I will preface this by saying that personal attacks/threats/etc are not constructive and won't help anybody. That said, there are serious criticisms and much of the toxicity stems from the toxic environment under which some of the Pdox titles released/operate.
The problem is the combination of the products' quality and the attitude demonstrated regarding issues with them.
When a game routinely, reproducibly lies to players and patches for years ignore that entirely...this will by necessity erode trust in developers. There is a 10-20 patch trend of the demonstrated priorities that tell us that Pdox does not think lying to the player is worthy of addressing with any urgency in EU 4, though ironically 1.31 finally attempted to address that only to crash and burn in other more obvious ways. HOI 4 stills lies with no apparent end in sight, about achievements, what focuses do, where units will go, and what will happen with events/disasters. Some of these result in straight up lost runs.
It's about balance. It's fine to be critical and share constructive feedback, but if it's done with a constant negative, snarky or dismissive tone, it gets exhausting to read through it.
As players/enthusiasts of the game, some of us are similarly exhausted. I can, for example, go into HOI 4 right now and reproduce numerous ways in which the controls don't work. You give one order, the game does something else. This is extremely frustrating, was intentionally made worse (confirmed intentional in bug report thread) via penalizing players for engaging with it less, and has a > 3 year history of being shown that it it simply isn't a significant priority for the combination of Paradox's project management/development in that game.
At some point, politely pointing out "hey, your controls don't work" is going to progress to "hey, your controls still don't work two years later in exactly the same way as before", and then eventually to "it is obvious that whatever developers are willing/able to work on, their priority is not on whether the controls of this game work".
So now it's May 2021, and the controls still don't work. I can still go into the game, draw a battle plan, and reproducibly watch units move and attack outside of the battleplan, sometimes away from their own front line (just one example! I could flood this post with them but it's long enough already!). It's been an impactful negative experience in the game for years. From a developer's perspective it might be "constantly negative" to get increasingly cynical about that, but it's not like the problem has changed. They work on and sell DLC while showing us, repeatedly through action, that they simply don't evaluate that issue as important.
But at least some of the player base actually does consider the controls of the game to be important, so there's an impasse there. Especially when a new-ish poster brings up an issue with those controls (or focuses/peace conferences/paradrops/etc) the same way some of us have seen dozens of times.
If the negative element is longstanding and constant, how is the expectation that negative posting about it won't be similarly lonstanding and constant? And this extends to several other core mechanics of the game, not just the controls. I'm not sure it's fair to point to the community for being toxic there. Some people cross the line, sure, but the setting itself is inherently toxic. They're selling add-ons to a product which has several core advertised features (provably) not work. In most cases there is no single, easy explanation for how things get like this. Life is rarely that conveniently simple. But especially given the quality of the game(s) in question right now, calling out some of the community for being toxic is a little off-putting.
Certainly not. Should we have less tolerance for people being overly or constantly negative and assuming by default that we're dishonest? Maybe?
There's some nuance here as usual. I would estimate it as very unlikely any of the Pdox staff lies deliberately to consumers.
On the other hand, we get types of interactions that makes it hard to trust developers regardless:
- The game will do things like say "rebels need to control a fort to break the country" explicitly, then you get broken by rebels that don't control a fort. If this were a one-off issue it wouldn't be a big deal, just a bug to fix in the next patch. But it isn't a one-off issue, and it doesn't get fixed in the next patch. Or within the next ten patches. You can replace this example with dozens of others, varying in impact from "nuisance" to "if you what take this says on faith you lose your run over the last 2-5 hours".
- Reasoning failure:
- Let's say X necessarily implies Y and Z. Developer gives an explanation that X is done because of Y, but won't address why this doesn't apply to Z. This isn't a problem unique to developers, lots of people make this mistake (myself included sometimes, I appreciate when it's pointed out so I can adjust). But when devs stick to X --> Y but not X --> Z even after the discrepancy is identified, it does shake the belief that the explanation given is genuine.
- Similarly, if the stated goal of a mechanic is to incentivize/disincentivize something, it will raise eyebrows when it obviously doesn't. Again, this almost certainly isn't outright dishonesty, but I can see how it leads to doubt.
All of these result in issues where players are given to believe or outright told something that isn't true. When they observe it isn't true and are upset with the quality of the product in addition, I can at least see where people are coming from in saying something was "dishonest", even though I don't think intentional deception is a plausible explanation.
First, and I think this has been raised by everyone who made that point before: we welcome feedback and people being critical of your games, business, and/or actions. I don't believe we've ever silenced, banned, or stopped working with someone because they were critical of us.
It's been a number of years now, but I have had it happen to me twice:
- Once I received a major infraction for giving a list of 3 negative things patches had demonstrably done over the past several iterations at that point. The thread was about the patch at the time, so it wasn't off topic and the post in question was strictly negative about the patch qualities (no personal attacks/callouts/etc).
- Once a developer defined an "exploit" as "anything that developer says is an exploit", in a thread about whether a particular tactic was an exploit. I was banned for saying that words have meaning, and for "exploit" to have meaning it must constrain anticipation...to result in some behaviors we should expect and others we should not expect when we hear/see it. For that and pointing out that this is necessary criteria for separating "exploit" from other arbitrarily chosen words, I was banned.
- I have seen another poster banned for a negative comment about the level of play in one of the dev MP games. Which at least at the time was a different standard than what the forum had allowed when it came to players calling out each others' skill when discussing mechanics. That always struck me as strange on both counts; it's rare in any game for its devs to be at a high level of play (it's harder to think of exceptions, maybe the Celeste dev? Probably worse than speed runners but still very good in that case), and it's odd that there was an apparently different standard at the time.
Admittedly, these incidents are ~5 years old now, and at least I personally haven't seen anything similar to that recently, which I appreciate. But knowing this has happened in the past (and not just to me), I can see how posters might be getting antsy after a poorly received DLC release.
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So what breaks the cycle? A combination of a) moderating people getting personal or not contributing to discussion at all and b) better project management/constraints/product quality/prioritization. When posters like a game but still see the same problems now as 3 years ago there's no escaping cynicism. Even the more saintly among us will get worn down, and most of us aren't saintly
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