Question for Gaslamp: How many death threats have you recieved because of fan anger over Dredmor?

http://kotaku.com/5904367/another-d...om-gamers-to-the-people-who-make-video-games/

I think the whole death threats thing is more a function of the type of people who are attracted to the game. Then again, if David or Nicholas received death threats over diggle gameplay balance changes, I'm sure it would be a sign that Gaslamp has a large and commercially successful game.

 

This trend is just, in my mind, part of the general loss of civility that we've had, culturally, since the Internet started.

Call it one more reason that Gabriel Internet F****** Theory resonates strongly with me.

There's things in the article there that I think are well beyond the pale, but they've happened to far more people than just game figures. (Jack Thompson springs to mind, and I'd have trouble arguing that the man didn't encourage that with his approach).

 

Hey you made a good game, dont be discouraged by people who dont like it you cant please everyone, If you're happy with it and people play it, what more can you ask for. Dont ponder to over egotistical lets players or whatever or whoever complained they werent in the beta, you cant invite everyone and as you said they ignored your statement to state it wasnt his work and he ignored that so he really didnt deserve to be in on it.

 

Screw metacritic. I'm leveraging my GitP star power (lol internet famous) to bring more players aboard.

 

For shame. This game really rocks.
And for any indie developer, I know to take the development cycle with a grain or two of extra patience.
The fact that I am getting their game for a couple of bucks and they put their soul into the game with a tiny studio makes it all the more epic.

And then there are games like this which literally have gotten more than TRIPLE the time I have put into other games that I like such as Skyrim... Epic. And I got this out of a humble bundle which I am now ashamed to admit that I only paid 5.00 for the whole thing. Although I have since bought more copies of DoD for friends. When I joined there were like 2000 members in these forums and now we are up to nearly 5k.

 

Well, the one thing to remember is that those who complain like that for no reason aren't really worthy of your attention, because they complain for the sake of complaining, hate for the sake of hating, and bash for the sake of bashing.

But you probably already know that.

 

I think it might actually be harder for some people to throw that kind of "I HATE YOU DIE DIE DIE" vitriol around when the devs are more active in their game's community. When the devs are people, with faces and names, who talk to you, who crack jokes, who ask questions and address you and give props to the people who mod their game and all that. As opposed to John Q. Dev who works at Such-and-such Software and his existence is only really known because his name's in the credits. It also doesn't hurt that Dredmor has an appeal to a slightly different audience than who you would find in the mainstream.

 

To piggyback on this, when you multiply the number of people on the Dev Team by fifty and the number of consumers by a couple thousand, you're going to get a lot more crazies and a lot less personal feedback from the Devs.

I hate to keep going back to it all the time, but look at WoW: you have a perfect storm of a game that's marketed to the lowest common denominator, being made by hundreds of Developers (NONE of which interact directly with the community in ANY way, instead having Forum Moderators that "speak for them"); said consumer base is roughly 10 MILLION people, tens of thousands of whom are spewing vitriol at the devs wherever they can; and a Corporate Entity (or three) filtering everything doled out to said community in Perfect PR Speak™ in an extremely controlled (and completely non-interactive) manner.

The end result is that a single typo or mis-phrased sentence from the go-between Forum Mod can ignite a world-wide firestorm that gets spread across every major internet "news outlet" within minutes of it appearing.

In that environment, where literally everything is blown out of proportion to a ludicrous degree, and the number of people involved is so mind-bogglingly inflated, you're guaranteed to get crazies becoming so angry over one small aspect of a video game that death threats and similar nonsense will become a reality.

In contrast, you have a Forum like this, where 3-4 Devs are able to talk to their active, posting user-base of several dozen (a couple hundred?) people, and without the PR Speak™. The chances of angering a crazy becomes extraordinarily slim in this case.

Unless, of course, you mess with the compatibility of their save files.

 

To be fair, WoW was a pay as you play game where you first bought the client, then devoted more money and time into characters. People tend to expect such things to work how they want since they are still actively paying every time they play. (I could be wrong about that, I have honestly never even seen WoW.)

DoD is a single player game. We pay once and get a game that is fairly solid and we can play as much as we like without ever expending another Zorkmid.

There is a major difference in what I would expect from DoD if I were paying every time I played.

In actual life, DoD is the cheapest commercial game I have ever bought. And I have bought closer to thousands than to hundreds of games. The value is immense. We sometimes get irritated when something is broken, but the Developers acively interact and try to resolve those issues. For that, We love them.

Gaslam Games, I and many others would gladly take a bullet for you. Keep up the great work!

 

Wait, are you implying that someone actually cares about Metacritic?

 

My theory is that for some people, if they don't see an actual human face, there can be a lack of empathy. I believe it's the same reason why some people feel little guilt about stealing from hotels, or cheating on their tax returns, and so on. There's no person physically present in the room with you to illicit feelings that you normally experience if you are dealing more directly, and related feelings like shame, or guilt or even a feeling of a common humanhood may be absent.

I also see the same thing when people make outrageous accusations or have wild conspiracy theories that involve either government agencies or companies and corporations or organizations or whatever. They become in our minds like entities separate from actual human beings. It's a lot harder to picture people that you know doing outrageous things, than a generic faceless 'other'.

 

When a group gets too big, the chance that some small part will do horrible things rises to a near certainty. That is why many people distrust any "Agency" in the world. Weather it is governmental, corporate, or little green men is irrelevant to my understanding.

But to not go onto that subject at all, remember that Gaslamp Games is a couple handfuls of people. I doubt they have a "Horrible Atrocities Committed Against Our Customers" department yet... (Next patch perhaps?)

Back to the example of WoW, they probably do have the equivalent department. They have PR people that have to deal with upset people. And they cannot always please them all. So the idea that they may be unfair and evil cannot always be denied to a reasonable person. They are simply too large to be neutral or good all the time in every situation.

Moreover, WoW is property of a company that I do not particularly like, and absolutely do not trust. And anytime you read the prescripted PR BS it leaves a sour taste behind. It is not a Human saying "We are deeply sorry for your unfortunately generic trouble that we never bother to describe in this reply..." and it never was. Perhaps a Human picked that generic response, but that is the sort of thing that aggravates me when I am a paying customer with a problem.

Gaslamp Games does not do that junk yet. I dread the day that they resort to that. But it will happen eventually. And I will move on. There is always the next Independent Game Developer coming up. I just hope that Gaslamp endures the trouble of communicating as Humans for as long as possible.

I have been reading on the Corsair forums for a year or so now. They *DO NOT* answer any questions whatsoever, nor try in any meaningful way to help. If you have a problem they spew the generic response and if that fails to make the user reply in thanks for solving the problem, they suggest an RMA of the hardware. I wish I had bothered to check their forums before I bought my HS1 headset, since they suggest an RMA for everyone for common problems and never fix anything even when they RMA it. They are frankly insulting in manner.

Understand, I love the sound quality of the Headset, but the microphone is as useful as a piece of string and two cups. If not worse... I have never found anyone who got an RMAed headset and was actually happy with the results. Yet every single day they suggest everyone try the generic crap and then RMA and pay a third the price of the Headset to ship it back.

*I should change my Signature to say that I am persistently off topic...*

 

Hrmm. I query that - compare/contrast League of Legends which has quite an active set of developers and players who commit to talking on the forums.For millions of people.

 

I'd be happy to send you guys death threats if it'd make you feel like successful roguelike tycoons.

 

I realize this is a tangent from the main thread, but this would be a funny dungeon addition.

 

I was thinking that as I wrote it.