Yeah frankly your PR skills are, as I said in what was essentially the first round of this thread, deplorable and cause major issues. You don't need to be a PR expert to have someone write you up PR practices. Do you think any other code team working on games are expected to be PR experts? Fuck no. But they are smart enough to understand that acting like jackasses bites them in the ass and figure out what exactly you are supposed to do, either by taking on someone as the PR manager or outsourcing.
When you are utterly unable to interface with what is essentially your clients, even though for some reason the coders in a super fucked up way don't see the server in that respect, you need to fucking make changes and get savy on PR. That is the long and short of it. This would not have happened if coderbus knew how to manage itself on any level, including just making sure they put off a friendly face. The fact you don't care how people see you at all shows there is a huge problem and disconect in values.
What is funny is that a lot of this shit that is getting flung at you? You are asking for it. HG's response on page 1 for example was about the worst way to go about crisis communication. "Nothing is wrong. Fuck you. I refuse to listen to anything you have to say." Anyone who has taken any sort of marketing or PR class would slap their face and at this point explain the Tylenol standard. Insisting a problem in PR doesn't exist and refusing to engage people who bring it up is inherently self defeating because it proves that there is, in fact, a PR problem just because people want to talk to you about shit you refuse to talk about. The very manner in which you went about trying to refute the issues proves that you have them.
Here is the real secret though, the one absolutely anyone with any sort of experience in the field understands, are you ready for it?
It doesn't even matter why people think poorly of you. What matters is that they do. It doesn't matter if the reason they think poorly of you is wrong. That doesn't change the problem.
It doesn't matter if the community picks a fight with you, unlike you the playerbase doesn't have an organized structure and thus is inherently more reactionary. If you pick a fight back you are downing a bottle of stupid pills and just escelating the situation. It doesn't change the fact that the standards coders hold themselves too are bad,
a downright joke to anyone who actually has any familiarity with real world design practices, just because you feel like the feedback is salty.
Should people be raging idiots? Of course not. But that doesn't mean you suddenly can be an asshole to what are essentially your customers, or worse, if you think about SoS as your customer, your customer's customers. Employees who pick fights with protestors get fired. CEOs who say "Fuck you" to people complaining about their company are replaced, and so on.
The TL;DR: Coderbus is an orginization, the playerbase are a collective of random people. The standards of behavior are not only very different, but in the real world other people's behavior does not change yours.
An0n3 wrote:Watching all this arguing makes me sad and diminishes the hope I might have for any positive change resulting from this.
Here is the ultimate issue I think you missed An0n3. This conflict was always going to be an ugly one.
In the very first page of this thread, in no uncertain terms, the community was told that all their worst fears about coderbus were true, and they can fuck right off. You are not going to see a conciliatory result come out of this at this point. Both sides have stated what they want. One side wants any ammount of accountibility and respect, the other refuses to grant any at all. The terms are laid out, and the only person who can really resolve this is SoS. He needs to answer the ultimate question of what the server's relationship to the code is, because the code team made very clear what they want their relationship to the players to be. SoS has the power to forcibly change this dynamic at pretty much any time he wants. It is pretty obvious this is what the roundtable is going to be about.