i-Novae's community management is a disaster #3

[Lomsor]

I want to thank I-Novae and Flavien again for taking the time to dig into this and open up about some of the related topics. It shows in the posts made and is an investment that I personally very greatly appreciate.

Being open about the perception, issues and motivation concerning the ban made it much more clear and unambiguous what was going on … it makes it relate-able in a way it wasn’t before.
Or rather it was only possible with assumptions that were in conflict with other assumptions.

I do agree with most that has been said by others since my last post here. Especially Crayfish is able to voice well the difference between optimal and what the end result is.

The recognition is appreciated, still the loss is there and I value both greatly.

Here’s to hope for the future.

[mattk50]

The disaster continues with no signs of slowing down or learning from anyone on the dev team. Keith is happy calling other people an idiot on discord while flavien bans people on the steam forums for criticizing the game and studio. Criticism is “personal attacks [and] aren’t welcome in this community” but calling someone an idiot is a-ok.

Gentle Opinion :: Infinity: Battlescape General Discussions

I already know what the response will be tbh. Any time someone on the dev team does something it will be “deserved” or “provoked”, any time someone else does something it will be “unwarranted” or “malicious”. Only the holy devs are allowed human things like stress and emotions, everyone else is trash not worth thinking about. Seen the same dance too often from dev teams that have abusive relationships with their community.

[Playbenni]

It was definetly out of line, they should use the mod tools more instead of engaging in useless debate.
He should have just temp ban you for repeatetly spreading falsehoods about their ability to revoke non-existant keys.

[mattk50]

What i did was post a link to steam’s documentation, what falsehoods lol. Devs who would ban people for “falsehoods” such at that deserve no respect at all.

Keith sent me a PM threatening me for not lying to his benefit before, truth isnt exactly a priority around here and i should be banned for linking to steam documentation?

[Playbenni]

i do not reccomend taking keith at his word given his history

You accused him of lying. Which he wasn’t.

“Steam does not allow us to revoke your access to the game once your Steam account has been linked to it”
This just isn’t true :v

If you scroll back he never mentioned keys, he explicitly said “linking” accounts.
Next you dug out a completly irrelevant part of the steam documentation to “prove” he was lying…

The arguement can be made that slandering is worthy of a temp ban. Even worse is that it wasn’t a discussion between you and the dev, you interjected and misrepresentated facts to a third party.

Also I don’t see the value in digging something up that happened almost a month ago.

[INovaeFlavien]

while flavien bans people on the steam forums for criticizing the game and studio.

The link to the incident is above for everybody to see. That person you are referring to wasn’t banned for criticizing the game or studio ( there are other people in that very thread that have been doing that, and they’re not banned ). He was banned for personally attacking and insulting us ( and doubling down on that after being warned ).

Look Matt, if banning people who are personally insulting us ( and not “criticizing the company”, that’s your own narrative ) is bad community management, then so be it. We disagree, but we’re not going to fight you over your definition of what is good or bad community management. Point is, we are making the rules here, whether you agree or disagree, and anybody that is insulting us instead of calmly, politely, constructively debating, is not welcome anymore.

[cybercritic]

I don’t think a CEO should be calling people idiots regardless of the situation.

[mattk50]

You accused him of lying. Which he wasn’t.

in this thread we see several examples of keith lying when convenient. I think im well within reason to suggest people do more research, before taking him at his word. Which i then did, and said research directly contradicted what keith was saying.

The correct response is not a ban and its not calling someone an idiot. If the source is wrong correct or contradict it.

Look Matt, if banning people who are personally insulting us ( and not “criticizing the company”, that’s your own narrative ) is bad community management, then so be it. We disagree, but we’re not going to fight you over your definition of what is good or bad community management. Point is, we are making the rules here, whether you agree or disagree, and anybody that is insulting us instead of calmly, politely, constructively debating, is not welcome anymore.

“you’re an idiot” is an insult.

I am so sowy poor baby oh no we crossed a red line by pointing out the obvious.

