Rather than actively alienating, these guys are simply too small of a studio for how much this game blew up. 2 years ago they posted a
Meet the team on their official forums, they had 13 on the team then, I can't imagine it's grown much since. They simply don't have the capacity to be handling all the issues that are coming in.
I beat the campaign in offline mode this morning and ended up watching the credits. There are close to 50 people on the Wolcen team now, including admin and operations, but not including external teams that were listed.
So sure, some of those folks may not be actively doing anything hands-on in regards to the inner-game workings, but they've certainly grown past the "small dev team of 13" statement that keeps on getting bandied about.
The gold dupe bug was in the game before launch, wasn't fixed for launch, and now you have their community manager mentioning sanctions being taken against their player base that dared to use it, knowingly or not. The intent behind that shortsighted call might not have been to actively alienate, but it sure as hell comes off like it.
Instead of just issuing a statement that focuses on how they're actively working on improving things that have negatively impacted the player's experience to date thus far (please understand), they also release an ominous statement via an official channel, that some action will be taken against their players.
PR 101 would probably teach, in the wake of a near-disastrous game launch, that talking about
player sanctions in regards to a known bug you didn't fix probably isn't a good idea if you're intent on maintaining and growing your player base.
I've got 29+ hours in the game and was planning to stick around for endgame but would want to refund it and move on if they're going to follow through their game launch with shortsighted, player-unfriendly shit.
Like many, I've run into some hilarious game-breaking/restarting bugs, like losing my potions from the hotbar. However, my favorite one so far has to be the last act boss being immobile, yet invincible during the final phase of the boss fight. The fix was to restart the entire battle, skip all of the cutscenes, and then actively don't move your character for a second or so until the boss itself moves after skipping the cutscene before that phase of the fight. If your character build was a gimped one due to investing in broken nodes and skills, and it took you some time to get to that phase and the bug happened, that's gotta suck.