Developer Toxicity Reaction, Behaviour and Incitement

[DrNukeLear]

Now that I’ve got your attention I want to clarify that all the devs are human. They are fallible and mistakes happen. They’re good people. They’re behaviour isn’t inherently toxic, but it’s certainly inciting the situation at times. There is no malice or ill intent on the part of the developers. This can’t always be said of players. Also toxic behaviour is inexcusable.

Full Disclosure: There was one incident where a Paradox Employee in his role as Programmer wrote something which would have seen him sacked for gross misconduct had he been my employee talking to my customers.

I decided to write this piece when the Stellaris virtual Lan (for PDXCon) was announced. I was excited. Then I saw “Play with the Devs” and my reaction was “No thanks”. I’m not saying my reaction was justified or right. In fact I was wrong (the last three words we all need to say more often). I should be jumping at the chance to play with the developers of my favourite game.

I’ve written this in the general forum because I think it applies to all Paradox software development houses, it may be a gross exaggeration or generalisation but looking through other forums and the writing of developers on those forums I don’t believe that’s the case.

Allow me to explain what happens and why I felt like this:

The devs set up the “Hype-train” ahead of a big release, this can be 6 months of dev diaries. Live-streams as so on.
The devs work on a new expansion, the systems supporting the new content are added and made free to a point to allow compatibility and ease of development.

The players board the hype train.
The players ride the hype train to the highest peaks.
The free update is released. A system overhaul is bundled into the free update and the new DLC arrives. The developers throw a party are on a high.

Then these things happen:
- Players can’t stand the overhauled system.
- The DLC under delivers compared to the hype.
- The new system to support the DLC is minimal without it and is an issue.

Sometimes it’s just one issue, somtimes it’s two, sometimes it’s all three. Different individual fans have differing reactions. There’s some who don’t have any issues with the release. All are valid opinions,

Players then voice these opinions, some more forcefully than others. Some of this reaction does wanders into toxicity (again, this is not acceptable). The reasons for this passion are normally from among:
- They’re our favourite games, we cherish them and we don’t like big changes forced on us.
- We’ve invested financially in the game and would like it to persist in good condition.
- We may have preordered the dlc and don’t want to roll back to a previous version which we prefer because we’d lose access to what we’ve paid for.
- We’ve invested hours into these games. I’ve clocked over 2500 hours on Paradox titles.
- We mod Paradox games and the developers have built something which is defies comprehension.

As a result the developers get this wave of backlash and seem surprised by it. This is because we’ve been cheering from the back of the hype train for months. So we then have some quick fixes, nerfs and refocusing of the new stuff. Sometimes we have some rapidly public beta work with focussed feedback.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. There are ways Paradox can work to minimise these backlashes and provoke less toxicity and outrage.

1) Development Diaries about development. Announcements about announcing.
By separating the Announcements from Development Diaries you can move your marketing, pre-order notifications, trailers etc to the announcements. This gives your big announcements, reveals, release dates a bigger focus. Developers can therefore take complete ownership of Development Diaries and talk about current development work. Just imagine fortnightly dev Diaries all year round (yes you can take holidays and breaks) it’s constant regular contact between devs and players. ‘Cos sometimes it feels like we only get dev Diaries when you want to sell us DLC and that hurts.

2) Free Update Public Betas
Embrace your public beta! Keep them going 52 weeks of the year. If you want to change the game and get our reactions before you’ve spent six months on the feature, let us play it. It’s a free feature. Giving us access to a free feature before release will not cost sales because it’s going to be free anyway.

3) Documentation is King
You need documentation for your games. The user manual is not something which arrived spontaneously without need. Each game should have a manual and a revised edition added prior to the release of a game version. If we want to roll back to Stellaris 1.3, we should be able to grab the 1.3 manual. Each manual should have a little section on each DLC at the back of the “book”. Not only is this helpful in playing the game, it can sell DLC!
Grabbing the new Stellaris 3.0 manual 7 days before Stellaris 3.0 comes out would stop me being unaware of new changes, let’s me throw a link to new players to help them and helps modders get ahead of the curve.

I’m not saying players are blameless, we’re not. But when PC Gamer runs an article describing part of this forum as toxic the status quo must change.

This outline does above is the best way forwards for Paradox and the players. Trust me. When I’m not a Stellaris player and modder I’m the Chief Executive of a marketing company with clients on four continents.

 

[Slargos]

I don't know what happened to Paradox hiring standards, but I do know this: The forum contains their most loyal fans. The badge salad on some of these people makes them look like North Korean generals. Calling them toxic is not going to end well for the bottom line.

