it's not like they're going to go through with the threats unless they screw over south koreans with some loot disappearing bugs.
besides than I'm pretty sure if you found guys responsible for kotor2 release and whoever came up with me3 ending you could get away if it was a "jury trial of your peers"..
I don't think that any game developer with any vision is going to stop developing because some guys bitch on twitter though... many more are going to stop because nobody gives a fuck either way about their games.
Re:Who else should comment on your games? (Score:5, Insightful)
Part of good game development business practice is to NEVER have developers talking directly to fans or viceversa. There should be middlemen who do that, namely community coordinators, moderators and such.
Re:Who else should comment on your games? (Score:4, Interesting)
Part of good game development business practice is to NEVER have developers talking directly to fans or viceversa. There should be middlemen who do that, namely community coordinators, moderators and such.
The problem is if you are a new independent start-up that is essentially a one-man show. I would like to point out the experience of Marcus "Notch" Persson who literally did everything in the company at first from writing the HTML for the website, the back end server work, and the actual game development. Yes, now he has the money to hire people to do all of that stuff, but he was at least at first doing everything on his own.
There are other similar very small game development companies I've interacted with that are in a similar position... even with very popular games. Even using the example of Notch those developers start out by interacting with just a small number of die hard fans, but sometimes either they strike gold or some sort of "magic" happens where whatever they produce becomes extremely popular in spite of their small size. They love the interaction with fans, but eventually get real tired of all of the attention.
The question here really is how do you deal with fans in a company where you are so small that you simply must wear multiple hats? You might be able to enlist some volunteers from the fan base, such as what Jimmy Wales ended up doing with Wikipedia in a mostly volunteer effort including some substantial software development and server operations. Still, even those volunteers have limits and eventually you need at least some people who are paid for what they are doing. If you have a smash hit, it becomes even harder as sometimes the growth of the fan base gets ahead of any effort to get community managers (especially paid ones) in position to deal with them.
It is a nice idea in concept, and when a game development company is in a position to separate the fans (heck, any sort of direct customer interaction for any kind of software development) from the developers it is a good thing. I was a software developer on some major software projects, and thank goodness I only provided tertiary support backing up other customer support representatives. Even then, I often made some pretty awful mistakes when I ended up needing to deal directly with customers.... in spite of the fact I gained a reputation of almost always solving the problems involved (hence why I got many of those kind of support calls). Larger and well established companies certainly should put up some sort of barrier between the developers and the fans.
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If I recall correctly, there was even personal and family information posted online about some Blizzard employees by angry WoW players.
Either way, the trolling on gaming forums is far out of hand. I won't even bother visiting them anymore because 90% of them are just that. The only time I will is if I'm having hardware problems and I'm looking for fixes.
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Actually, on Free-to-play pay-to-win games, they seem like the most useless demographic.
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When the companies do actually have meaningful interactions with the player base, I don't generally see them getting angry at the developers. If I may give an example, I play Guild Wars 2 alot, and the relationship between the players and the developers has generally been civil. People complain about things, but they don't go after the developers.
The exception has been a couple of occasions where the company released an obviously broken patch and, for some reason, decided to respond that was obviously not
Re:Who else should comment on your games? (Score:5, Insightful)
Since when is "I will find you and kill you" useful feedback, let alone appropriate? And who should have to listen to dreck like that?
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Since when is "I will find you and kill you" useful feedback, let alone appropriate? And who should have to listen to dreck like that?
Since when did people start believing anything they read on the internet. I just don't get it - a death threat is exactly as credible as a poster extolling the virtue of his Ferrari and the 17 hos he pimps from it.
Any change will please some fans and anger others, and it's mostly the angry ones who will post. Having a "community relations" person to find the few facts-and-numbers complaints and forwards those on to devs is can be valuable (and sadly is almost never done), but beyond that all the forums re
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Really? You're going to go down the "blame the victim" path here? It's the developer's fault that some people in his audience are childish tools?
That's fucking ludicrous
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Who said anything about actual violence? We're talking about violent *language*. When is the last time you played an online FPS without people shouting/chatting that they were going to kill you? Why would you expect such people to suddenly express their passions in a calm reasoned manner in the still-mostly-anonymous forums?
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This is a serious issue that needs to be addressed, and I'm glad that some people are talking about it. This shouldn't imply you need to be paranoid when you are in that situation, but to put your head in a hole and pretend these issues are not worthy of even thinking about them or doing some advanced planning to avoid some of the problems which come from fan/developer interactions is also just as silly.
