Death Threat Regret

[Daymo]

First: Does the [look at a YouTube comment section to understand my level of bile and disgust for this person] kinda look like Bieber(its the hair).

Second: Erin's rage face is hilarious.

Third: You should actually be cursing IceFrog. He's the guy who made the Warcraft 3 map/mod.

Fourth: Keep up the good work, or we'll receive it poorly.

Guinsoo or Eul would be more accurate for number 3, depending if you want the original mod or the DOTA All-Stars one.

 

[NuclearKangaroo]

and the award for the dumbest idiot in the world goes to...

seriously, who the fuck thinks threatening to kill your employer/business partner is a good idea?

if anything i feel bad for the other guy who worked with that jerk, his career might have been ruined by that asshole

 

[KazeAizen]

Boy that was dumb thing for him to do, even as a joke. I'm no DOTA player, but my heart goes out to those who are. I understand a game like that needs a vigilant person running it (It does, doesn't it?). Considering how big this game has become, with tournaments and everything, the impact must be huge.

DoTA 2 and League of Legends both. I'm not sure about DoTA 2 but I know that Riot has been trying method after method of trying to police their community. I'm not sure how effective its been but it seems that at least twice a year, maybe more, there is some role out or announcement of a system to try and deal with the toxicity. Sadly the only surefire way to do it is for the actual good eggs to do something about it. Hence any time someone uses inappropriate language now towards me, especially without a prompt, I just report them. Team or enemy.

That may seem a bit too touchy but me and my group are fed up with it that its that easy to get reported by us. The days when people used to act like actual people need to come back.

 

[Haru17]

Fuck Valve and Steam, no one deserves to die obviously (and no one would ever have in this instance), but fuck Valve all the same. They can take all their meme-based popularity and shove it up their ass. They have too much power over too many PC games.

It is totally their right to take the game off steam and essentially kill the business. Rule 1 of business is you don't insult the people who are important to the survival of your business. You sure as fuck don't, serious or not, threaten to kill the owner. Sad story maybe for his artist who has had his life ruined, but Valve did exactly what they should have.

By not doing this, Valve would be setting the precedent that sending death threats or belittling their business when you release games on their system is somehow okay. If Origin, or GoG, or Green man gaming, or anything else didn't do the same thing, I'd be pissed at their inaction.

It's obviously their right to take the game down, but it was not morally right to do so. One member of a studio posts a tweet, a death threat to be sure, but one on the internet, twitter no less, with dubious credibility. It's obvious that Valve's shit treatment of indie studios just got to the guy, who was at his wit's end after having to deal with that and said something stupid on the internet, stupider than most 'stupid things said on the internet', granted. So naturally it's fair that his entire studio loses 90+ percent of the profits to years of their work, right? Bullshit, Steam is a bloated mess that too many people cede power to. I hope they can publish their game (which is good, let's remember) on a console online marketplace that doesn't pull half the bullshit steam does.

AND STEAM IS STILL SHIT REGARDLESS OF THIS MESS, have you watched Jimquisition, listened to PC youtubers, or just plain logged into Steam in the last year? It's the fucking McDonalds of video games! Stop protecting the rich and powerful, they have the money to do that themselves (and I'm not talking about literal, physical protection, no one should be harmed, obviously).

Hence fuck Valve, Gabe Newell, and everyone who defends their actions because they're a slave to steam / HALF LIFE 3 OMG.

And I'll simply say the obvious once again.

It doesn't matter that steam is shit.

It doesn't matter that he struggled to get his game on Steam.

It doesn't matter that Valve doing this essentially killed his livelihood and company.

You do not insult business associates. Period. You sure as fuck do not threaten to kill the head of a company you are associated with. If Valve didn't do this, they'd be saying its ok to do so, which is a horrible precedent.

Valve is entirely in the right for doing this. Same as GoG, or EA with origin, or whoever owns Green Man Gaming would be entirely in the right for doing this.

This has always been the way since we started forming tribes. Do not threaten someone who can end you without effort, and if you threaten those that assist or help you, you teach people not to assist you.

You're confusing capability for moral high ground. Stop protecting the rich and powerful, it's disgusting. It's like watching people crush insects for the fun of it.

