Oh, their poor little butterfly hearts!
Negativity seems like a supremely lame excuse. This is the Internet. You're going to find negativity wherever you go, here and everywhere else, in this gaming forum and in every other.
Frankly, I found their excuse hard to believe, not only because it is blatant corporate speak, but also because they rarely used these forums for feedback all that much anyway, even in the halcyon days before ME3.
How incredibly mature and understanding of you. *sarcasm*
Apparently, some people just can't get it through their heads that deaths threats, threats of violence, name-calling, and abuse are completely unacceptable and that no one should have to just sit there and take it - especially not when people occasionally do act on those threats.
I suppose you'd be perfectly fine with constantly receiving death threats from random strangers on the internet or having them threaten to beat you up because they didn't like something that you wrote or created? Is that okay to you? Is that acceptable to you? My opinion is that it's not okay and that it's not acceptable behavior. I wouldn't wish that sort of thing on anyone even if I had paid $200 for a game and the game (or its ending) sucked. Saying "this is the internet" is literally the STUPIDEST cop-out ever and is the lamest justification that I've ever seen used for excusing away bad online behavior.
Let me tell you that on my job, I've had to deal with authors who are just as egotistical, self-entitled and delusional as some of the worst people that I have seen here or on the internet in general - the ones who think that they have a right to say literally anything because they ponied up $60 for a game that they didn't enjoy (or some other product) and who feel that that they're entitled to spew expletives, to scream at people, and to stomp their feet and throw verbal tantrums.
I'll tell you a story about one sorry author that I had to work with who ended up blacklisted over his abusive behavior - a man who proclaimed himself the greatest writer in the world on every page of front matter and/or back matter written by him about himself (lololol - that's literally the only thing about that whole horrible situation that can still make me laugh). A little background first:
- This author...let's call him Captain Ego...literally wrote a page of quotes with quotes entirely devoted to himself and how great he was, how talented he was (lol). He more or less constantly stated that he was God's gift to writing (lol).
- Please keep in mind that this was/is an author who can't write decent dialogue, who doesn't understand grammar at all, and who completely fails at punctuation and spelling way too many times for my taste. His edits weren't great either when I got them.
- He even had a friend write an introduction that included a line that went something like: "His mom gave birth to a legend."
- And finally, Captain Ego also lied and said he was a best-selling author (so not true) and claimed that he was going to be a billionaire one day (he was/is completely delusional as far as that goes),
I put up with all of his crap and all of his ego for several of his (bad urban fiction) novels, including a revised version of one of his early novels - right up until things finally came to a head on his final novel. I will break down exactly what happened here:
- It was around the time of his fourth novel or so, and I was told that Captain Ego had more post-pub edits to do on his latest title (EDIT: that or the post-pub edits in question were for his third title - it's been a while).
- I didn't like that news at all, because Captain Ego was a complete failure as a writer as stated above. I inevitably ended up having to fix multiple errors whenever he submitted edits, even though it's not actually my job to do that.
- I have to take a moment to explain that the policy for authors during the editing rounds is that all their edits will be inserted exactly as-is, including any mistakes that they make (which is why they're supposed to go over their edits carefully before submitting them for insertion).
- It's solely because I actually CARE about trying to put out a respectable product that I so often take it upon myself to fix the ten million mistakes that the really bad authors make.
- I proceeded to dutifully do my job and inserted all of Captain Ego's post-pub edits, despite the fact that I intensely disliked him (I didn't hate him at the time - it was only after what happened next that dislike turned into outright hate).
- After Captain Ego finally got around to reviewing the new galley proof, he came back and suddenly claimed that I had messed up and that I had not inserted the edits correctly.
- I pointed out in an e-mail that I had inserted exactly what was on his edit form.
- He started screaming and threatening the company with a lawsuit and shouting about how he's the greatest, blah blah blah. This was all happening via e-mail (consider it the equivalent of toxic posts on the forums).
- I was like, I've had enough of Captain Ego and his craziness, and I told my superior that I wasn't going to deal with this guy's crap anymore.
- You know what happened shortly thereafter? Well, this giant, egotistical jerk finally told us that, woops, he didn't even actually know what was on his edit form!!!!!
- He then admitted that he had had someone ELSE enter his freaking edits for him and that he, genius that he was, had NOT bothered to review the form to make sure that everything was okay before the form got passed on to my company!!!!
- My response to all of this was that this jerk had abused my good graces for YEARS and had inflicted so much stress on me by that point with his crap that I would NEVER agree to format one of his manuscripts again after what he had just done.
- He had actually threatened to sue us and to tell everyone that he knew about how terrible we were...over a screwup that he later admitted was ENTIRELY his fault. It was extremely stressful at the time.
- Captain Ego then came crawling back to us and pleaded to be taken back. All of a sudden, he was so terribly contrite about it all once he'd been informed that he would no longer be allowed to publish with us.
- Though the company decided to blacklist him, we agreed to finish up his current projects (and to do post-pub edits on existing titles if absolutely necessary).
- Because I'm reasonably nice most of the time and actually like my direct superior, I agreed to ride out the post-pub edits even though I hated Captain Ego.
That was basically the end of it, except for me having to make a few minor post-pub changes that I agreed to take on.
See, abusive behavior - after years of an employee or a company as a whole putting up with it - can actually result in a whole company saying that person <x> or group <x> is causing so much trouble and stress for everyone that they're just not worth the headaches that they're causing. That's why Captain Ego is no longer a giant, bloody thorn in my side (or the sides of the author representatives who had to deal with him), and I suspect that it's for similar reasons that these forums are being shut down.
As for me, as a contractor with my company, I am entitled to request reassignment (or to refuse an assignment) if I so choose. Because of Captain Ego (and a few other authors like him), these days I will simply request reassignment at the first hint of major trouble/nuttiness/bad attitude. I found that I don't particularly enjoy spending my days with my stomach constantly twisted into knots or feeling like acid is burning its way through my guts because I'm dreading opening my inbox, and no amount of money can convince me to work with people who are abusive jerks anymore.
I did feel sorry for the author reps who worked with Captain Ego, because they actually had to work with him directly. They were the ones who actually had to talk to him on the phone and deal with all of his e-mails, his demands, etc. He caused me a ton of stress, and I was just working on the design end with limited communication (basically, when he threw a tantrum, his tantrum did get forwarded to me if it was something that I could address on my end). I can only imagine that it was so much worse for them (I do know from talking to the reps that they didn't like this guy at all).
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