Jimmacle ?  3 hours ago
Well, it looks like they forgot to ban me from here so I'll throw in my two cents. Keep in mind this is all from the top of my head since I can no longer access the Discord where these things were originally discussed.

It has been this way since they banned/censored users from the Miner Wars discussion forum over their criticism of added DRM that stopped players from being able to play offline. It seems like if it will still make them money, they'll do it. Selling skins after saying they won't, moving to "beta" and "release" while still overhauling systems and fixing known bugs, and most recently releasing "cosmetic" DLC that not only has a whole collection of visual issues, the blocks aren't actually cosmetics and impact players' ability to interact with otherwise vanilla game systems like sitting. Now, I'm not at all against developers making money but I am definitely against sacrificing quality and the community to do so.

As most people probably know, I'm pretty critical of Keen when they make these short-sighted changes and announcements along with a number of prolific contributors to the SE community. It goes the same way every time. We bring concerns to Keen's attention, we're blown off, then they rarely get fixed. Now, I'm not blaming the dev team itself here because I've spoken to some of them and it's really not their fault. The issue is that the few people in charge of actually managing the game's development are out of touch with the community and aren't interested in fixing that. Exhibit A would be the big PR incident starting with Rexxar's Reddit post discussing incidents like what we're seeing now: https://redd.it/9osdm5

Keen's official response was unprofessional to say the very least. It was filled with personal attacks against Rexxar who worked for Keen in the past and along with Xocliw did some of the best community interaction to come out of the company. This warranted a response from Marek who apologized for the post but said... "I am standing behind [the PR guy], not going to punish him or anything" and "shield [the developers], protect them" from criticism. Despite those strange quotes I thought we were getting somewhere and offered to discuss solutions further in private. Guess what happened? No contact whatsoever. It was ignored just like any other blunder Keen has made in hopes that it would be forgotten and my offer to help Keen improve public relations was disregarded entirely.

Now we're here, where Keen's mismanagement led to another wave of censorship. Along with myself, a large number of users were banned from the Keen Discord server after exploits regarding DLC DRM evasion were discovered, exploits myself and others had brought to Keen's attention privately when they still had time to fix them before the update. You might say "but Jim, you said they ignore you all the time so why'd they ban you for this one?" Well, my best guess is because it could cost them money but instead of doing the right thing and fixing the exploits (which would not be particularly difficult) they chose to release them and ban those who discovered and talked about them.

At this point, I can only wonder if trying to fix this is a total waste of time. This has been Keen's pattern of behavior ever since Miner Wars and Rexxar and I aren't the only ones who have had run-ins with them about this. The question is, what is left to do about it? If we keep rolling over and accepting this (thinking of the "it's only $4, what are you poor?" crowd) then nothing will get better. Keen has so far shown themselves to be unwilling to work with the community to solve these issues so unless we collectively show them that we won't support this behavior, it will never improve. Again, I am not placing blame on individual developers but on Keen management. If you made it to the end of my rant before it was nuked from this page, have a cookie on me:

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