There are no precedents set here, how would a death threat precedent ever form? It's moronic to think that could ever come to pass. Stop with the slippery slope bullshit, there are no positive feedback loops here.

Its not setting a death threat precedent, its setting a precedent for insulting Valve when they are business associates. This is not acceptable, and they should not say its acceptable. This happens too much already, the people that can actually do things about it shouldn't god damn stand for it, and Valve hasn't. Its a good thing. You just have an insane hatred of companies, and automatically assume they are in the wrong just because they are a company.

This discussion has descended into unknowable levels of stupidity for which there are no words.

You don't understand my views on companies. Most companies are only concerned with profit, though I appreciate when companies act morally or pro-consumer / community, like Costco, Nintendo, etc have done in the past. To exempt companies from criticism, however, is folly. Like how Nintendo got lambasted for having an idiot PR rep insult gay people.

Companies aren't going to close and go cry in a corner just because someone said something mean on the internet. They'll keep raking it in regardless of what people think of them.

They are taking actions to condemn a lack of professionalism. That is not stupidity, and can do nothing but good if it shuts up this Phil Fish types. Valve has done nothing wrong here. You hate companies irrationally.

Valve is taking revenge, that's all it is. It is actively doing bad by imposing poverty on everyone else at Code Avarice by taking away their primary source of income.

What the hell does Phil Fish have to do with this? Stop bringing in unrelated people you dislike.

And again, I dislike certain companies that have given me reasons to distrust them.

 

[Therumancer]

People vent, and as time goes on that venting has gone online, to social media. I do think that there needs to be some protections put into place here to prevent overreaction to what people say online. I mean sure, it's easy to say "you shouldn't be dumb enough to talk crap online given that everything you say will leave behind a permanent record and can be seen by anyone" when it's someone else, but then when it's you, you tend to get it.

That said, what Valve did was appropriate, but I am hoping Gabe does relent and forgives the transgression at some point as I've said before.

In a more general sense, I think the proliferation of death threats is simply because of how broken society is. Most people would prefer to deal with problems constructively through legal or social processes. Sadly as time goes on this has become increasingly less possible as your more or less powerless against private communications platforms, businesses, or government officials and the like. If there is any process that even applies for someone to get justice it can take months and tons of money to use in many cases. As a result you see increasing numbers of threats. Most people however are not especially violent, so the threat is minimal, before you even get into the lack of ability to carry out the threats. That said, I'm of the opinion that things will get increasingly worse through a lot of levels of society if things continue down this path and people might gradually become more violent if left powerless for the long term, especially as you see increasing amounts of people at the top of things feeling entitled to their ability to wield power over others and make decisions about them without any real lack of accountability. This goes well beyond the context of this discussion though which was just someone being POed over a bureaucracy messing things up, as bureaucracies tend to do.

At any rate on the initial point I think people need to be better protected when it comes to context, something the system does not currently do a good job of considering.

 

[SanguineAngel]

I do not think I would agree that Mike's tweet was obviously not serious. Out of context, the tweet on its own is just a straight up death threat.

In context of the tweets immediately surrounding that one, Mike was clearly impassioned and angry about a topic directly relating to his livelihood. So the seriousness level of his statements (in a public forum) seems pretty high. He may have had no intention of carrying through his threat but he certainly made it in anger.

In the wider context of Mike's general behaviour, it's hard to tell in hindsight due to this event colouring perceptions but the web is filled with Mike Maulbeck's angry and out of proportion responses to minor criticisms. It is entirely believable someone like that might snap.

I have some sympathy for Mike as a brief and stupid comment has apparently closed a major avenue of his life and I know that we all make mistakes.

But I don't know Mike personally so all I have to go on to assess the threat is the surrounding information: how he has acted in public previously and the fact of the threat itself. At the very best it was grossly unprofessional. Although valve was in business with Mike's company, I doubt they would have interacted much if at all on a personal level. It seems entirely possible that Gabe Newell may have never met the guy. So they can only look at those same things, as well as their own correspondence with him during the incident that initially incited his rage. I think Valve made the right choice, I wouldn't want to work with someone like that and there is no reason they should have to and even if it blew over this time I would have serious concerns about his future behaviour and particularly any response he might have if something even worse were to ever happen.

