In response to the Bioware feedback issue, I find this kind of disturbing, both in the developer's response and in the way The Escapist is responding. The thing to understand is that when communities are turned hostile there is usually a pretty good reason for it. Bioware's community remained positive for a pretty long time, but then things like the development of "Dragon Age 2" and "Mass Effect 3" turned the community against them, and from how this sounds to me, the developers want to avoid negative feedback rather than taking action to rectify what is upsetting people. To be honest when it comes to Bioware there are a relative handfull of reasons why people have turned on them and gotten so nasty, and those reasons are enough to eclipse a lot of the positive things they did. I'm not alone in saying that the ending of ME3 wasn't just a bad ending, it killed the entire series for me, and knowing how it ends, it prevents me from taking any joy in any other aspect of the franchise. Bioware's refusal to actually change the ending has brought this upon themselves. When it comes to games like "Dragon Age 2", understand that Bioware did things like ask the community if it was okay to remove race and origin selection from the equasion in return for giving Hawke a voice, the answer was an overwhelming "no", and Bioware not only did it anyway, but had the audacity to claim it was due to positive community response to the idea. To hear a developer formally claiming they are going to "zone out" the negativity, and the implication that people should largely be positive when companies have done things like this, is kind of disturbing to me, and demonstrates exactly what's wrong with the gaming industry and the people working in it right now. You make a popular product, then annoy your fan base enough to turn on you, and then refuse to do anything to rectify it, and you should expect this. The idea that this is all lies and all of the positive feedback is being "drowned out" is the height of arrogance, especially in cases when there was at one time more positive feedback to begin with, when your seeing this level of negativity it's a message in of itself.
I'll also touch on WoW as this is an example used from the Podcast itself. The reason why the community changed so heavily over a short period of time is Blizzard's own attitudes. Right from the beginning they promise to do some key fixes, balancing, and overhauls, and they never got around to doing this. Or in cases where they did finally take action it was too late to make a differance, or the solution was totally half arsed and ineffective. Let's not forget that WoW is the game where they pretty much let imbalances balance the game in favor of The Horde for ages, even leading Penny Arcade to refer to rolling Alliance as "one of the biggest gips in gaming", and leading to all kinds of problems with PVP in paticular. Balance shamans? Blizzard's answer was "we have no idea how to fix this" despite being told how to do it, eventually they just gave each faction the other's exclusive class. Then let's look at the whole Cataclysm insult where you had The Horde receive the "Goblin" race with free global bank access, haste boosts, innate DD and blink (rocket jump) abillities, and a bonus to what is perhaps the best money making tradeskill in the game, Alliance got the "Worgen" whose special abillity is a run speed boost for a few seconds which many observers jokingly pointed out involves them bending over in the classic position to receive anal sex. Blizzard is the company that also famously said in response to criticism "we make games, not promises".
Let's not forget this is the game that is so imbalanced factionally that we've actually had it spilling into RL at cons, and while later recanted Blizzard's own house band was even basically encouraging harassment of alliance players.
Blizzard is in a unique position where it's pretty much gotten away with dumping kegs of gasoline onto the fire for years because it runs a pseudo-monopoly. Simply put, Blizzard has no real competition for this level of MMO, you either play WoW, or your stuck with something that's a mere shadow of it content wise. Every game coming out trying to compete with WoW has failed due to bad design (neglecting to plan for the endgame which is where all players wind up, and what keeps them re-upping subs) and simply not producing enough content to compete with what WoW grew into now. It's only a pseudo-monopoly because in theory other games can compete, but the reality is that it's impractical for many to invest the resources to even consider playing on the same field.
Sure you can praise Blizzard for a lot of things, among them they were smart and focused on their endgame after launch, realizing that was where a game is made or broken, and stuck with developing that way. But at the end of the day there is only so much you can say when a company is this antagonistic. When you build up a certain degree of hate, and then refuse to change it, nothing you do is going to matter until those core issues are addressed. There are problems with WoW that have existed since Day #1 that were never addressed adequetly.
In short developers and companies have no right to QQ over their treatment, when things like this happen they tend to bring it on themselves, and it's in their hands to fix it and rebuild relations. To be fair most game companies that are successful enoguh to maintain forum traffic for this to be an issue fall prey to the kind of arrogance that leads to this kind of hatred. This is a big part of why so many people (like me) become anti-industry/anti-developer/anti-publisher since it ultimatly has it's origins in the same, basic, avoidable behaviors, and entirely scewed priorities when it comes to what to address. In general what your players are telling you needs to be fixed is probably a bigger deal in their mind than what YOU think needs to be fixed, and they are the ones paying so well..
Of course there is the whole irony of this, especially with games like WoW, that due to a borderline monopoly the people spewing the hate also keep re-upping subscriptions, oftentimes in hopes that thing will get better.
Also when it comes to video games, MMO or single player, there is also the issue that if the customer base costs the company money by not paying for the product, the producers will rarely fix it or work on doing a better job, they will cancel it. Enogh people leave an MMO, the MMO goes down, it doesn't get rehauled and have content added. When a franchise gets tanked, it just gets cancelled due to poor sales and reception. As a result you wind up with the ironic situation where the people wanting something, but wanting it fixed or improved, tend to spend money on a product which only sends the message to the bean counters that they are happy with it when that's hardly the case.
Under the circumstances, and given attitudes within the industry, and a general lack of response, it's pretty obvious why you see the "die in a fire" attacks. The situation leads to outright hatred of the people involved and helping to keep the cycle going. This developer from Bioware deciding that instead of dealing with the issues he'd rather just avoid the forums is exactly the kind of arrogance and the very attitude that leads to people wanting to tell him they hope he dies from testicular cancer. Someone cares enough to write dozens of forum rants, and the guy on the receiving end chooses to just elevate himself above it and ignores it, making "reading your responses something I will only do or care about on my own time, and if they meet my approval" the perceived attitude... and golly gee, that just makes so many friends and wins over so many hostile audiences.
Apologies about length, not sure how many people will read it, but such are my thoughts and observations.