You are the best dev ever and can do no wrong lol.

Is sarcastic criticism of your behavior and inability to take criticism well. So you punished him for criticizing your inability to take criticism. Just like that guy said in the prior post, you act abusive and you dish it out and then when people respond, you punish them. I dont even know that guy and i’ve never spoken to him, maybe take the hint that both 10+year veterans of your project and random steam players use the same “abuse” word when describing how you act, and that it so closely mirrors what i’ve been saying here. And “you” here is the tag-team combo of flavien+keith.

What is even more absurd on your part is that in that you specifically say “but calling us idiots or scammers” isn’t okay, when not a single person used the word idiot or scammer to describe you in the thread. The only one who goes around calling people idiots is Keith. Where’s his ban?

This all goes back to how you only think people on your team are human. You expect huge leeway and forgiveness for a continuous tend of mistakes, and give none in return.

[INovaeFlavien]

Anybody can see the Steam thread that got locked and form their own opinion and whether it was deserved or not.

When somebody tells us personally “keith and flavien, you are liars and you are ripping off people”, this is an insult. He received a warning for it, I politely asked everybody to stay on topic and speak in a civil manner, to which he doubled down with his “poor baby” comment. I do not know in which world you live where this is acceptable behavior towards developers.

[Sab1e]

Is sarcastic criticism of your behavior and inability to take criticism well. So you punished him for criticizing your inability to take criticism.

I’m sorry, but you’ve been here a while and should know better than this. The devs have always been quite open to rational discussion, debate and carefully thought out criticisms. That isn’t the issue.

The issue is delivering it in a respectful, clear, responsible way, and also knowing when to admit defeat on a point even if you disagree. Some in the community have not followed that principle; they make it personal, create incoherent rants, or continue to hammer a point because they are convinced they are right.

It’s not helpful and can be inflammatory.

[mattk50]

When somebody tells us personally “keith and flavien, you are liars and you are ripping off people”, this is an insult. He received a warning for it, I politely asked everybody to stay on topic and speak in a civil manner, to which he doubled down with his “poor baby” comment. I do not know in which world you live where this is acceptable behavior towards developers.

Every post you’re making is deflecting from the point. The reason i made this post now and not a month ago is because you went out of your way to ban another critic of the game and you specifically mentioned calling someone an idiot as unacceptable behavior that not only did they not engage in, but that I-Novae studios has. Are you saying it’s reasonable that you explicitly break your rules? If you continue not to respond to this point then the only conclusion i can make is that, yes, you think that is reasonable, and that will be the premise going forward.

You are in a situation where you’re fine with devs calling people idiots but if someone thinks your game is a rip-off you ban them. People are allowed to think your game is a rip-off. Its on you when you take it personally, and thats exactly your error. It’s a big joke that you think you could ever have run an MMO when such tame comments are worth banning people over.

I’m sorry, but you’ve been here a while and should know better than this. The devs have always been quite open to rational discussion, debate and carefully thought out criticisms. That isn’t the issue.

The issue is delivering it in a respectful, clear, responsible way, and also knowing when to admit defeat on a point even if you disagree. Some in the community have not followed that principle; they make it personal, create incoherent rants, or continue to hammer a point because they are convinced they are right .

It’s not helpful and can be inflammatory.

Did you forget how hard it was to get banned here historically? Someone calling the game a rip off would have never resulted in a ban in the past here unless they did nothing but that for a huge period. It took people like georgeman and let us not forget irn4l who was here even after the new forums got made to run amok for huge periods of time, and there were a couple of other who i recall spamming profanity. The only difference is now that there’s an actual product to criticize the devs are unable to hear it without lashing out.

You don’t get to gaslight me here, you are simply wrong if you think a permaban for 5 ribbing comments over 4 pages was something that would have ever happened before flavien and keith turned community hostile. Is it better to follow your suggestion? Of course. But not being helpful enough is not a valid ban reason. Take a guess the whole reason we’re in this situation. Maybe if the devs hadn’t been so hostile lately the community would pick up some slack in the discussion forums and it wouldnt be flavien “personally” responding to someone saying IB is a ripoff and therefore getting “personally” offended.

