Holy shit, can I get like a cliff-notes version of this drama? It seems delicious indeed.
Celerity understanding that I read your entire post above.. what exactly is it that Red Hook did that showed them as dishonest, lazy, etc?
(Not really) Short version:
Red Hook advertises and hypes this incredibly difficult hardcore Roguelike unique game. They give as little in the way of detail as possible, while talking in these vague and grand statements. That makes them blaze through the Kickstarter phase despite having shown very little in the way of a game at this time. Many people were fooled by this, a few saw through it, I didn't even know the game existed yet.
Very shortly before their Early Access release they did a "Week of Torment" event in which they got an incredibly large volume of Twitch streamers and Youtube content producers previewing their game a week early and showing it off for a massive audience.
Once the game is released this results in many people buying it because favorite video maker x liked it.
The game wasn't actually difficult, or Roguelike, or about making difficult decisions. And without seeing it through the viewpoint of a distracted and generally unskilled person, that became apparent within 5 hours at the most for any early adopters.
The forums were filled with feedback about the many balance problems that resulted in a complete lack of challenge and depth, as well as the complete lack of class balance.
Red Hook's response was ignoring this for a while, and then doing the minimal possible thing that makes them seem like they are doing something. For example, walls of posts by different users mathematically demonstrating Plague Doctor non viability = Plague Doctor gets a 70% chance of curing damage over time instead of 50% (note: Enemy DoTs are just as useless as yours, and that was the real problem with the class). Or Hellion stacking trivializes the dungeon with damage spam = one of the viable Hellion moves (and 2 bad ones) debuff your damage after using them. Which doesn't hurt you at all if you're stacking Hellions because one round of attacks kills everything. The purpose of these were proxy nerfs, make it seem like the problem is fixed so people quit complaining about it.
While early on this sort of thing was very minor and not really noticible for most people, as the months past, more and more of the initial crowd lost interest, but the balance problems remained these sorts of lazy changes became more and more prominent. A good example of this is the anti heal exploit. Before it worked no problem. They allegedly fixed it, it still works if you attack for 0 damage or attack and miss. They claimed they fixed it again, it worked with no changes. They claimed they fixed it again, it worked with no changes. The latest patch "fixes" it a fourth time. It mostly just punishes you for not damage spamming instead. Worth noting: The instant people started this nonsense in Deepest Dark back in... March-April I fixed this by simply giving every commonly exploited enemy a (generally 1 in 8) chance of summoning a mini boss if alone on his turn. That simple fix actually better prevented the exploit and had fewer unintended sideeffects than anything officially done.
Their laziness started really becoming apparent around the Fiends and Frenzy and especially the Corpse and Hound patches released 5/28 and 7/15, respectively. The former showcased their laziness because they were not only putting in the minimum possible effort, but were also releasing the game with major crash bugs (with the cannon), and were barely utilizing their own features. The latter made it so obvious everyone started seeing it as while most fixated themselves on corpses, every aspect of this patch was lazy and arbitrary (and/or just power creep, like locking more damage on your characters). You also have the Hound(master), a useless class that is also a fairly obvious palette swap of the Man at Arms (compare faces) and the Rabid Dog instead of being an original work. You have 12 pages of notes, but most of it is "we did a bunch of minor shit, look how awesome we are".
As for the dishonest part, I started suspecting that right around the time the game was becoming easier and simplier instead of harder and more complex even though they knew better. That was around... Feburary? March? But I don't like throwing around strong accusations like that until proven beyond all doubt. All doubt got removed around late May, when I received that email about "Early Access games being in need of fixing". They then responded with a lot of BS that was quite obviously false, but I read it in the best possible light anyways and gave them one final chance with the Corpse and Hound. Which they failed at. They liked blaming me for all the hostility that came from this patch, the fact is I knew it'd be shit, I didn't download it or look at the forums for hours and by the time I did evaluate it and said something about it the forums were already full of negative posts.
The dishonest part became blatant when their forums exploded with this negativity from all sides, the developers manifested the Abusive affliction because they could not just "ignore salt", and began censoring their userbase for negative feedback. Posts would vanish in a half hour or less, threads would be locked, users would be banned (sometimes permanently on a first offense). People would collect evidence on this, sometimes the evidence would vanish before they could even screenshot it at all hours of the day and night. Cue hundreds of posts preserving the evidence, many people reaching out for Jim Sterling, while meanwhile the review section exploded from its original 95% positive early lead because those couldn't be censored (usually).
