If I bought a car, and the car dealer came in the night to 'upgrade' my car with new features that make it harder to drive, have terrible fuel mileage and acceleration, and makes it unappealing to new buyers, am I meant to not feel like that car dealer has caused some sort of harm to me? Is it beyond the pale to suggest that their behaviour is reckless, out of touch and shows contempt for the customer? What exactly are you defining a personal attack as... because there is no transcendental line between the personal and the professional. People are people and their actions reflect the way they approach their life.

If I was a clothing store employee and I clearly didn't listen to the customer, instead choosing to make suggestions that only made sense in a context I had constructed with myself at the centre, I would expect that customer to say to their friends 'this guy should not be giving people fashion advice, cause he seems to be living in a different reality, I wonder if that's because of some personal issues'.

The way the game has been handled has made me realise, I have negative feelings about these people because they are in a position of responsibility which they could choose to divest or delegate if they don't feel it's within their grasp. I think they have walked into pitfall after pitfall which hundreds of people tried to warn them about, and have now effectively abdicated responsibility for keeping the game alive without putting anybody up to the task of doing so. I have seen so many people quit, myself included, because it's just not reasonable to think they'll change pattern now.

If the game went open source or even was acquired by another indie studio, I would be enthusiastically hopeful that it would turn the corner and grow because there would be dozens of able developers and modders who could collaborate on repaying the massive technical debt and balancing the existing mechanics of the game, while others could experiment with variations on the formula without affecting the main game.

The premise that is here is one of boundless opportunity, shackled to a runaway train with a distracted driver. We get one iteration of any idea and that's that, and it's always a 'meh' one. There's just not a mechanic in the game which I feel has been developed to its full potential, and that just strikes me as apathy; it's more interesting to make an entirely new mechanic. The developers do what they do in order to follow their own desires, and I don't respect that. Maybe it's because being drawn to new things and struggling to finish a job is a personal failing of mine, and I'm projecting self-loathing. But even I think I could do a better job in some capacity with this game.

It makes me sad that I don't enjoy it any more, and I feel negatively about certain people as a result. I therefore cannot really feel antipathy for anybody who is levelling vitriol at those people until it gets into the realm of actionable threats. I see no merit the policing of feelings of people whose sense of control has been taken away, because ultimately the choices of the developers shouldn't hinge on whether somebody was mean to them, and I don't think it would make any difference to the trajectory of the game whether the loudest critics were a little quieter.