[INovaeFlavien]

You are in a situation where you’re fine with devs calling people idiots but if someone thinks your game is a rip-off you ban them

No one is getting banned for a single offense, but it’s the repetition of it and the constant harass that is not acceptable.

I’m not going to deny that Keith calling you an idiot over Discord wasn’t a nice behavior, I certainly wasn’t happy myself when I saw it, but let’s not forget that you recently called him a psychopath on these very forums, and that the incident that sparked the “you’re an idiot” from him is you, out of the blue, implying that he was lying. It certainly wasn’t right, but it wasn’t unprovoked, and even us have our limits.

Someone calling the game a rip off would have never resulted in a ban in the past here unless they did nothing but that for a huge period.

We have explicitely warned the community, months before the Early access, that once we did go on Steam and have a product, we’d become more strict with certain behaviors. At least we’re in agreement on that point, but it didn’t come out of nowhere.

You don’t get to gaslight me here, you are simply wrong if you think a permaban for 5 ribbing comments over 4 pages was something that would have ever happened before flavien and keith turned community hostile.

We did not turn community hostile. Anybody that speaks politely, in civil manner, can criticize us.

I mean, from my perspective, you are being completely ridiculous with your conspiration theory that we’re banning people from criticizing us. You’ve been doing that yourself for a long time and you’re still not gone, can’t you see how contradictory your argument even is ? There are tons of people criticizing us every day, why haven’t we banned all these people yet, if it’s true that we can’t stand a bit of criticism at all ?

What we do not stand for is name calling and harassment. The person you’re trying to defend on Steam, hasn’t just been posting “5 ribbing comments over 4 pages”. Check his history. He’s always been posting the same thing, derailing threads that are about other topics, and it’s been going for months. Even then, it was fine, until he started the personal attacks on Keith and I.

I’m not gonna repeat myself again and again. Criticize the game as much as you want. Criticize the company as much as you want. Criticize our pricing point, our strategies as much as you want. Keep doing personal attacks - not in the name of the company, again. Personal, named ones, like the one that earned Critic his ban -, keep harassing / slandering us, as individual people, in every single post as you can, and yes, big shock: you will not be welcome anymore.

[INovaeFlavien]

The issue is delivering it in a respectful, clear, responsible way, and also knowing when to admit defeat on a point even if you disagree. Some in the community have not followed that principle; they make it personal, create incoherent rants, or continue to hammer a point because they are convinced they are right .

Absolutely, and I’m happy to see that some of you are getting it !

Take the case of SentinelGundam that was banned a few months ago from the forums. How did it all start ? His very first post, if you look at it, was on the encouraging side. He wanted the game to focus on planetary surfaces, details, vegetation, and walking around, and thought that it was the reason why the server population was low.

It’s not an unreasonnable argument. We obviously did not agree with his analysis, as I suspect the majority of the community did not either. So we engaged in a discussion, explained that we’d love to do it, but we had to set the priorities straight, implement the game features that were lacking, and focus on the feedback we were getting from the existing players, first. And then on the planetary details and more, later. Just basic priorities.

Somehow, SG did not agree with that, and started to be far more agressive with his answers. For months he’s been writing that the servers are deserted and that we’re incompetent. It’s not a nice thing to say, but the part that got problematic was when he started to say he was gonna build his own competitor and reverse-engineer our tech. Combine that with constant harassment and derailing pretty much every single thread ( we started to receive PMs / alerts on a regular basis from other members ) and he received a warning for that.

Yet he continued this behavior for weeks, before we finally decided it was time to let him go.

I litteraly have no idea how we could have handled that situation better. When you try to discuss with somebody, and all you hear is “you guys suck, you’re incompetent, you are liars, I can do better, I’ll steal your tech and players”, and that gets repeated for months, how far do you set the red line ? Because it seems to me Mattk does not want a red line to even exist - he’s basically fine with anarchy (?) or I’m at a loss at how exactly he’s expecting us to handle these kind of situations.

