I’m less concerned about sides being taken: I’m sure that happens all the time, about everything controversial here. Forum users have their friends here and, I think to be pretty blunt, staff members don’t. So I don’t actually pay attention to likes, though I try to give them out when I want to acknowledge I’ve read someone’s comment. My likes aren’t uniformly “upvotes” or whatever.
Anyway, all of this, including reviewing a lot of my posting history here in order to come up with examples (to contextualize this stuff better for @Avery_Moore) makes me wonder whether there’s really any benefit to staff participating on the forum. I’d argue that Jason is not the “leader” or “head” of the community. We’re a team of 7. Not all of us are here regularly, but that’s because being here is not really part of the day to day work of editing and publishing games. We don’t have a community manager. Maybe if we did, things would be different. But as it is: if some of the staff post here, answer questions, engage, none of us can be said to be speaking for the entire company. And I’m a little tired of that, too–we are different and we don’t always agree with each other.
Of the editorial staff I can say that we do have a fair amount of leeway and divergence in the kinds of games we publish. Maybe customers aren’t aware of that. A Jason game, a Mary game, a Rebecca game: they’re different. We bring different things to the table. Rebecca edited 7th Sea: A Pirate’s Pact; I edited Stronghold: A Hero’s Fate; Jason edited Choice of Magics. Those were all remarkably different and remarkably popular games. I edited Fielder’s Choice, Rebecca edited The Martian Job, and Jason edited Gilded Rails. Those were not particularly popular games this year.
So feel free to ignore what Jason’s talking about:
but don’t do it because he’s the one saying it. I see it all the time, too, and Jason doesn’t usually comment on the same topics as me. And let’s leave aside “negative conjecture” and talk about “micro-aggressive opining.” We get a lot of suggestions from members here, and they really are often phrased as demands rather than “Have you considered…”
And that is 100% a thing people here do. I’m not going to call out examples because I don’t want to make anyone the subject of them, but that is something that happens. “COG should do X” “It’s terrible that COG won’t do Y.” If you really want to engage and not have it be about you then feel free to ask and open up a conversation rather than demanding.