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then don't be surprised when those that are paying your paycheck want some input into the direction of what they are paying for.
What other industry does that happen in? With a single exception that springs to mind (Snakes On A Plane), fans do not have direct input into the direction that a movie should take. People don't buy books because they think they have some say in how the story progresses, they buy a book because they appreciate the author's work. Some random person paying for a print of a painting does not get to tell the painter what to do. You can commission a work of art if you want to, and then you get some amount of
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But watching grown men tackle each other for 5 hours is quality entertainment. Am I right?
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And if you're over 16 and judging others on how they spend their free time on an internet forum, you are a loser, also an asshole hypocrite, and probably a troll.
Re:Unintended positive consequences - fewer sequel (Score:5, Insightful)
Some gamers have moved from a perspective of critical approval before purchase, "If it's a good game then I'll get it" to a sense of entitlement, "they owe me a good game".
Run that up against the whole process of finding a game idea, fleshing it out, coding it, adding the art & sound, network support, testing, packaging, marketing and if you are in the business you wonder how you succeed at all.
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Some gamers have moved from a perspective of critical approval before purchase, "If it's a good game then I'll get it" to a sense of entitlement, "they owe me a good game".
It would be interesting to see if there is any correlation between this entitlement and when a game is marketed as "teh bestest game ever!!11!!"
Once you have promised the customer a good game and you expect them to save their money and time for your game instead of the competitors then you can expect some flak if you don't live up to your promises.
There is still no excuse for death threats but expect people to be angry if you waste their time with hollow expectations.
Advertising a game with a load of pictures and hyperbole is a waste of effort. The word gets around that it's good or bad and it sells or does not sell. All they need to do is email people who are registered for their last game there's a new one out and Word of Mouth will do the rest.
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I'd wonder as well how much of it is because of the distinct lack of demos, shareware, and trials.
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I'd wonder as well how much of it is because of the distinct lack of demos, shareware, and trials.
Sometimes a lemon is a lemon, no matter how much decoration you put on it and a winner gets around like wildfire. There are only so many gullible n00bs each year, coming into their early learning years (or sufficiently practiced at wheedling to get mum or dad to pay for it) and once or twice burned on a sub-standard game and they're into the jaded majority.
Small wonder gaming company stocks are such a risky investment. Winners like Tetris or Angry Birds come along every now and then, but generally from c
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As an extension of this, see if there's correlation between this entitlement and the increased ubiquity of pre-purchase offers in the industry. I can understand the demands given you paid $60 for the game 3 months ago.
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Uhh... I'm paying money for it. They DO owe me a good game. Why would I give them money for a bad game?
Vote with your dollars. If you don't like a game, don't buy it, go buy something else. Whinging about what a bad game or company it is if it doesn't meet your standards is sour grapes.
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Just like car owners and sports fans, once you spend a certain amount of money on an industry you start getting rather passionate about the subject.
Hello World XXVII will be Extreme! Would we lie to you?
You can even ask our marketing department after they get back from sacrificing a goat at their alter to Baal.
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Yeah, nothing compares to NCAA football fans.
I may have not been a big fan of Deus Ex: Invisible War, but I wasn't sending under age girls over to Harvey Smith's house with beer to nail him statutory rape or dressing up as Warren Spector's biggest fan and smoking weed with him to get him fired over a drug test because he went to Disney instead of the studio I wanted him to go to. Some of those fans have gone to cold war era spycraft lengths to get what they want.
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Re:Couldn't have happened to nicer people... (Score:5, Insightful)
But who should be getting the abuse you advocate? The executives of the big publishers or the regular folks working for the industry to actually make games? I've disliked games before but that doesn't mean that I should be justified to spew vitriol at the coders, artists and others working in the industry.
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Why "coders, artists and others" are representing your company? Almost-always deserved abuse is targeted at the specific company (e.g. EA Sports). Vitriol falling on regular folks is direct result of these regular folks attention-seeking diva behavior that is so prevalent in the gaming industry.
For example, you don't see "regular folk" speaking for Microsoft, and no-surprise they don't get abu
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But who should be getting the abuse you advocate? The executives of the big publishers or the regular folks working for the industry to actually make games? I've disliked games before but that doesn't mean that I should be justified to spew vitriol at the coders, artists and others working in the industry.