Edit: for info, the person that was banned on Steam also made a comment about “people ripping and hacking our planet tech out of our files”. That’s a… very specific comment, and in general he’s also been posting the same arguments and derailing the steam threads. I have no way to prove if he’s that same SentinelGundam that got banned on our forums, as we cannot check IP addresses on Steam. But in France, we usually say “there is no fire without smoke”.

[Arkenbrien]

Honestly I’m surprised any community member even cares at this point. The devs have absolutely zero interest in even considering improving their community policies, as evident by their arguments here, the entire “letter” farce, and the townhall. Apparently, they’re happy to re-live the same community management disasters on the steam forums. And might as well keep the status quo, eh? After all, we don’t have the sales numbers, so who knows? Maybe this winning strategy is making them millions!

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Personal opinion hot-take incoming:

Flav, just make your game, and ignore this quagmire of despair. After all, neither you or Kieth is going to even contemplate any policy change or getting a community manager. Making these pointless huge posts re-re-re-iterating the same tired points that basically devolve to “we’re doing just fine, you’re the problem” to people that, according to your perspective, are totally disinterested in changing their own opinion to the point of being on the ragged edge of being banned is a total waste of your time. After all, if you’re right (and clearly you are), this thread is just chalk full of crusty salty busy-bodies who can’t tell a hawk from a hand-saw.

[mattk50]

This entire thread exists as compilation of specific, precise suggestions how to handle these situations better, what do you want me to do, copy paste here?

I will start with just one point that has been discussed from post one. Temporary bans over permabans. Even after this entire mess that started when you decide to permaban first and ask questions never. I-Novae has claimed that the only reason critic was permabanned instead of using temporary bans was a technical discord limitation. When that limitation went away, you refused to correct it. Even after pointing that there were no PM warnings and that the public warnings in chat were not sufficient, no correction. Next you have a chance with sentinel gundam, again it’s just a permaban. Now these steam people, i cant see the exact ban length but given your wording with “goodbye”, it looks like another permaban. The response should not be “goodbye” it should be “go cool off for a week”.

That is not “anarchy” that is you being more reasonable. Your current behavior is blatantly self destructive and toxic, how do you think that thread reads to other people outside our community? You look like exactly what he was saying because you proved what he was saying correct right, then and there, immediately! Why would you do that? And temp bans over permabans is only one of many issues that’s been discussed previously here.

I dont believe the old way things were run here could be described as “anarchy” either given we only had a few incidents like georgeman and the forums were a lot more popular and active than they are now. Before the EA period if we knew that you meant taking extreme offense to people calling the game a rip off i doubt many would have agreed to it. Previously the project suffered from endless accusations of it being “vaporware” but this also did not warrant such extreme responses.

Lets look at the steam guidelines for moderation: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/community_moderation#4

Warning. An example would be a user posting a bug report outside of your official bug report section.

Warning Users

Warnings are another great first step when you want to communicate directly to a user that their behavior is against the rules. Several pre-written warning reasons can be selected when issuing one. The pre-written messages are translated into whatever language the user has Steam set to. You also have the ability to write a custom warning reason, but these of course will not support translations.

We feel that in most cases, giving users the benefit of the doubt and issuing a warning is the correct first response to users breaking the Steam Community Rules And Guidelines.

Banning Users

Bans are a last resort for violations of the Steam Community Rules And Guidelines. They should be temporary in order to serve as a reminder of the discussion rules.

If a user has received previous temp bans, it may be appropriate to permanently ban them from your Hub. If you do need to ban a user, please leave a clear, concise ban reason when doing so. This ban reason is visible to the user as well as other moderators.

Even the official guidelines make it clear that a temporary ban is a last resort
and they specifically point out that you should start with temporary and move to permanent later on.

