Over in my old stomping grounds on SWTOR, yesterday the lead community manager was forced to scold players for being self-entitled jerks.

However, following the posts John made yesterday, a few players formed a witch-hunt against John. These players tracked him down on some of his personal accounts and in some extreme cases, even those of his family members with the sole purpose of harassing, insulting, and threatening him based on those forum posts. The purpose of our forums, of our subreddit, and other official channels is to have a dialog. We know that sometimes we may disagree, and that’s ok. We want to have those hard conversations, we want to talk about what we can do to improve, and to pass on our thoughts on how we see things from the Development side. But taking that conversation off of official channels to make personal attacks against Developers is completely unacceptable. Please understand John didn’t need to communicate his perspective about the class. John and the Combat team knew giving their views on Sentinels and Marauders, in some cases, would not be received well, but he did it anyway. The alternative, is that we stay silent.

Emphasis his, but I’m in full agreement – and in no way am I considering this unique to that game’s community. Game developers want to be able to talk to their fans, but when the response to us talking is not criticism but steps outside of our work lives and into our home lives, the natural impulse of developers is to shut down that communication. And when that happens, the dev attitude pretty much is forced into ‘you’ll take what you get and you’ll like it’.

I’ve written in the past about what we’ve lost in the recent catastrofuck – the desire for developers, to engage wanes when they think that there is actual real risk – risk to their job, or risk to their family – from engaging with their playerbase. But this is a problem that predates recent events, and runs parallel to them. Jennifer Hepler and Jade Raymonde. Ask the Call of Duty dev who was piled on by death threats for nerfing a gun. Or the Bungie executive who was swatted. Or for that matter, Brad Wardell, who I can remember mentioning at some point (I can’t find the link) that angry customers started reaching out to his family.

All of the above is not cool.

Criticism is fine. Disagreement is fine. Being opposed to changes in your favorite game is fine. Designers aren’t always right. Players aren’t always privy to all of the reasons that developers need to make changes. Shit happens. But when people stop arguing based on facts and start reaching directly for an attempt to indimidate, this ends up with a chilling effect for player/developer communications in the future.