 

[Haru17]

Fuck Valve and Steam, no one deserves to die obviously (and no one would ever have in this instance), but fuck Valve all the same. They can take all their meme-based popularity and shove it up their ass. They have too much power over too many PC games.

It is totally their right to take the game off steam and essentially kill the business. Rule 1 of business is you don't insult the people who are important to the survival of your business. You sure as fuck don't, serious or not, threaten to kill the owner. Sad story maybe for his artist who has had his life ruined, but Valve did exactly what they should have.

By not doing this, Valve would be setting the precedent that sending death threats or belittling their business when you release games on their system is somehow okay. If Origin, or GoG, or Green man gaming, or anything else didn't do the same thing, I'd be pissed at their inaction.

It's obviously their right to take the game down, but it was not morally right to do so. One member of a studio posts a tweet, a death threat to be sure, but one on the internet, twitter no less, with dubious credibility. It's obvious that Valve's shit treatment of indie studios just got to the guy, who was at his wit's end after having to deal with that and said something stupid on the internet, stupider than most 'stupid things said on the internet', granted. So naturally it's fair that his entire studio loses 90+ percent of the profits to years of their work, right? Bullshit, Steam is a bloated mess that too many people cede power to. I hope they can publish their game (which is good, let's remember) on a console online marketplace that doesn't pull half the bullshit steam does.

AND STEAM IS STILL SHIT REGARDLESS OF THIS MESS, have you watched Jimquisition, listened to PC youtubers, or just plain logged into Steam in the last year? It's the fucking McDonalds of video games! Stop protecting the rich and powerful, they have the money to do that themselves (and I'm not talking about literal, physical protection, no one should be harmed, obviously).

Hence fuck Valve, Gabe Newell, and everyone who defends their actions because they're a slave to steam / HALF LIFE 3 OMG.

And I'll simply say the obvious once again.

It doesn't matter that steam is shit.

It doesn't matter that he struggled to get his game on Steam.

It doesn't matter that Valve doing this essentially killed his livelihood and company.

You do not insult business associates. Period. You sure as fuck do not threaten to kill the head of a company you are associated with. If Valve didn't do this, they'd be saying its ok to do so, which is a horrible precedent.

Valve is entirely in the right for doing this. Same as GoG, or EA with origin, or whoever owns Green Man Gaming would be entirely in the right for doing this.

This has always been the way since we started forming tribes. Do not threaten someone who can end you without effort, and if you threaten those that assist or help you, you teach people not to assist you.

You're confusing capability for moral high ground. Stop protecting the rich and powerful, it's disgusting. It's like watching people crush insects for the fun of it.

There are no precedents set here, how would a death threat precedent ever form? It's moronic to think that could ever come to pass. Stop with the slippery slope bullshit, there are no positive feedback loops here.

Its not setting a death threat precedent, its setting a precedent for insulting Valve when they are business associates. This is not acceptable, and they should not say its acceptable. This happens too much already, the people that can actually do things about it shouldn't god damn stand for it, and Valve hasn't. Its a good thing. You just have an insane hatred of companies, and automatically assume they are in the wrong just because they are a company.

This discussion has descended into unknowable levels of stupidity for which there are no words.

You don't understand my views on companies. Most companies are only concerned with profit, though I appreciate when companies act morally or pro-consumer / community, like Costco, Nintendo, etc have done in the past. To exempt companies from criticism, however, is folly. Like how Nintendo got lambasted for having an idiot PR rep insult gay people.

Companies aren't going to close and go cry in a corner just because someone said something mean on the internet. They'll keep raking it in regardless of what people think of them.

They are taking actions to condemn a lack of professionalism. That is not stupidity, and can do nothing but good if it shuts up this Phil Fish types. Valve has done nothing wrong here. You hate companies irrationally.

Valve is taking revenge, that's all it is. It is actively doing bad by imposing poverty on everyone else at Code Avarice by taking away their primary source of income.

What the hell does Phil Fish have to do with this? Stop bringing in unrelated people you dislike.

And again, I dislike certain companies that have given me reasons to distrust them.

Ok then. You have a hate boner against large companies, and refuse to accept that unprofessionalism cannot be tolerated, which is why I brought up Phil Fish, who is the symbol of such things.

Do you know any other languages? I don't speak in self-parody.