I really don’t think Jason wanted to say anything like “you’re a bad forum citizen.” Instead, he’s pointing to something that many forum users do, frankly all the time: which is–negatively speculate about what the company will or won’t do. Maybe the example he picked here, which was your comment, wasn’t the best example. And certainly calling out examples makes the people responsible for them feel singled out. So let’s not single anyone out.
My overall experience interacting on the forum has often led to interactions I find really strange. Let me begin by digressing and preface this by saying: this is my job. It’s a job in the gaming industry, which I guess to outsiders seems like I do “fun” for work. But work is work. Whatever your job is–it’s a thing you have to do and do well in order to put food on the table.
So: my experience here is often people attempting to borrow trouble. People like to theorize about stuff, stuff that relates to my job, and it…just doesn’t do any good.
Forumgoers often pose extreme counterfactuals that just have zero basis in reality. It happens a lot. Read the threads I’ve excerpted from above. No one wants to make an example of you, personally, or shut you down, but saying “COG might do this or if they did that,” people constantly characterizing us and making guesses about things that people know nothing about, rumor mongering that goes on behind the scenes “Jason will do this,” “CoG won’t publish my game because I said/did X or Y” …let me say that we have bigger worries than some kind of personal vendetta against anyone on the forum. The most we try to do is keep things here civil. Maybe I’m a little bitter, but you know, it would be great if everyone could stop assuming the worst–I think the example of the “Oh noes they’re going to do DRMs with the Omnibus” is probably a better example than your comments about HG, but…I’m sorry, they’re in the same vein.
And we’ve published 99.999999% of everything submitted to Hosted Games. Period.