The part where they said "The right to discuss is a privilege—it is not an entitlement you earn by playing the game" made me laugh out loud. What a ridiculously bad public take hahaha
Right? Like, if I want to be as charitable as I'm capable of being, I could understand that sentiment if you are talking about your own official forums on your website. Like, sure, if you own the content and the forum, you have the power to determine what is and isn't acceptable on your platforms. It's a stupid determination, mind you, but it's within your power. However the impression I gather from the article is that they're referring to the Steam forums, which is absolutely asinine to me.
They are referring to the steam forums, and in one of their own comments in said forum they say that theyre required by steam to have those forums, in response to someone asking why they dont shutter the whole thing if they cant handle responding to bug fixes and the like.
So its not actually a privilege, its a requirement to sell the game.
For OP or others wondering about context:
It requires a surprising amount of digging to really try and figure out what started all this, but from my rudimentary research, it seems to me that this is a problem that's existed for a few games now and has steadily gotten worse, stemming from high DLC prices and an equally high number of, potentially game breaking, bugs, across multiple games that don't get fixed as it's very quickly on to the next one for CA.
There's rumination that it's because the studio is constantly working on multiple games at the same time and just shoves everything out without having the proper time to go back and make sure everything works like it should.
This seems like it came to a head with a recent DLC pack's price increase while containing equal or lesser content than Warhammer 2 DLC, which was cheaper on release. This prompted review bombing from the community, which prompted a response from one of the lead devs, Rob, who basically said (paraphrasing here) "Costs are up, there's no good time to do this, but we have to raise the DLC prices and challenge ourselves to make the content better to match".
Turns out the community doesn't think the content is better to match. CA doubled down on that position, and here we are.
And doubled down hard, since the boycott bans are killing off their more popular mod creators.
A surprisingly increasing number of companies seem to be making suicide sprints lately.
They know the world is ending so it's a sprint to be top of the leaderboards.
Cheap money (in the form of loans) has reduced. This means that investors are suddenly putting a lot more pressure on the top. In good companies, this is dealt with by the leadership team. Unfortunately, a lot just let the shit roll downhill.
There is also the issue of compartmentalization. In larger companies, the people dealing with the complaints have little to do with the people who actually need to change things to fix the root cause. This leads to the schizophrenic/sociopathic behaviour we see. The mouth has very little idea what the hands are doing.
Right, I can't remember the Creator's name, but apparently they supported a boycott and got banned for it, removing access to their workshop account as well, and they created one of, if not the most subscribed mod for the game. Maybe you know that, I haven't played Total War since Rome 1, so I'm way out of touch
Considering how consistent the complaint of how much SEGA is forcing CA to act like a shittier version of Paradox, that's not surprising.
Since the niche of players that buys Total War games will hardly budge upwards, the only way to maximize profits is to squeeze those suckers with endless DLC. No wonder every game since Shogun 2 has had blood as a separate DLC.
Its crazy to me that a ban from the community page removes your contributed mods too.
Guess it must be pretty bad if your mod creators, the ones making you free content to keep your players around, are getting banned for being pro boycott.
If they ban the right creator, I wonder if a bunch of mods will start breaking similar to that guy who removed his packages from npm, breaking everything
"The right to discuss is a privilege" - someone is very confused about the difference between rights and privileges and also wrong.
I had to check. They actually said this. I've never played Warhammer (I have been interested, just haven't gotten around to it) and I don't know these devs at all, but contradicting themselves with just seven words in the same sentence is actually kind of impressive.
Games Workshop is renowned for shitty treatment of their customers. Looks like whichever studio develops their IP for games will do the same.
That’s pretty terrible and should put people off buying anything from them. They increased pricing, and when community backlash happens they just ban everyone who dares express an opinion that isn’t positive.
This is why all games should use independent forums moderated by passionate community members. If only there was some federated, open source platform they could move to in order to discuss the game anonymously and without repercussions from the devs...
I just upvoted every Steam review highlighting the company's shitty practices. Thanks for the heads up!
Tone deaf company. My friend wants me to get into this series so badly, but this article details what a disgusting relationship CA has with its customers.
The series is still great, but decisions by the company recently have really been bad.
Each time I check the r/totalwar subreddit, there seem to be another PR fuckup from CA. It's really sad considering they were peaking just a few years ago with TWW2. Stopped maintaining my mods due to it.
They even closed the Steam discussion thread and didn't have the decency to properly link to the "New Discussion" wherever the fuck that is taking place. CA have their heads so far up their ass that every bit of shit smells wonderful to them at this point.
Edit: Found the link
Valve should remove Total War Warhammer 3 from sale. Been a Dick to your customers is not something that Valve should tolerate.
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