Jim eventually acknowledges what's going on, after a sale backfires on them by giving the wall of negative reviews a large number (as high as 1,500+) recommended votes in 36 hours. He misses all the talk of censorship, and just focuses on corpses which Red Hook would eventually use like a political weapon.* While they didn't care at all what the normal users thought, they near instantly made them optional after Jim's fans repeatedly suggested this. Why? Because negative attention from someone important = lost sales.
I, meanwhile very happily showed off the Jim Sterling article anyways. This resulted in much rage from the game's blind supporters, who suddenly thought Jim was the worst human being on the planet and one even harassed him on his own boards then got parried with a one liner. It also resulted in much rage from the developers, who censored me for a full month for making that thread (the many people insulting both me, Jim, and any other critics were not even warned, and this was considered an abuse of the report feature by Cadogan aka RedHookRyan).
That censorship, and some of their other antics finally made Jim aware he missed much of the situation. He couldn't investigate fully now but he did go ahead and withdraw his curator support.
Meanwhile a few of the most popular negative reviews are censored, after someone asked if Jim would investigate Planetary Annihilation for doing the same thing. They quit doing that when it was quickly caught and highlighted.
After a lot of outrage about it things calmed, it seemed they might save face and even present themselves as a legitimate company by making it seem as if they fired the censoring mod for making their company look bad, and replacing him with someone else (RedHookJohn), who conducted an "interview" with them 6 months ago). None of that was true, as I found when I returned around Cove time, warned people of this game's history, and promptly got permanently censored for mentioning Jim Sterling's name. As usual, plenty of insults thrown my way without even a warning and if I respond at all, even hitting report post that's abusing the report feature, because this is how they treat their critics. Once they finally did do it the mindless supporters had a nice circle jerk for a few days where they carried on like PTSD victims about the "mean" things I said about the game. Hilarious shit. They also made multiple disclaimers about their censoring as this was happening.
More recently (as in between Cove and now) the censorship largely calmed (because they ran out of targets mostly) and mostly consisted of them putting negative threads in their trash bin (Feedback and Suggestions) so prospective buyers won't see it immediately. That and they throughly self selected their userbase. Nearly everyone intelligent left, was driven off, or censored, leaving their mindless supporters and random new people. Most of whom would also be driven off by this empty "Git Gud" posturing.
Now cue their latest patch, where the entire thing is just poor coding that rewards damage spam and punishes everything else. I mean really. If you make an anti heal exploit script, the first thing it should do is activate only when a heal is used. If you're reordering your party, or killing (slowly), or buffing, or stunning or whatever you're not delaying combat. And you still can delay combat, you just need 2 harmless enemies. There's plenty of those.
None of this is surprising in hindsight. If you search for design documents by Tyler Sigman, there's a nice one about being lazy with AI and another about statistics. Both of which make very simple concepts seem much more sophisticated than they actually are. If he couldn't hide his lazy design behind unique art and compelling, but out of place narration it'd be a throwaway game. Everyone would see it for what it is - the anti Roguelike. Both because it actively avoids Roguelike elements and because it it praised for its presentation while being lambasted for its mechanics.
But the biggest thing that showcases their laziness and dishonesty isn't the poor design, the censoring, any of that. It's that the only thing they still do is aggressively advertise and put the game on sale 1-2 times a month. Imagine "Suicide Squadding", but with real people and that's what they think of their fans. Except they're barely getting any attention at all anymore, positive or negative. People know the real with them, marked them off, and continued on.
* - Red Hook quickly developed this narrative in which corpses (and heart attacks) were the only problems anyone could have with the game. They'd assume you meant those if you gave nondescriptive complaints about the game regardless of what you actually meant. Once they did become optional they'd say you can turn those off, therefore there's no problems with the game and anyone who thinks there are just wants their company burning.
Edit: I'd rather not keep going over it so I'll just leave this here.
http://steamcommunity.com/id/Areanynamesnottaken/recommended/262060/
Oh yeah and forgot a few gems. Their ego has grown so extensively they openly make statements on Twitter like their shitty walking simulator being more important than Baby Jesus (I don't care, but good job pissing off the large portion of the world that's religious!) or some random person in Denver is annoyed that people in Denver care more about sports than the shooting there and they repeatedly defend the other guys. I mean come on. I can be a sarcastic asshole troll, I can say some really mean shit, I can make grown men cry (probably why they hate me so much). There are some lines you never fucking cross, especially with zero provocation. With those remarks they quit being shitty game makers and shitty developers and started becoming shitty people.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/262060/discussions/4/618453594742695196/
