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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8984080" data-attributes="member: 6790260">This is....very complicated. I agree that Blizzard has stepped back from the absolutely horrendous "EVERYTHING IS ON FIRE ALL THE TIME" situation they were in previously, but the stuff they'd done before that, both as game developers and as a business, had pretty much ruined whatever customer goodwill they had before. They are basically starting from square one, and there are more than a few people who have just decided not to come back. Even those who are willing to come back are much more skeptical and critical than they were before, and many of them are watching like hawks for any sign of backslide. They have managed to win back enough of their reputation that people are cautiously willing to engage, but it's going to be a long road to true recovery, especially if they keep doing some of the things they had been in the "everything is on fire" period e.g. the ham-fisted "the Jailer is the culmination of more than two decades of epic story" when players could trivially see that this was a weaksauce effort to match the competition (mostly FFXIV's Endwalker expac, but also GW2, what with End of Dragons.) They are learning, and they've frankly done better than I expected. Given what I expected, that's damning with faint praise.I'm unfamiliar with the exact difference between "responses" and "punishments." I assume, by the terms, it's meant to be something other than detention or the like. I'm just not really sure what "responses" one can have that would not ultimately cash out as "we are taking away your privileges and/or applying undesirable/onerous burdens because you have repeatedly broken the rules."Oh, certainly. This is reflected in wider humanity. TL;DR: it's not that humanity is any worse (it's measurably better in certain ways); it's that we can SEE all the ways we can be ultra-bad.[SPOILER]For many decades now, violent or preventable (non-disease) deaths per capita have been going down. The data is of course lumpy, but the trend is clear. We are much less violent now than we were a century ago, and they were less violent then than humanity was a century before that, etc. As with several other issues...which I'll call "observed vices" as opposed to "actual vices," it's not that humanity has become more violent or less educated or more immoral. It's that we are only now becoming aware of just how violent, foolish, and/or immoral humans can be, at exactly the moment where there are more humans to populate the extreme of the bell curve.Humanity, as a whole, is actually getting better about a lot of things. Not everything, of course, but certainly some real and meaningful ones. We are just now able to hear the worst of the worst, from almost everywhere, almost instantly. We have far greater capacity for bursts of violence, even as the actual rate of violence goes down. Etc. But the bursts are what attract our attention, not the slow and steady trend that will actually win the (human) race.[/SPOILER]</blockquote>

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