I forget how many tens of hours I'd spent expecting to arrive at anything resembling what was alluded to in the trailers or demos. It was probably 20+ hours until I realized that the problem wasn't related to progression-locked content. I'd been swindled. No. More than that. I'd been robbed.
I was mad. Sure. But I was more hurt and disappointed than anything. I can no longer trust Hello Games or Valve. Hello lied to consumers and Valve, from my perspective, backed them up while allowing a select few to actually recieve refunds for the sake of PR.
I understand the desire to protect Developers from unrealistic backlash. You've got to draw a line somewhere which, after crossing, makes one ineligible for the normal refund process. I do think the placement of that line should vary by game (or at least genre) instead of the two hour hard cutoff Valve uses.
For a game like No Man's Sky? At the two hour mark I was still taking in some of the visuals and geeking out about what I thought was coming. I definitely hadn't gotten into any of the completely broken mechanics, lack of depth of characters/worlds, or any other out of a plethora of disappointments and outright lies Hello had baked into the game and its marketing.
So now, for most things, I refuse to pre-order. I might miss a few neat things that I would have gotten otherwise, however; I won't get robbed again.
You'd been swindled, sure. Plain and simple. Not robbed.
Letting anger and frustration escalate beyond the scope of an injustice isn't doing anyone any good. I agree though, a more judicial approach to refunds is probably warranted for a game that SO under delivered on the hype. This isn't in the same ballpark of a let down as Spore.
I live in a country (France) where such harassement (especially death threat) can and will be acted on by the police if reported, and regularly are. I agree with that policy, and I agree with the recent move by our government to make it easier to report online harassement.
I absolutely disagree with your statement that if a part of a group is rotten, no matter how small or big, then all of the group's complaints should be ignored to avoid drawing attention to the bad members. This is stupid on a lot of level, easily abused (don't like that group ? just infiltrate them and make them part of something bad ! a great plan used by all of your favorite dictators), and frankly I can't believe anyone smart would argue for that.
By that same logic, we should not heed the concerns of those harassed online because some of them have done harassment themselves ! Great plan there.
You're making a big reach there. The parent comment is responding to the article, which is towing the developer line that the release wasn't that bad, they hit their expectations, it was just stuff like missing butterflies - none of which is true. The harassment issue is a problem, but I see nothing wrong with a comment correcting core problems with the article first.
I emphasize with your core argument that sometimes we need to discuss the bad behavior out front, but people have different priorities - it doesn't make sense to hold everyone else to your particular mix of priorities.
We can't control the crazies. They will always be out there and it makes no sense to focus only on them every time they pop out of the woodwork.
In the US around 1 in 1000 people will murder someone in their life. So if you scam a million people then on average you scam around 1000 murderers. Getting death threats when you make that many murderers angry should be expected and actually getting killed is not out of the question. This is not a problem with the gaming community, this is a problem with society in general.
Killing someone is of course illegal, but I wouldn't go around taunting murderers unnecessary anyway. They are provably irrational so them getting punished wont stop them while I would still be dead.
But the vast majority of murderers know their victims and have some kind of relationship with them - spouse, significant other (at least at some point), drug dealer, relative of a victim, whatever.
"Video game customer" is not on that list.
But what this company did was fraud in my view. He should be fined or put in jail. So should any people who sent them death threats.
I, too, am bewildered by that line of thinking.
Harrassment may be unpleasant, but I suspect they would rather that than be fined all profits and sitting in prison.
But not bad enough to get that statement any higher than the fourth paragraph of your comment. Even Gamergate came in the 3rd paragraph. You're more interested in flogging a previous commenter than... well, you get the point.
The order of ideas does not necessarily represent their importance in an absolute frame of reference. When talking about lithium batteries you won't start with a disclaimer that you strongly condemn child labor in DRC cobalt mines.
Also, for my 4th paragraph, I'll just say that you're willing to grossly understate what the developers did which makes me think you are very biased about this, hence making a mountain out of a molehill when it comes to the least important part of a comment.
> and probably lied a bit too
OK. I will, for the purpose of conversation, cede your point that there is some point beyond which even just, deserved, valid, polite, and correct complaints should be ignored because of the side-effects. How do you propose we determine when this point has been reached?
Yea, no, sorry. The fact that he put that eight sentences in tells you absolutely nothing.
If you can find real fault with what he said, go ahead, but this is just nonsense. You're condemning someone who agrees with you.
When you put yourself out there in a public space, and especially when you're charging people money, you risk major backlash if you're caught lying about significant things. Does that warrant death threats? Of course not. Does it warrant criticism, protests, demands for refunds, and accusations of fraud on social media? Definitely.
If the game dev considers public backlash harassment, he should enter a new line of work and/or not lie to paying customers. Except for cases where the harassment turns into threats, he has no right to complain. He's the only one who put himself in this mess.
Objective conversation should specifically reject externality. That's a fifth wave myth anyways.
Stealing and lying is definitely worse than being mean online.
In the context of this discussion, about an article about online harassment, this is a very disingenuous straw man. Yes, there are other problems in the world, but this isn't the forum to debate them.
I was responding to a person who was saying that because death threats are worse than fraud, you can't talk about the fraud. I was making the comparison to far greater injustices to turn the same argument on them.
I find it hard to believe that you truly misunderstood my rhetorical tool as a call to discuss those injustices here.
See bribroder link to the reddit page for an idea of how far what they claimed they sold was to what they were actually selling, and it will help you see that as a cautious gamer, if you actually went out of your way to specifically check for features shown on official release video and/or answered as yes/no question by the game's lead, you would still be fooled. The reddit comment matches direct interview answers with major missing features.
When you see two factions doing some major warring in space, and the guy present it as actual gameplay that's in the game's build and says "Like here, we're at the battle between two warring factions. I could join in, I could take sides." and then there is no fleet battles anywhere in the game, I have a hard time blaming the players for their expectations.
I strongly disagree with the crazyness displayed by a lot of people, and those that go as far as death threat should be refered to the police. But this is not a case of "rabbid fan attack dev who couldn't reach what marketing promised", he put his hand in the fire to grab dollars, he got the money and he also got burnt.
It was so bad, for a while valve made a exception to its refund policy specifically for no man's sky, so that players could refund it even after dozens of hours, because the dev was hiding behind the "you have not played enough, you will unlock it later in the game" trick.