Maybe, but I think there's something wrong with society when people aren't capable of taking criticism, however unjustified. If anyone is threatening to do these guys or their families physical harm, then that absolutely crosses the line, and they need to call the police. If they're talking about random people online talking about how much they hate a game and the developers who made it...grow the fuck up and develop a thicker skin. Either be proud of the work and ignore what people say, or listen to the
Re:Couldn't have happened to nicer people... (Score:5, Informative)
Yes - self-censorship. The internal voice that says, or should say, "This is something that should not be said to another person, since I (ideally) don't want to be a jack ass".
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Fundamental issue here is Customers vs Corporations, and customers by virtue of payment, are entitled to any and all kind of abuse directed at these corporations. When abuse spills on unsuspecting employees of these corporations, well then it is a problem with corporate governance.
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Jesus there's some warped people on this particular thread.
No one is entitled to "...any and all kind of abuse directed at these corporations" as a behaviour. So, I don't like a product you produced, it's ok for me to come a shit on the front steps of your corporate headquarters? Because that's just a building right? It's the corporation that owns that building so no people were harmed in me heaping abuse on it.
Because the building just cleans itself, the hate mail just opens and reads itself, the corpor
Re:Couldn't have happened to nicer people... (Score:5, Insightful)
So everyone is deserving of abusive, sociopathic behavior? Even the indie developers whose team is small?
No. This is about the studios and developers being undeservedly abused and harassed. Not criticism but blatant abuse from immature children masquerading as adults who have no mental capacity for filtering their insane behavior. It's probably the same lack of mental facilities that cause others to abuse women who stand up for themselves.
Re:Couldn't have happened to nicer people... (Score:5, Informative)
Death threats are not criticism.
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Agreed, but don't try to pretend that death threats is the only kind of feedback they get.
Just because some idiot threatened you, doesn't mean that all other criticism you got is automatically invalid, nor that everyone else who didn't make any death threats is not entitled to criticize you.
Look up "red herring".
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Because retail, fast food, Tier 1 phone support for large teleco and many other industries and jobs exist?
Re:Couldn't have happened to nicer people... (Score:4, Insightful)
These are many of the reasons I'm a big fan of Nintendo. They care about the developers, take their time to develop the right product, and don't engage in this microtransaction nonsense. Even with games like Pokémon Rumble U, Nintendo promises that you can see everything there is in the game even if you don't buy their collectible figures. I'm glad Nintendo ignores the investors (iOS!) and the non-Nintendo fans (MMOFPS sports game please!) to make a quality product that doesn't rely on these "shady profits".
Re:Couldn't have happened to nicer people... (Score:5, Insightful)
All those evil things you describe; sweatshops, layoffs, buyouts, DLC, lack of innovation are not initiated by the designers and developers, yet those are the people getting harrassed.
This isn't some anonymous "gaming industry" that gets the crap, it's individual people.
Imagine somebody coming up to the counter of whatever supermarket you work at and start verbally abusing you for decissions made by some upper level management people.
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When you are flipping burgers that are known to give people food poisoning, then yes, if I happen to eat one and get poisoned I will let you know what I think about your company and your burgers.
At the same time it wouldn't be directed at you as a person, rather you as a nearest representative of the company.
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Bullshit. Verbal abuse is *always* directed at a person. You're rationalizing. The entire context here is abuse and threats, not criticism.
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Imagine somebody coming up to the counter of whatever supermarket you work at and start verbally abusing you for decissions made by some upper level management people.
Do you think that doesn't happen? I have seen that shit in both poor and rich neighborhoods, actually it happens more in the rich neighborhoods than the poorer ones. Must be something to do with poor people having worked in retail/customer service at some point before. It happens in every customer facing industry that I know of,(yes threats of physical violence) just on web forums there is some kind of record.
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Because the entire game industry is EA and Activision, amirite?
Or maybe there's independent devs who just make games out of love of the art and wish they got some basic degree of respect and dignity from their NAAAAAH lol I'm joking of course, anyone who's ever touched a gaming API is a heartless sweatshop owner who rapes children and eats their dogs in front of their faces for profit.
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Unfortunately, the abuse is frequently targeted at hapless employees. You can hate bobby kotik all day for the business abuses he engages in, but when people threaten the lives of poorly paid writers for daring to have a philosophy about writing [metro.co.uk], it's not a good thing.