Anyone on Paradox that doesn't recognize that the forum is (or at least used to be) one of the support pillars of the company needs to check their priorities. How many PDX employees started their careers as members of this forum?

Go ahead. Call this toxicity. Call me toxic. See what happens.

 

[DebbieElla]

Reminder: critiquing Paradox products is fine, and not toxic. Calling our devs names or sending them death threats is toxic and will get you banned. We have rules in place to make the forum fun and informative for everyone, and reserve the right to enforce those rules.

 

[Slargos]

Reminder: critiquing Paradox products is fine, and not toxic. Calling our devs names or sending them death threats is toxic and will get you banned. We have rules in place to make the forum fun and informative for everyone, and reserve the right to enforce those rules.

And this is exactly what I'm talking about. You're receiving criticism and you imply that is tantamount to death threats. No gray scale there. It's either double-plus positivity, or it's a nuclear event. I don't know how Paradox thinks this is the way.

 

[DrNukeLear]

Reminder: critiquing Paradox products is fine, and not toxic. Calling our devs names or sending them death threats is toxic and will get you banned. We have rules in place to make the forum fun and informative for everyone, and reserve the right to enforce those rules.

I completely agree. No one should ever receive a threat of death or violence on any forum, publicly or privately. If anyone wants to use my OP as a rallying cry for toxicity they’ve missed the point.

 

[Slargos]

I completely agree. No one should ever receive a threat of death or violence on any forum, publicly or privately. If anyone wants to use my OP as a rallying cry for toxicity they’ve missed the point.

But that's absolutely preposterous! You shouldn't have to disavow death threats. A representative of Paradox going "just so you know, death threats aren't allowed" to your post is absolutely bizarre!

 

[Kayden_II]

No one should ever receive a threat of death or violence on any forum, publicly or privately.

Fine. point is cleared. Your and Paradox problem is "just" the thing that the majority of players doesn't threaten Paradox with "violence" or / and "death", which is why they don't feel addressed by this, so why has this theme to be forced upon them as well ?

 

[delra]

Notice how Slargos was already a member of this forum for 20 years when this moderator's account was created... Time flies.

I don't think Paradox ever released any game that was actually properly ready to be released. And - that's perfectly fine by me. Seriously, it is. Maybe my memory fails me, but I am trying to go through the list of the games in my head year by year and I don't remember any very smooth releases. There were expansions which were very good on release, but full new games - pretty sure never, maybe we got close to it a few times, but we never got one that'd be entirely right. Maybe people who are here only since about Imperator or CK3 release aren't used to that fact of life yet. It's a whole new generation too, more spoiled, more entitled, maybe that plays a factor?

My advice for those newcomers, be honest, but also always try to be constructive. Rather than attacking the developers personally, which leads to nowhere, write what exactly you want changed in the games and how. That's the only chance you have that you're ever going to receive the product that you dreamed about.

Back in the old days, we had an unwritten agreement with the devs, they released something which wasn't working very well, we got angry but we paid for it anyway, because god-honest truth, nobody on the planet made any strategy games in the same league as Johan's, so even if we wanted to leave, - there was nowhere to go. So instead we wrote what we wanted changed and fixed, then developers used the cash to patch the games and improve them according to our wishes, rebalanced things, made the interface easier to interact with, added things that made games more immersive. This is how games got better over time, this is how this whole thing called Paradox was built, grew to its current size.

Reading that PC Gamer piece, my immediate thought is that shutting yourself down to forum feedback, you have no future in this profession, I'm sorry, you might be a perfectly nice kid otherwise and a good developer, but you just don't. Should probably change your line of work or at least get reassigned to a position where you don't need to interact with the community. Running to the media to crap on your customer base, making us all look like toxic murderers is even worse and should probably lead to your firing. And if there ever were actual serious death threats, they should be immediately forwarded to the police, not used as an excuse to derail conversations with people who dedicated decades of their time to supporting your current employer, who helped build this whole thing and who will still be here long after you're gone to another job.

We don't want to kill the devs, we have a worse fate for them planned, which is having to actually fix things they broke. Right?

 

[TheCheeseMaster]

Pretty disgusting how hard Paradox tried (and tries) to control the narrative, like they were an abusive ex unable to take criticism.

Customers: "Wow, this DLC is bad."

Paradox: "What? It's not the DLC that was bad, it's _toxic gamers_"

Customers: "Yea, toxic gamers suck, but the DLC is still bad"

Paradox: "t o x i c g a m e r s"

Customers: "..."

