To me the question of politeness, tone, etc. is partly a matter of upbringing, naturally so. But where it applies to criticizing Paradox's actions and products on a Paradox forum website, there is an aspect of practicality involved as well, one that should, to a rational person, bear a great deal more weight.
What is my (hypothetical) reason for posting something critical of Paradox, it's actions, and/or its products on its own website? Venting? Nope, I could do that on any public forum. Personal attack? Maybe, but what possible benefit is that going to provide to me, beyond getting my account ganked for breaking forum rules? None.
No, clearly the only rational reason for doing that is because I want Paradox to see my grievance and do something to correct it. So it follows that if I go about things in a manner that lowers the odds of my words being heeded, I am doing a harm to myself, working against my own interest. If I want anyone at Paradox to read my words and give them weight, or more, give them enough weight that they choose to alter their actions/product in response, then it naturally follows that personal attacks, profanity, and other types of abusive or unhinged behavior are only going to hurt my chances.
When you attack, people defend. It's as natural as Newton's third law which tells us that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. If I want to make you defensive, I attack; so if I want to make you receptive, I should offer you something you value. In this case a good thing to offer is a positively phrased suggestion on how Paradox can make their own situation better, not a negatively phrased demand that they make MY situation better. And when it comes to game devs like those at Paradox, all it really takes to make them see a situation as an improvement for themselves is to make a sound case that it will improve their game. They want their game to be good; they want people to like it. That's like a legal and harm-free intoxicant to them!
Counterproductive - I hate X and Y features, Z was a stupid idea, and all you people are blah-blah unhinged insulting rant comments.
Productive - you could expand your fanbase considerably if you added feature A, altered feature B like so, and made feature C an option that could be configured by the player, plus it might make future balancing easier if you changed feature D from hardcoded to moddable
...and so on... Put simply, etiquette is nice, important and yadda yadda, but I am not going to convince anyone to adopt good manners based on that kind of argument, especially if their mother and father failed to teach them any. I might, however, convince someone who actually wants to see their grievances addressed to at least pretend to have some manners. That to me is as good as firing the Bitter Peace event.
