Before I say anything else, I just want to say this.
Now then, time for seriousness. This boycott never stood a chance. It was formed mere days after the E3 announcement of the game. An announcement that amounted mostly to just a teaser of things to come. The kneejerk reaction that followed was unexpected. I mean, who in their right mind would be upset for a company releasing a sequel on-time? Especially if it's Valve, who are known for having long development times.
More hilarious is the fact that within 2 weeks they'd already announced just about everything we'd need to know about their plans to continue supporting L4D, as well as why L4D2 had to be a sequel instead of a DLC pack. The boycott was already dead in the water. Yet it persisted. For nearly five months people harangued, complained, trolled, DoS'ed, and convinced themselves that they were making a difference. Even after word came out that the preorders for L4D2 were greater than that of L4D1, they continued. When Crash Course was announced, somehow they believed they had caused that despite the fact that it was probably in development before L4D2 was even announced. I have to hand it to the boycott movement, it at least had a lot of confidence and drive; unfortunately that was all wasted on a fruitless endeavour that will not be remembered for doing anything but wasting time and acting like self-entitled brats. I'm sure that's unfair to some of the group but if you can't keep the reins on your most damaging of elements then it seems to me that the methodology here was to get your way, no matter how badly the online L4D community may suffer for it.
You know who the real winner in this is? Valve. There was a number of things they could have done about the boycott, my personal favorite idea being to put all the boycotter's Steam IDs into a piece of code that would ban them for a week if they ever played L4D2, but then again I'm a very vindictive person. Anyway my point is that Valve reacted to the boycott by doing two things.
1. They continued their work, as they always had been before even announcing the game. It's not like the boycotters could keep complaining nothing was being done after more content was added to L4D, right? (not quite)
2. They flew out the heads of the movement to Valve and showed them that yes, this is more than just a reskinning of everything. Granted I feel that shouldn't have been done because if someone is too dense to see that Valve wasn't trying to screw us out of our money after countless articles and press releases, then they're probably too dense to be deserving of a free trip. But hey, it worked. The entire movement crumpled slowly, as it should have way back in June.
So let me finish by reiterating some things that have already been said. Boycott, you have accomplished
nothing. L4D2 is already on track to sell better than the first, how can you even claim a victory? Oh what's that? You think you're responsible for Crash Course? You think that they didn't have anything for L4D1 being worked on at all and your whining did something? Well that's pretty amazing that you have 40,000+ people in your group yet not one of you knew how video game development works, or have any idea how long it takes to develop a level, much less a campaign. You did nothing except try to salvage victory from a defeat that was ensured the minute you raged about E3. You will not be remembered for anything save for all the nothing that you accomplished. And I tried to be civil. I tried to explain that maybe this was a bad idea. After all, I didn't want people to waste time that could have been better spent oh I dunno, reporting things to Valve about these so-called bugs. Like this one:
jonmcnamara said:
How about the patch that made it harder to melee hunters in mid air?
Huh, that's funny, just a week ago I was playing and I've had no trouble meleeing hunters in mid-air with the same success rate (75% or better) that I've always had. Perhaps you've just been doing it wrong. But then again nobody ever wants to admit that they can't deal with changes made in the name of game balance, or they can't adapt, or whatever it is. It's not anything to be ashamed of, but whining about it is pretty shameful.
Anyway for all my initial benign efforts to explain why the boycott was a misguided venture, I got called a fag. Not surprising since this is the Internet after all, but the point remains that this "fag", as some of your supporters so eloquently put it, knew right from the start how this was going to go down. To paraphrase a character from another Valve game: "despite my best efforts to instruct and better you, you all found a new way to fail". Egotistical? Yes, but then again the only way to talk to a group of egotists is to smack them around with one's own ego.