It was all eventually resolved, through the help of no one talking about gamer toxicity on forums, but through the effort of Johan and Tinto patching everything over the next few weeks.

 

[Slargos]

We don't want to kill the devs, we have a worse fate for them planned, which is having to actually fix things they broke. Right?

Cruel and unusual punishment? I like the way you think.

Dead people can't code.

Yet.

 

[Luchofeio]

This is normal for the age we live in. The moment something backfires, doesn´t go as planned, or simply isn´t right, people hide behind the abslute minority that cross the lines like sending death threats. After that, ALL criticism is dismissed as losing its legitimacy. Not to mention that to me those "death threats" are just teenagers who will do absolute nothing in real life.

I stop visiting this forum after the Deus Vult discussion prior to CK3 release where the moderator said they were "temporarely" closing the thread to clear up "toxic behavior". It is still locked to this day.

This is a really strange trend these days to ignore their own customers because you believe that something is right to the point of absolute.

 

[ASGeek2012]

You're receiving criticism and you imply that is tantamount to death threats.

No, they didn't. Nowhere in that post does it say criticism = death threats. It's listed as two separate ideas.

critiquing Paradox products is fine, and not toxic.

Calling our devs names or sending them death threats is toxic

There really isn't a gray area there. It's entirely possible to write a strong criticism about a PDX game without once making threats or name-calling specific developers or the dev team in general.

I do software programming as a living. Everything I do goes to code review from my peers. They're perfectly capable of critiquing my code and pointing out flaws without resorting to personal attacks. Anyone who did resort to that would be fired.

 

[Slargos]

No, they didn't. Nowhere in that post does it say criticism = death threats. It's listed as two separate ideas.


There really isn't a gray area there. It's entirely possible to write a strong criticism about a PDX game without once making threats or name-calling specific developers or the dev team in general.

I do software programming as a living. Everything I do goes to code review from my peers. They're perfectly capable of critiquing my code and pointing out flaws without resorting to personal attacks. Anyone who did resort to that would be fired.

I'll remind you that personal attacks against your fellow users is a bannable offense, just so we're clear on that.

 

[ASGeek2012]

I'll remind you that personal attacks against your fellow users is a bannable offense, just so we're clear on that.

Good thing I didn't do that in my post, then.

 

[Slargos]

Good thing I didn't do that in my post, then.

See, kid, this is what we call a teachable moment. Read what I responded to again. Then read what you responded to again. Then ruminate on it a bit. The answer will be revealed.

 

[ASGeek2012]

See, kid, this is what we call a teachable moment. Read what I responded to again. Then read what you responded to again. Then ruminate on it a bit. The answer will be revealed.

Only thing I can think of is when you referred to personal attack you were not responding to the tone of my post directly but referring back to something earlier in the thread. If that's the case, fine, no harm done. If you were trying to make a point that I missed, feel free to explain it in more detail if you like.

 

[Slargos]

Only thing I can think of is when you referred to personal attack you were not responding to the tone of my post directly but referring back to something earlier in the thread. If that's the case, fine, no harm done. If you were trying to make a point that I missed, feel free to explain it in more detail if you like.

Paradox-Corporate-Drone #1357000 gave a cheeky response about not posting death threats. I protested that it was inappropriate on the grounds that it was an unnecessary implication. You protested my protest on the grounds that she'd made no direct assertion.

Forum-Wise-Cracking-Jerk #6 In order to provide an example you'd understand gave a cheeky response about not insulting other forum members. You protested that it was inappropriate on the grounds that you'd done no such thing.

Now do you see?

My protest is based on the implication behind the request to "not send any death threats". It's absurd, and it only serves to further aggravate. If there are people sending death threats, deal with them, but don't spray the rest of the 99.99% of members with the tut-tut spray.

 

[DominusNovus]

Only thing I can think of is when you referred to personal attack you were not responding to the tone of my post directly but referring back to something earlier in the thread. If that's the case, fine, no harm done. If you were trying to make a point that I missed, feel free to explain it in more detail if you like.

By responding to a post that is not at all out of bounds with a reminder of what is out of bounds, the responder is suggesting that the original content was not appropriate with a wink and a nudge.

 

[DebbieElla]

Actually I was clarifying what we consider to be toxic. If you don't engage in such behaviour (such as death threats, or general name-calling), then you don't need to worry about it. However, this conversation has already turned into name-calling, so it will be closed.