Anyway I’m sure this will bring about the self-reflection I am anticipating.
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Im against harassment but im all for keeping developers accountable for what they are releasing.
Opinions on a product shouldnt be accompanied by personal attacks on their gender, race or preferences.
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Customers suck, but I don’t get why providing a bad service entitles you to complain about them. Its just your crop come harvest. At least with a game you don’t have to be your own gang banger and chase people down for money. Just a great big ‘woe is me’ without thinking about ‘them’.
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I don’t mean to be dismissive, but it’s no secret that there’s jerks on the internet. If you go to the internet and invite people to give input, some of that input is going to be verbal sewage.
Threats or personal attacks shouldn’t be tolerated and management absolutely should be taking action to protect their staff from such things, but anyone who’s spent more than 5 minutes on any major platform knows that opening your mouth is inviting harassment.
It sucks, but that’s the price of engaging with the public.
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You reap what you sow.
While there’s always going to be a toxic c***, you can in large part mitigate the toxic behaviour by:
- Being honest.
- Communicating with your players.
- Deliver the intended product.
But most companies aren’t honest, they don’t communicate and they don’t deliver the product that was promised.
And when you treat consumers like that consistently you end up in the situation we’re currently in, in which consumers turn into rage foaming monsters, because most are so god damn tired of money grabbing companies.
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People are gonna complain whether they’re entitled to or not. Just sucks when those complaints don’t really offer anything but bitterness toward people who don’t have any say in the actual decision making process in the production of the product they feel personally slighted by. I see a lot of people in here and other conversations about DT who seem to just run with the least charitable interpretation of any piece of information they come across. More than just being unhelpful and stupid, it seems like an exhausting way to interact with your hobby.
I have plenty of complaints about the game and I’m really disappointed and frustrated with how it’s turned out so far, but I try to keep it civil and constructive if for no other reason than to keep the conversation interesting.
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Experience with the game industry has trained a lot of people to expect the worst.
Unfriendly monetisation strategies are becoming the norm, games are often released in a broken, buggy or incomplete state and they’re often designed to attract and accommodate a wide audience, resulting in nobody really being satisfied.
Such is the price of “progress”.
Yes, and hounding individual developers or low level employees of the companies doing this helps nothing. As you alluded yourself it’s a systemic problem with gaming as a whole. It’s a trend people are right to be against, but what the people I’m talking about are doing isn’t systemic critique or healthy suspicion, it’s preemptively screaming at tech support because they decided the worst is already set in stone.
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The current situation with communications between Fatshark and the community is 90% due to the highly toxic vocal minority. Of the things the community has control over, we could do better to ostracize this behavior when it happens. The survey results in the article indicate that the problem seems to be getting worse over time. The dialogue between devs and community have made games better, let’s not lose that over the community’s idleness and failure to excise some toxic buboes.
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I will never condone harassment or saying that someone should get fired. None of us know what is really going on. Any form of personal attacks against anyone should just result in an insta ban for life. I have absolutely no qualms about this and no tolerance for anyone who engages in it.
I also have close to zero tolerance for releasing unfinished titles, but I’ll be damned before I berate, denigrate, or god forbid threaten, any of the wonderful human beings working on this project. I will, however, criticise the end result.
I agree with this in the sense that any and every community statement from VT to now has been relentlessly picked apart and talked to death by the community, so the CMs might want to make sure whatever info they let out is very exact so as to not give people false expectations. However, from what I’ve seen this community isn’t really uniquely toxic compared to other games with bad launches, and even if it were I don’t think that alone would make most CMs refuse to do their jobs. Actual harassment aside, I imagine you have to go into it expecting there to be a lot of angry people and try to take that in stride. Fatshark has always had problems with community outreach and transparency.
Though I will say that the community probably wouldn’t be able to pick FS’s statements apart so relentlessly if there weren’t such long gaps in time between them…
If anything, I’m optimistic about them bringing in a new CM. Somebody with outside experience (hopefully at more effectively managed companies) can take the reins and turn things around a bit.
Harsh criticism and negative feedback shouldn’t be instantly labeled “harassment”. Developers need to understand that when you produce something players don’t want/like, then they’ll make noise.
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The survey doesn’t say what “harassment” means, exactly, outside of some free-form responses that mention threats or nonspecific “abuse”.
People here are taking it to mean attacks on individuals rather than criticisms and negative feedback.
It’s. Not.
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@Redy2Snap It isn’t uniquely toxic, however that just highlights the broader issue re: gamers and that this behavior is becoming more common. But if the relationship is not bearing fruit, then either side is free to decide to disengage from the communication. Fatshark is working on what they can, i.e. changing the game based on feedback, new CM, etc. The community should work on what they can and not normalize the toxicity.
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If you follow some of the links in the article they do specifically mention death threats and sexual harassment, and make a clear delineation between that and mean replies on social media.
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I’m looking at the report on the survey results, which doesn’t mention any of that. Perhaps what’s in those linked sites is based on something other than what’s in the report.
I’m not doubting it happens, I’m saying that the report doesn’t specifically mention it.
Yeah I guess the survey itself doesn’t define harassment, but do you really think a significant number of respondents are lumping in mean feedback with death threats? Because I just don’t really buy that.
Even so, if companies aren’t taking the death threats seriously why would they take mean steam reviews or whatever other frivolous type of negative online interaction seriously?
Harassment is a pretty well understood term and outside of clear-cut criminal behavior it is always subjective. Basically if it feels like harassment it is.
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Like anything else, unless you specify you can never really be sure what it means.
Likewise, the report doesn’t go into the links between the type of incident and the response from the company (which could be linked to the failure to define “harassment”). What the report does say on company responses is:
About two-thirds (68%) said their companies have addressed the harassment they experienced or witnessed—either internally (30%), externally (4%), or both (34%). One-fifth said no, while 11% were unsure.
Without access to more of the data it’s not really possible to make out any concrete relationships between any of the responses.
Still, the report is interesting for the topics outside of the harassment piece. The sections on meta and blockchain were somewhat encouraging.