I feel it’s an embarrassment that this community had one of the best “big name company” always talking to us on things and trying to work with us to make the game better and threw that all away. It’s even a bigger embarrassment that people are justifying it and saying that they should still be talking to us while we have shown that we no longer deserve the transparency. What do you think?
External link →The feedback on reddit was overwhelmingly in support of the devs. I was here. The toxic individuals were heavily downvoted and/or removed by the mods.
The problem right now is that the community has gotten so big, that even if a small percentage go absolutely psycho mode like they did, it manifests in a very prominent ugly way that's hard to ignore.
It's not hard to ignore. That's why moderation tools exist. That's why downvotes exist on reddit, why mods can remove posts or ban accounts, and that's what should be enforced. Again: punishing the entire community for a vocal minority is not fair.
Sure, Bungie doesn't have to tell us anything, in the end it's their decision whether they interact with the community or not. But we're talking about goodwill here, and how the relationship between the community was prior to the controversy. All I'm questioning is the reasoning for stopping to interact with the community.
Any dev that chooses to talk to the community is just a nice extra, they don't owe it to anyone. If they feel their mental health is tanking because of it, it's their choice to pull back for their own health. It's not a punishment to anyone, they never HAD to speak to the community, they just enjoyed doing it. And then that enjoyment stopped. It's not even remotely in their job description in the first place
Genuine criticism, but even in the case of them "being nice" you should really run it by the CMs since it IS their job to communicate with the customers/community and they have protocol for what can and can't be said, etc. The issue that people are bringing up as validation for the current streak of silence was due in part to this exact issue, a developer (read: NOT a CM or any other front facing part of the company) was sharing random tidbits of the process without any sort of filter other than what they considered good sense.
Problem is, what they consider good sense isn't necessarily what constitutes good sense from a PR perspective so it was really only a matter of time before they said something they really shouldn't have (even if it's just a harsh reality/truth) in a way that rubbed people the wrong way. The fact that presumably Bungie knew Kevin was sharing these insights and didn't give him a crash course in PR or dealing with potential ne'er-do-wells is a failure on Bungie management as a whole since I promise you if that information was revealed in a TWAB or some sort of official announcement it would not have been worded the way he did (which was honestly rather flippant).
That doesn't excuse the immature response and the vitriol thrown his way but pretending like it wasn't something that could have been easily avoided by putting a bit of a leash on him when he had been doing this for as long as he had is naive. You are right that no developer has any obligation to engage with the consumers (they have a special department specifically for that purpose) but that doesn't mean that when one of them gets the itch to actually do so they can ignore standard operating procedure that said special department follows and any developer who wants to engage should have informed said department and gotten a run down of what to expect and how to word things.
I hear what you're saying, but essentially you're saying you don't want the more casual interactions with devs and instead want everything perfectly vetted and sanitized and like you said, "on a leash". Funnily enough that is what's happening as more devs stop communicating directly with the community in a casual manner because of death threats, etc. You'll still have your twab, and your interviews in Bungie.net, and the designers having little excerpts in twabs and other spots like that. That hasn't gone away. But I guarantee you a lot of people really enjoy the more casual way to engage and even get little tidbits of info, the way Kevin used to do. I personally do that with people that engage with me in a respectful manner from time to time and it might not be the most official and perfectly vetted, but it's super cool and fun and different from the more structured ways of communication. If you don't like it, then don't follow those devs on Twitter or what have you! No one is forcing it on anyone. The people that enjoy it will pursue it and extend the sense of community, as long as it's chill. And sure, one day someone might call someone else "my guy" and they might be so fragile that they will threaten them with death for doing so. Instead of just saying something like, "I disagree with you but I hear what you're saying, my guy!" and call it even in a funny way. And everyone will keep being happy. I know Kevin and he's the nicest guy you'll ever meet, and has called me my guy several times. This whole tone policing thing that turns into death threats is literally insane
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