Nah, there has always been a fair amount of criticism on the forums in the decade+ I've been here, and I haven't seen the toxicity change that markedly relative to how well the game is currently doing. There might have been a bit of an uptick in the 1.22-1.29 era when there were some very questionable design decisions made, but the critiques were well warranted in my view.There's been a direct correlation between the growth in EU4's popularity and an increase in toxicity on both these forums and on reddit. I imagine with lockdowns and people sitting in their house, a lot have fixated on things they don't like which only increases their rage.
I definitely haven't seen this. I don't doubt that *some* people insult the devs, but it's certainly not anywhere close to a majority of the people who criticize the game for one reason or another. Implying critics of the game are awash in people who use ad-hominems is a pretty clear example of weakmanning. It's the internet. There will always be some bad actors who can't control themselves and lash out. The correct response is to trivially ignore them. If anything, I've noticed most people are incredibly well behaved when the devs actually show up in threads, almost as if the devs are minor celebrities.Insults to the devs have skyrocketed the past few years.
The biggest change on the forums I've noticed has been the sharp reduction in dev comment frequency. Paradox used to be ahead of the curve here, with weekly dev diaries being almost unheard of when they first started them many years ago. Complimenting that with frequent ad-hoc posts on the forums, and it felt like the devs were particularly in-synch with the playerbase. As Paradox has grown, however, the frequency of comments has declined to the point where the dev diaries are the only time the devs talk to the community outside of specific exceptions (e.g. Johan and Arheo). During the 1.22-1.29, it felt like there was almost permanent radio silence from the devs which increased frustration quite a bit. There were numerous glaring flaws in the game and all we'd get is a dev diary on a mission tree or a sprite pack.
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