Big surprise that Crema has stepped in it again. They’ve been pretty awful since this game started. I can still remember when they first rolled out the bans and insisted their would be no appeal because their ban process was never wrong. The CEO aggressively defended it, and it wasn’t very long before community managers were walking that back admitting some people had to be unbanned.
Their discord was run by dictators as a meme that cropped up around a botched patch resulted in the mods going nuts and banning anyone who mentioned it, and the steam forums were the same. They had a gaggle of fanboys who’d attack anyone who said a bad word about the game, and if anyone talked back to them one of the developers would come along and ban them.
It was such a great idea ran by absolutely awful people.
My partner and I just played through this together in co-op and had a great time. We thought it was a good game.
I read the whole discord drama stuff, and I’m more on Crema’s side. I think they’ve made the mistake of trying to talk to a fanbase like they are just a group of reasonable people that will understand and empathize if you just lay out the facts. But they aren’t. They’re just going to pick apart anything you say and relentlessly shit on you because they are, collectively, not able to be reasoned with.
They released an MMO in its final state, minus some Kickstarter promised stuff, that they have said they will deliver. They tried to monetize the game how they felt was best, it didn’t work out, so they’ve moved on and left a functioning, small-scope MMO. You can argue the quality of it or whether you agree with their decisions, but they made what they said they were going to make.
And they are still releasing small updates to a community that is, frankly, awful. The subreddit is just a hivemind of asshole armchair developers.
Honest question: can you name an asshole gaming community that isn’t tied to a live service game? Because I feel like the shitty community comes from expecting everything to be continually improved, and lots of those improvements are subjective, so someone’s improvement is someone else’s regression. I’ll happily revise my hypothesis with some good counter examples though.
Warframe’s community is the nicest, least toxic community I’ve ever encountered. Not saying there aren’t toxic ass holes, there certainly are, but compared to other online game communities I’ve been part of the Warframe community is a breath of fresh air.
So perhaps the updated hypothesis is all asshole communities are tied to live service games, but not all live service games have asshole communities?
I’m not a huge mmo fan but I do like Final Fantasy 14, in part because the community is surprisingly friendly.
So yeah, I support “live service games attract bad communities, but sometimes they rise above that”.