The way aop dev works is that cirn and me sit on irc all day and literally shitpost. We've known each other for a long enough time now where we can tell when each other is being ironic and when he's serious. Paragon was always on the channel and I made it a point not to change the way I type just because someone else is on the channel. If youre on the secret dev channel, sifting through all the shit im posting is part of the experience.
As far as paragon is concerned, he rarely ever said anything on irc and since there was so little data to go by, it was hard to tell if he was being serious or not. The clear east-european accent shining through didnt help either.
When he did quit, the "devteam" didnt realize until like 2 weeks later cause he never was participating much anyway, even when I specifically asked him for his opinion or urged him to join the shitposting.
Now to get serious, the real serious dev is actually done on mumble discussions, which paragon, or anyone else whos not an "official" dev, never took part in. It wasnt like we explicitly excluded anyone either, we just went "hey lets mumble" - "ok" and went on mumble. In fact, the very few times I was on the vtec mumble and heard paragon speaking, I got a very different vibe from him and if we ever actually went on mumble together and talked, the whole thing would have gone down differently.
To summarize it, I imagine that paragon misinterpreted things that were said on irc for various reasons, e.g. not knowing our characters, not knowing the background and context of aop dev and also just the language barrier. At the same time though, I never felt like there was much of an issue since apparently paragon didnt complain. Until he suddenly left with a statement saying how he knows exactly why and how we dev and what we're like as persons and how we think about him and to me it really was just
Being the fatalist person I am, I guess paragon and me just weren't meant to work together, just not being on the same page or the same wavelength as we say in german, but I never had anything against him or tried to specifically piss him off. It's just that at this point, he already convinced himself that I hate him or something so there's not much I can do.
About deletion of posts and closing of threads: I'm strongly against any of that and the only time I removed posts other than spambots was when courier tried to troll my video on bursting, partly because he put a retarded image in his signature which I thought was a direct post, but of course when I noticed it he already kept trolling even more so there was no way back.
Aside from that I am strongly against political correctness and believe that anything goes on the internet. I dont know who locked the thread but if people want to make fools out of themselves by trolling each other then let them have at it. Still, it is not in my power nor my responsibility to tell those people with moderator powers how to do their "job" as the fact those people have gotten the powers in the first place expresses the trust of the rest of the team. I can only hope they use it responsibly and agree with me on this issue.
Multiposting or just spamming random gibberish to flood the forum is a different thing, but that thankfully hasnt happened yet.
As far as general dev is concerned, through the extended discussions cirn and me and the rest of the devteam had over the years, we don't need to talk every single thing through because we already know well enough how everyone thinks and where we want to go. It's just that public obviously doesnt know anything about that and can only speculate based on what we have published, which is bound to make them reach a different conclusion.
On top of that, it's only natural for every single player to have his own, subjective and unique experience of this game and his own ideas of what it should look like and his own assumptions of what the devs are up to and how games should be developed etc. It's the same thing with literally any other topic out there, music, politics, religion, whatever. People have different opinions due to different backgrounds and everyone thinks his own opinion is the superior one.
Let's take a typical example: "devs dont listen to players".
So what if we listen to guy A and implement his stuff but then guy B comes along and doesnt agree with it all and so we implement his suggestion instead which walks all over guy A's suggestions and then he's all pissed off and I guess you get the point already.
Apart from games not being a democracy in the first place, majority votes are not the most perfectest way there will ever be to handle issues as we can see every day. There are other ways of handling that like systemic consensing for example (which should be looked into by everyone reading this anyway) but such approaches also require more involvement on the part of the participants and for a project such as this, I dont see it happening. After all, we're still on the internet here.
An example I brought up on irc the other week talking with VVish about this issue, was the topic of music. Fans of bands dont expect their favorite musicians to listen to their suggestion on how to do things properly. Just because video games arent officially called art doesn't mean that they're not creative works that come to life in a similar process.
Extending upon that argument, and to adress the next popular issue of "game is free so you have no right to complain", I wonder if anyone ever thought that purchasing his favorite band's new album granted him any more rights to complain about it and suggest changes to the band. In fact, "selling out" doesn't seem to be what fans want their favorite artists to do.
Point is: The game is still in a very WIP state and will remain as such for a good while longer, until we have reached our own personal goals. Until then we can only hope that people think about our position, situation and motivation as people working on this game before drawing their conclusions and posting them publicly, because they will necessarily just be
"opinions" and as such will most likely be discarded. Contrary to popular belief, our goal is not to be the most played game in the history of mankind which has to be achieved by any means necessary, but any suggestions, opinions or comments using this exact pretense will automatically be invalid.
edit: im taking the liberty of moving this to general discussion section.