Game Developer Harassment

Good luck with that. I've been giving him the stink eye about his puns since 2006.

OK THEN I WILL START.

YOU ARE ALL BAD AT THINGS. YOU SHOULD FEEL BAD ABOUT YOURSELVES FOR THINGS YOU DID THAT WAS BAD. YOU SHOULD CRY.

I am no good at harassment, i feel bad now.

When u have guys do things like #dealwithit then wonder why people rage it's no surprise. I am thou surprised purely for the fact that you are forced never to buy anything. If you don't like what a dev or development house does, here is a grand idea, just don't buy it. Gaming seems to some as breathing, if they can't they get all blue in the face.

So.. you're going to state that, you think it's ok to rage (or in this case, Adam got death threats, had to upend his life, etc etc) because of a tweet between himself and a good buddy who he was mostly trying to troll? Interesting.

Devs are humans too. We speak out of turn, we make mistakes. But unlike most of the anonymous internet, we aren't anonymous. I've never gotten a signed death threat. I suppose that would take too much courage of conviction.

Isn't this pretty much just people being people? These death threat nuts I mean, we're just talking about a handful of nuts who can't handle themselves away from the screens. I'd also find it hard to take seriously a death threat from a pimple faced butter ball, anonymously flexing his powdered cheese stained trigger finger. That article would have you think this is the daily grind for developers, but I really doubt that.

Think of pro athletes. They get beer thrown on them depending on what town they work in that day. They also date models and get paid a lot. And stadium beer is expensive! Ok where was I going with this ...

Edit: Oh, yeah. Point is that, like with athletes and other public-ish figures, people take license that they wouldn't otherwise. It's not really a game industry thing - it's a life thing that has probably always been around.

I think you have a good point about harassment not being limited to just game developers. However I would argue that prior to the creation of the Internet it was significantly more difficult and inconvenient to harass others while maintaining a considerable degree of anonymity.

Another thing to consider is that athletes, celebrities, and other public figures that are popular enough to be the target of extreme harassment typically make a lot more money and therefore can more easily afford advanced 24/7 home/personal security which in addition to providing tangible protection also provides the intangible benefit of greater peace of mind.

Additionally, for the vast majority of gamers playing games is not a high risk venture (like high-stakes gambling in sports for example) or an activity that has the potential to profoundly affect their lives (like a major court ruling from a prominent judge for example). My point is that it seems much more difficult to justify harassment toward game developers compared to other public figures, because the impact of the game developer to the gamer is small relative to many other things in life.

Having said this, it seems obvious that people who commit this type of harassment find it very challenging to prevent their emotions from overriding their ability to reason logically and think critically. And for a very small minority of these perpetrators, this characteristic itself is what could lead to real harm/damage. This small risk for real harm/damage circles back to my previous comment about the feasibility of advanced 24/7 home/personal security.

Anyway, just wanted to share my thoughts.

It happens, and courts ignore the blackmail aspect of identity theft in these cases because they incorrectly assume the "potential earnings" of a game are "trivial". This happened to me, and it is one of the reason I now carry a gun (death threats and threats against my family, over my IP).

Well, Über seems to be some kind of target.
PCGamer just recently released a small article about the PA beta starting soon, of course, some of the comments (not all but surprisingly quite a few) stated that Über is worse than EA, money whores and so on... "releasing" a game on steam for $90... no one, not even EA did that before.
The problem for me is, how could you, like Über, prevent this kind of stupidity and ignorance.
So many people are talking smack about something they have not understood...

And yes, they do not understand the difference between pledging and buying a game, the difference between Alpha and gold master.

To be honest, Über stated everything very clear and in detail from the very beginning, still...

On the positive side, at least we won't meet those "*****" on the battlefield.

I would not care about this, but those comments are simply false, rude and uninformed.
Freedom of speech also means to shut your mouth once in a while. I never understood why someone would post a comment about something he is clearly not interested in.

Sadly, I wouldn't be so sure about that. Quite a significant amount of those people which are now foaming at the mouth with phony rage will probably end up buying the game anyway. It's the same as with those people that feel the need to constantly tell everyone on a game's forum how much the game in question sucks... yet won't just leave.

Lol, true that!

But... those still don't understand that the finished game will only cost $40 and not $90 like they say all the time.
This is also one of the reasons why I would prefer a blacklist when you host your own game, so certain people cannot even join... happens all the time in SupCom2, there are even a few guys impersonating me and a few friends... Valve/Steam not helping at all... but back to topic... ^^

Quoted Star Wars You Did, "Like" received you have.