It never ceases to amaze me how the anonymity of the Internet leads to these extreme expressions of opinion (e.g. "people who feel this way are idiots" and "this is a farcical waste of time" and so on). I could be misreading the situation, but it seems to me that it boils down to a very basic, uncontroversial matter: some customers object to a practice (perceived or actual) on the part of a company, and they've started a boycott (not a new idea there), and others disagree with their outlook. Do people really need to be branded as morons and angry children over something that simple?
Personally, I joined the boycott to stand and be counted. While I can certainly see flaws in some of the arguments on the party line, I still some compelling reasons to seek Valve's attention. I know this has been talked about back and forth, but I wanted to spell a few things out and see what everyone thought.
First off, there definitely has been DLC. I don't know that anyone in the boycott community is asserting otherwise. However, I don't think it would be fair to say that Valve has performed up to the high stand they set for themselves (I suspect that's why TF2 gets brought up by the boycott community so often). Survival Mode is hardly a new mode. It literally does nothing beyond take a section of existing campaigns and add a timer to it. The Lighthouse adds nothing more than a single, small section of standalone map in which to play this new "Mode." For comparison's sake, if Valve released a modification to L4D that let players, say, try to sneak past randomly-spawned witches in the barn towards the end of Blood Harvest, could we justifiably call that a new "Mode?" If they added something the size of the Lighthouse for you to use to run past witches and a scoreboard to count how many witches you'd snuck past, would we have a new "Mode?"
What surprises me is the lack of new campaigns. The game would seem vastly more loved by the Valve support team if we weren't playing the same 4 maps over and over again. The director keeps that from being entirely repetitive, but it still gets old after a while. One of my primary reasons for jumping on the boycott wagon is the fact that Valve has obviously tasked a lot of its resources with developing a new game when they could have slowed that process a bit and had some of their developers make us the occasional new map. That alone would've gone a long way to fulfill their promises to the L4D community.
Secondly, notice back there I said "promises to the L4D community." I wasn't making that up, and I wasn't performing some Internet-style exaggeration. They specifically, repeatedly, and quotably said we'd be seeing extended DLC support for this game. I'm not saying they lied; I'm saying they've delivered a lot less than we expect from them (because, yet again, they set the bar high with TF2). There appear to be three ways of looking at this: either they lied about how much support they were going to give us (I disagree with that exaggeration), they held up their end of the bargain (I disagree with that technically-true/actually weak statement), or they're being halfhearted with their follow-through (which is what I see happening). We bought this game at least partially because what we were led to expect from Valve's (again) explicit promises and past performance. What we received was the bare minimum to keep them from being outright liars and a $50 sequel that explains where all the L4D staff disappeared to for the past year.
Finally, it looks a tad illogical to say things like "Valve has supported this game more than most game companies would have" or "people in this boycott are angry babies, and they will have no effect." That ignores the fundamental concepts behind a boycott. We expect high standards from Valve, and (should we believe those are slipping), we will respond. The only "votes" we get as consumers are our dollars. That's not some immature, "ragequit" attitude at work; it's simply us engaging the normal capitalist feedback system and expressing something other than silent consent. I don't hate Valve and haven't let my positive opinion of them turn on a dime. I just think they made a mistake and did something that wasn't good for customer satisfaction. I'm filling out the virtual "comment card" and saying I strongly disapprove of this one specific thing they did. It doesn't change how fantastic their games have always been, and it doesn't ignore what effort they put into L4D. It simply says, "I don't think this was enough, considering your promises and reputation."
Finally, the above article was practically the only thing I've read in the "gaming press" thus far that even bothered to suggest there might be some sort of legitimacy to this boycott. I feel really let-down in that regard. 40,000 members, and it's still "stupid" and "pointless" and "won't make a difference?" It already made a difference; Valve has responded to it publicly, it's gotten press, and more and more people join daily. That constitutes a response. Yes, if 90% of the people in the boycott are blowhards who'll cave and buy the game the minute it comes out, then the remaining 1,000 unsold copies of L4D2 won't necessarily put a dent in Valve's collective pockets, but that's beside the point. Does anyone really think the next time they're planning a sequel release that they won't be informed by this mess? Doesn't it seem reasonable to imagine someone at that meeting might say, "Hey, let's make sure we are clear about what DLC we're offering and make sure it gets noticed so we don't end up with another L4D2-style uproar" or "We'd better be careful we don't create the perception that we started ignoring the game to work on its sequel the day it hit the shelves so we can avoid a negative response like we had for L4D2"?
See, the idea behind a boycott isn't just "we won't buy something, and they'll go bankrupt" or some such notion of punishment. It's "posting rants in Internet forums, no matter how well they're spelled, won't get the results we want, so let's get their attention." I know there are childish, ignorant, angry, and illogical members of the boycott--that's true of every group of people, even NASA. Please, though, don't label the whole project as abortive or idiotic or ineffectual just because you can quote some idiot on our side or some flaw in one of our members' views. In the end, the point is that some of your fellow Valve customers aren't happy with a product, and they're following the normal path for a complaint in such a situation. If you don't agree, that's fine. If you want to talk us out of it, that's fine. But don't look for some handhold to insult all of us when the fundamental divide here is simply we don't like a product offering by Valve, and you do. That doesn't make us idiots, naive, or angry babies.
For the record, I live in New Orleans and love zombie horror (and video games) a lot more than is probably good for my social life. I will, I suspect, buy L4D2 at some point. I say this because I have faith (unlike the article above) that Valve is going to extend an olive branch before L4D2's release. I'm not going to hold my breath for every "demand" (or request) to be met, but I would like to see Valve acknowledge that they did something (wrong or right) that irritated a substantial portion of their customer base and try to make it right. That would go a long way towards indicating their commitment to excellence isn't going out the window. There are all sorts of things they could do. More official maps, add some characters, figure out a way to combine the two games' online player bases so L4D doesn't become obsolete, and so on. They're creative people, and I think they'll figure out a way to fix this situation. I look forward to it, because I can't wait to run amok in my home city slaughtering zombies left and right.
P.S. Not with a chainsaw, of course. What were they thinking?!? Something noisy and heavy that requires fuel and could easily accidentally maim its user? Give me a crowbar any day, Valve! You know how to model one of those, right?
