I’m often in a rather challenging mood around here, with my dissatisfaction about the established indirect communication and the stress factor built into the game being quite obvious.
However at times I get reminded, that it could be several degrees worse.
A different game, that I’m playing for maybe fifteen years, and that is still quite a bit bigger than this one (and thus can’t claim to be in need of cost cutting) shut down its forum and on-site human support completely today. All that goes beyond the most basic scraps of ingame news now requires the use of third party websites; I don’t really want to imagine, what bug reports look like on a chat website channel of ten thousands of users, and help for new users is most likely not to be found in such a setting either. Nor would I imagine “social” media websites to be a fitting place for such.
I find that deeply disturbing.
I am rapidly losing grasp to the current incarnation of the internet. For this reason, and despite all of my complaints, thank you for still running this place “as it should be”. Not quite as a given thing as it was a decade or two ago.
I guess, for once users and moderation staff can silently agree to hope, that 505 Games never takes a peek at us and notices, that shifting all of this onto whatever website is trending at the time might give them a boost in short term publicity and save a few coins in webspace hosting.
Rant over.