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That was it.
The series of events began when John posted a public thread talking about the "Defensive Forms" for the Sentinel/Marauder classes. From there, he went on to make another thread that talked about the team's design philosophy on "Annihilation/Watchman Rotation." The final thread was about "Self healing and set bonuses" for those same classes.
Across these three topics where John did nothing but communicate the thoughts and ideas of the entire team, he began to get a number of hateful responses from the community. In less than a day, some went so far as to find out John's private information including the names, numbers, and addresses of him and his family. People then began to harass him and his family. They received threats.
Yesterday, Eric Musco posted a thread explaining how harassment of people is just damn stupid.
Hey folks,
I feel the need to make this post after some things happened yesterday. Yesterday, John made some posts communicating our views, and looking for feedback, around the state of Sentinels and Marauders. We knew going in that some of what we were going to say might not be what players wanted to hear, but the Combat team felt it was very important that you understood how we view things from our side. We may disagree on some things, but if all opinions are on the table we can have a better and more informed dialog about it.
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. If the reaction of this community is to go out of your way to personally harass someone we will stop having a dialog. How can we, as a Community team, ask the Combat team to put their opinions out here if some of you are going to react this way?
We know there is unhappiness in the Sent/Mara community and we genuinely want to continue having an open discussion with all of you. But, it’ll require regular dialog, respecting each other’s opinions, and very importantly, not harassing anyone who is participating in the conversation. That means, we all need to hold ourselves to a higher standard and be accountable for our actions.
Thank you.
-eric
I feel the need to make this post after some things happened yesterday. Yesterday, John made some posts communicating our views, and looking for feedback, around the state of Sentinels and Marauders. We knew going in that some of what we were going to say might not be what players wanted to hear, but the Combat team felt it was very important that you understood how we view things from our side. We may disagree on some things, but if all opinions are on the table we can have a better and more informed dialog about it.
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. If the reaction of this community is to go out of your way to personally harass someone we will stop having a dialog. How can we, as a Community team, ask the Combat team to put their opinions out here if some of you are going to react this way?
We know there is unhappiness in the Sent/Mara community and we genuinely want to continue having an open discussion with all of you. But, it’ll require regular dialog, respecting each other’s opinions, and very importantly, not harassing anyone who is participating in the conversation. That means, we all need to hold ourselves to a higher standard and be accountable for our actions.
Thank you.
-eric
It's simple, really: STOP DOXING AND HARASSING PEOPLE! How damn hard is it for some of you to display even the smallest bit of human decency? Because apparently, for some people, it's impossible.
This is something I've said repeatedly, but I'll say again now: I once joked that the CS community would flip their shit if Valve updated a texture. A week later, two at most, Valve updated a texture (I forget the exact reason) in a fairly remote corner on cs_militia in CS: Source. Yep. People were upset about it.
So sometimes, updates aren't going to be fun. Sometimes balance and a thought to the rest of the playerbase takes precedence. If people weren't so horrible, it wouldn't even be an issue. But everyone becomes so single minded and selfish that they forget how to be understanding.