The way the toxicity is embedded into the social fabric of the forum is part of the problem. It's often insidious and when pointed out it is denied or trivialized then blame is shifted elsewhere.
I don't believe the majority on here are toxic. The problem is that the few voices that are toxic speak out often and across many threads.
It's doubtful BioWare employees are afraid of criticism.
Funny. Most posts I read on the BSN are usually from people discussing things in a civilized manner.
Bioware devs must've gone blind with rage when confronted with a few of the sociopaths who lurk in the forum waiting for an opportunity to attack people. After the experience, they just labelled everyone here entitled and toxic.
Don't they realize we've had to deal with the sociopaths over the years every time we came to the BSN to interact with our fellow players? As well as in ANY other online social media? That this is not something exclusive to their fanbase, but rather the downside of the internet in general?
About BW handling criticism...no, they don't know how to do that. The ME3 ending fiasco proved it.
The players were right. The original ending was awful. Bioware tried to justify it, saying it was a conceptual thing, but it just didn't work. The problem is that a few people saw what was happening - dissatisfied fans making a legitimate complaint about the ME3 ending - and took the chance to wreak havoc and have fun at everyone's expense. They disguised their attacks to the devs as criticism. Thus a legitimate criticism to the game was transformed into a personal attack against Bioware.
But that's still not the main problem.
If the devs were harassed by sociopaths while acknowledging the legitimate criticism, they should have been ready to discern between sincere feedback and downright abusive behaviour, as well as have a staff ready to deal with the latter. Especially after the release of a huge game such as ME3.
(I never really understood why a dev would just engage in a random thread and expect not to automatically label himself a target for sociopaths. Because that's what happens everytime an assiduous member posts something. It's like a lamb insisting on walking through a forest alone where there's a well-known wolf pack hiding somewhere. And then blaming the other animals who survive in the forest BY BEING CAREFUL for not warning them about a possible attack.)
The truth is that the devs are not upset about the toxicity, as they call it. They're upset because the critics were right. And at the time, they didn't know how to handle the simultaneous abuse coming from sociopaths. So in their heads, we, the fanbase, insulted them. They only forgot we have to deal with abusive behaviour daily and just learn to, like Cassandra says, Deal With It.
And between admitting the truth and believing in a convenient version of the facts, they chose the latter. Thus why we're all paying for the actions of a few (who probably don't even like the games as we do and only come here to have fun at the expense of unknown victims): because BW didn't have a contingency plan ready to deal with a common online phenomenon.
The best part is that the sociopaths will continue to harass fans out of here, in the new forums. The toxicity, as they call it, isn't gone. It will just follow the fanbase to new places. But the rest of us have inherited their reputation thanks to people like David Gaider and Chris Priestly (Bye Felicia) calling the BSN toxic and helping to forge a negative image not of the few sociopaths that attacked the devs, but of US. We, the silent majority.
Does that sound fair to you?
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