I've been dodging the repeated question from multiple of why does this bother you so much? In part because the answer ought to be obvious, inherently. It's not a big enough game to warrant attention beyond message boards, but to that end, here we are on page 10, and I've probably -- before even just the last two pages -- contributed almost as many posts to it as anyone with the earlier expressed enthusiasm or thoughts on the game mechanics, mods, etc. So it's on one level just merely addressing here what was addressed on the game's specific forum/community, and again, providing the counter-weight "for the record." It doesn't strike me as a controversial opinion, that the abuse described - vaguely - from the developers, is offensive as hell. It compounds on the already obvious toxic stank that emanated from their tone online, and to a degree, in the game design -- although this is harder to elucidate as it's attempting to put to words a feeling on an intuitive level where language fails us, but here I go because I remarked a few times, in whichever thread, how it felt like there was a certain strand of nerd humor in the levels, but not a friendly or self-effacing or goofy humor for the most part, but the kind of "edgy" tone that's hard to describe exactly except by way of comparison to the Something Awful or early 4chan years where you can detect a level of sadism. It was just the tone of the times, too, the mid-00s when Mystic apparently reshaped the community.
I still haven't answered. I'll just say it is impossible that I am the only person who has seen this behavior pattern elsewhere and has been affected by it, as in, someone in your life or you yourself. There is a community complicity that goes unacknowledged, unaddressed, and unchanged and it is infuriating to see it perpetuate in seemingly every aspect of culture, from Catholic churches in small towns and everybody apparently knowing but not saying anything to the people who would need to hear it most, to Shane Dawson, to this crap. Beyond that, I don't know what else to say that I haven't already.