Whats even worse than a dev who uses the permaban button first? A dev who uses the permaban button first then also refuses to correct mistakes. You have some kind of hang up where even when there are so many points of error there’s a massive resistance to correcting the issue. I can only guess that you think that by fixing mistakes you show weakness and somehow that is bad. I would say it’s the opposite, being so afraid of showing weakness that it damages your relationship with the community looks a lot worse.

And as for keith, fine, as long as you and him both acknowledge that this double standard where your community is allowed to get flak from you but nobody is allowed to respond does not work out long term. I still think you should just isolate him from the discord and forums, he is consistently antagonistic and earned that reputation, and he will continue to define all of i-novae’s reputation if left free to do so.

[INovaeFlavien]

I would have issued a temporary ban if it had been an isolated incident, and if there was a chance for him to correct his behavior in the future. But as is clear from his posts, he’s been posting the same things for months in every topic - just like SentinelGundam here. These people are clearly on a crusade against us. Why should we allow them to hurt us ( as a company ) by filling the forums with hate, lies, and personal insults towards us ? In the name of “free speech” we should just let them roam around and do whatever they want ? Well I’m sorry, but no. If after being warned that you’ve crossed a line, you double down on your behavior, I see no reason why we should continue to be lenient. If that’s bad community management to you, so be it, but from our perspective it’s setting clear limits on what we allow or not, and preventing the forums from being polluted and threads being constantly derailed by the same people.

[Pendrokar]

We did not turn community hostile.

What community. There is hardly anyone left to care…

Honestly I’m surprised any community member even cares at this point.

…as the reason the Vets don’t engage is because they are long gone. Not silent in their excitement and anticipation. Hell the forums were more active when there was nothing but ICP to play. Square that.

It’s not a nice thing to say, but the part that got problematic was when he started to say he was gonna build his own competitor and reverse-engineer our tech.

Sounds like a call for modding. Something that would take a burden away from the lead programmer as suggestions from veteran Space Sim players like… say… Mattk, would be able to try out different configurations offline. Instead of a I-Novae programmer making gameplay design decisions once a week as he pushes it as the only main version of the game! Experimental changes! (Not even a Beta branch)

The fact that so many different disciplines fall onto the lead programmer is unreal. Speaking of burdens and unreal…

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@INovaeKeith, I’m curious. Why do you bother with this project if you hardly ever took a cut of the profits? What is your dream, how is this all worth it?

From the very beginning, wasn’t it your initiative to make the I-Novae Engine a commercial game engine that would rival the likes of Unreal? Surely that it is entirely off the table now. And now, if this still holds true, that you haven’t touched I-Novae Engine for more than a year now. What is your expertise as a former Epic Games’s Engine Programmer worth?

[Sab1e]

Flav, just make your game, and ignore this quagmire of despair.

I like this. The whole thing was a homespun passion project from the beginning. I know they’ve gone “official” now but honestly it might be better for @INovaeFlavien and @INovaeKeith to perhaps leave us to our own devices for a bit.

Maybe just a little input here and there to any patch feedback etc, plus dev updates. Anything else is not worth the emotional baggage of getting involved in.

[INovaeFlavien]

You’re probablty right Sab1e. Maybe we should do exactly what Matt accuses us of doing, and start banning any dissenting voice. There wouldn’t be a lot of activity but at least we’d have some peace of mind - which I must say, we don’t have much those days and certainly it would make things so much more simple to manage. Or maybe we should just ignore the community ( apparently that’s what we’ve been doing for years anyways ) and let the forums sink into chaos. Or maybe just lock threads silently. I don’t know, but for sure if every single of our actions is met with such anger, we cannot continue like that. It’s pretty amazing to me that we need to defend ourselves from the action of banning people that have been harassing us for months with nothing positive to say. That’s like a guest is coming into your house, shitting in the middle of your living room, and when you show him the door some people tell you you’re abusing your authority.

[Playbenni]

That’s like a guest is coming into your house, shitting in the middle of your living room, and when you show him the door some people tell you you’re abusing your authority.