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Beloved franchise=first released in 2009 to moderate critical reception.
I didn't buy dragon age 2 because I could smell the awful a mile away. That doesn't justify threatening the goddamn life of writer, in conjunction with your kind of misogynistic bullshit, over the fact that she wrote some things you don't like.
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It's this thin veneer of ironic hate, that really fails to cover for being fundamentally bad people. "I'm posting on the internet, in a way that will permanently demonstrate my incompatibility with civilized society."
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Isn't that sorta like abusing the rowing slaves for the lousy conditions on the galley?
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The people at biggamecorp who decide that the end to the game will require an additional $20, and you will need to be online at all times with ads popping up in-game, who make the testers work 60 hours a week for no overtime and then are fired immediately upon launc
Re:Couldn't have happened to nicer people... (Score:4, Insightful)
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No, the game industry treats customers badly by pushing derivative and faulty product and engaging in abusive practices. The fans, who happen to be paid customers, react to this and lash out at company representatives. Since whole gaming industry is riddled with poor management and questionable practices they do not have any
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Gaming industry deserves all the abuse it gets. Extreme cases of abuse aside, all criticism is they get is deserved.
No one deserves amount of naked, unbridled hatred and venom that the internet can generate, least of all people who are trying their best to make something nice for you.
Besides, all the nonsense you complain about is management level decisions. It's the creative types who are feeling the venom, and it's much harder to be creative and make something fun when you're being told how worthless you are and how you should just die than it is to make soulless marketing decisions.
In other words, your nerd rage does
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So if someone doesn't like your post, you're okay with getting phone calls at 3 in the morning threatening your family members?
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Re:The customer is wrong I guess.... (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a big difference between complaining about something and being abusive about it, we seem to not understand this concept anymore.
Step 1:
Don't assume your adversary is evil or has some evil agenda. Most people want to do the right thing, however they made wrong decisions along the way.
Step 2:
Discuss your problems rationally. Get some sleep before you start ranting about something. Ok you are frustrated at this level, perhaps because you have been playing the game for 30 hours straight. And it is you that is blacking out every 5 minutes and not the game. Figure out how big of a deal it is. You love the game but your arm polygons sometimes go threw a wall.
Step 3:
Realize that Perhaps you are not the target audience. I mean the "Pony Unicorn Princess" Game is a bit too girly for a 30 something guy. Or "Hell Killer: Mountain of blood", is giving your 4 year old nightmares.
Step 4:
Focus on the good points too. If you are going to tell someone your product sucks and you will never buy it anymore, they won't care, they lost (past tense) a customer. If you give them the good points and the bad points then they could be loosing (present tense) a customer and they may be more open minded.
Step 5:
Realize if you complain about something, it doesn't make you seem smart. There is the idea that the Intelligent person must be complaining about something and people who are in generally happy must be dumb, isn't really the case. If you like it, it is OK. Stop trying to find faults in everything.
Now you can complain about stuff.
Lets say the game says it should work on your system requirements, but it doesn't load up. Or you get bugs that prevent you from winning, you can complain about those, however you should also preference with the fact you like the game otherwise.
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Now, man, count to 1000, and try to some more reasonable steps, close to the reality, not your imaginary fantasy world you apparently live in.
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That's looking at the past with rose-colored glasses. For every good 80's/90's game there was a lot of crap that you don't remember.
In the 90's if you picked up 5 random games, 4 of them would have been DOOM clones.
Personally I think the bar of quality has risen. Even the low-rated games are at least "playable" these days and have reasonably good graphics and sound even if they aren't up to AAA quality.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
So...games go from being able to show 20 sprites at a time to 10's of millions of polygons, screen resolution quadruples and you think the budgets should stay the same? Maybe you think the budgets should go down. It's clear you have no idea what you are talking about. I'm not saying that to be mean, but there are some pretty obvious reasons for the budgets growing like they have and they have been known since the "CDROM" game collapse.
1) Development cycles have stayed roughly the same 18-24 months-ish
2) Gam
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> I only got insults and mocking, and was based told to go fuck myself if I couldn't figure it out on my own.
> So I wiped Linux from the system, sold the whole thing to a buddy who wanted a cheap box to slap Windows on for his kid to play games on, and I haven't touched Linux since. And never will.
So basically you let other people control you. /sarcasm: That will learn them !
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Ellen Page: noun; winy vanity attention-seeking cunt & drama queen.