I certainly wouldn’t argue with anything he is saying in the article, and it’s a decently accurate recollection of the history of the “toxicity” in the community as far as I can recall it. His basic assumption - that it all amounts to communication is almost a given. If people are fighting about something either one of them is just wrong, one of them is just an ■■■■■■■ or there is a breakdown in communication. I tend to think we have some ■■■■■■■■ in the KI community, but it’s generally not productive to base a discussion around that’s. So communication it is.
I don’t think there’s a single “magic bullet” explanation for how the community became “toxic” (or labeled as toxic - I still enjoy tons of positive interactions with the KI community). Lots of major and minor contributions. I think some of what King Hippo points out is spot on and along with a few other things is sifficient to explain what has happened.
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People think “we are willing to listen to you” means “we are going to do what you ask us to do.” KI’s unprecedentedly open and transparent development process had the unfortunate side effect of making everyone in the fan base think they had a say in how the game was made. So when they didn’t like a decision they also felt ignored or slighted by the devs. Ironically, the more directly the devs tried to address those issues the worse the problem got. Lesson: there is such a thing as too much transparency.
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Being good at a game is different than being good at MAKING a game. A lot of high level KI players, especially from season 1, thought that the developers should be taking more of their input on board. But frankly, most of them didn’t have better ideas than what you see in scrubquotes. Keits let them know why he thought they were wrong about stuff and they didn’t like it. Egos etc. And they couldn’t deal with the fact that they were, in fact, not special in regards to the game’s development just because they won tournaments. Lesson: there may be some value in distancing the fight designers from the games high level player community.
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IG, and to a lesser extent the MS team, did not always understand how their communications would be received. The IG streams were filled with a lot of humor about the chat’s reaction and mocking complaints from the community. This was all intended in good fun, but didn’t help calm down people who were upset by stuff. Playful trolling of the community often “triggered” the more triggerable people in the community. Lesson: even when you are trying to be open and transparent make sure the people communicating with the community understand what they are doing and don’t just act like they are talking to friends in their living room.
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Social media and modern internet communication make everything worse. It’s an ancient adage in communications that “negative messages predominate.” This means if you read thirty YouTube comments that the game is amazing and one that says it’s garbage people will say “the game gets mixed reviews.” We pay way more attention to the bad news. Coupled with the volume of info in KIs open (ish) development, this just made every problem worse.
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That creepy psychotic stalker you ignore in real life has nothing but time to post on the internet. I know this sounds mean spirited, but the ability of random, unqualified, and even slightly deranged people to spread and amplify their messages on the internet is a problem that we, as a society at large), are struggling with. I refuse to believe that the world is actually populated by so many loathsome people. I never meet these people in real life - be they misogynists, racists, delusional thinkers, conspiracy theorists or any other “undesirable.” But they appear on the internet in droves and using the echo chamber effect they appear to be legion. When in fact it’s just a handful of people posting nonsense over and over again. Lesson: don’t ever think that what you read on the internet is an actual representative sample of how people feel.
I don’t know why I’m writing a novel about this. I don’t think the KI community is especially unique. Probably the only truly different aspect is how much the openness of the games developers has not helped improve the community.