Nice, and shine had nothing to do with it, it was all the evil pvp'ere and everybody else fault ?
but you right the community isn't falling apart, it already has.
OK, if you insist. Everyone's entitled to their opinion and, as they say, everyone has one. Don't put words in my mouth though, please.
I didn't mention PvP.
At all.
No one here is or was blaming "PvPers" except in as much as
individuals like Red self-identified as PvPers while slandering mods and such and tried to paint bans over brazen and overt forum rule violations as some kind racial discrimination against "Peeveepeeurs." Though it is true that the abusive minority I mention did/does absolutely love to make literally every issue of game development about "PvPers" or "vets" (kinda tailcoating on people's conditioned support for actual military vets) while trying to assert that they solely represent those groups.
Literally anything they disagreed with was met with "You just hate peeveepee cause you suck - git gud!" Even when it came to outright exploits these issues were being painted as some kind of bizarre "PvP Rights" issue.
Not by accident: By persistently implying that anyone voicing preference for a different development path does so purely out of some secret "dislike of PvP" they open a door to insinuate that the underlying cause is lack of skill and understanding of the game mechanics and therefore assault the value of an individual's input on the issue in the minds of the community and dev team.
Saying an issue is about PvP is essentially a very slick
ad hominem attack on opponents.
You want to close an exploit? "
Mah peeveepee!" (i.e. "Shut up, noob! Git gud!")
You disagree with demands to re-open someone's favorite closed exploits? "
Unfair treatment of peeveepee!" (i.e. "Shut up, noob! Git gud!")
I used to associate with the PvPers because MOBAs and SC/SCII were my shit for like a decade and I still get into those a lot, but... I hadn't realized until sometime last year that on this forum "peeveepee" was by and large a loaded abstraction being held over everyone's heads to control forum dialogue regarding what the community wants by implying opponents of one's opinion don't know the game.
As if there aren't hundreds of mutually exclusive styles of PvP gaming popular with hundreds of thousands of gamers, only one way. Your way.
In actuality, within PvP gaming there exists a vast multitude of different preferred playstyles. The fact that someone likes to pound big ships into each other doesn't mean their opinion represents the opinion of a PvPer who enjoys playing a more strategic and economic game and vice versa. PvP is FPS, PvP is RTS, PvP is MOBA, PvP TBS, PvP is even MMORPG sometimes. Literally every playstyle can be a PvP playstyle. It's not distinctive.
At the end of the day, PvP is nothing but a
choice. Not even a single choice, an entire class of nominally similar but substantially very, very different choices. Choosing PvP doesn't mean you know the game and it doesn't mean you're gud.
It doesn't entitle anyone to 'special' consideration or status. Ain't no "Playstyle Affirmative Action." It doesn't convey some "right" to demand that software engineers in any given game genre never make changes to an application that negatively affect your own,
personal PvP playstyle preference.
PvP in Starmade is very different beast, anyway. Most PvP games don't expose play to nearly this exploit potential where a tiny elite can abuse game mechanics in many, many ways that go against the developers explicit stated intent, using such exploits to dominate public servers until they become private playpens for overgrown babies to bully and toy with clueless new joins. All justified by "we're just testing! we're helping find problems" while continuing to hump unclosed exploits for months on end and often never reporting them as bugs. That kind of so-called "PvP" (so-called because as part of using exploits to maintain a petty fief of noobs on a pub server some ships are inevitably destroyed) is actually a major reason most new players who join a public server end up leaving the game after a short period. Which made it super ironic (props) to have a clique of such players screaming that closing exploits was going to kill the community and threatening that if Schine acted to do so the dissidents would actively kill the community by posting negative reviews everywhere to prove that it was somehow Schine's fault....
Which they did.
Schine's changes didn't kill the community, the retaliatory internal/external PR assault over the changes did and was
explicitly calculated to do so.