There is a difference between criticism and being a back seat driver. The one is involved in the process, an important part of the team; the latter is mostly just an annoyance and contibutes nothing besides complaints and distractions. The people who feel targeted and threatened by threads and posts such as Khelvan's cannot accept that they belong to the second class and not the first, and assume that because their particular complaints are not being immediately acted upon that the EB team is totalitarian and immune to criticism. There is a third class of people who behave like that: children.

The large diverese and unpaid EB team has been going for three years or so now and according to multiple posts often is not unanimous in their decisions, yet they still manage to produce a product that has generated an overwhelmingly positive response. To me, that indicates that they have a robust internal criticism that performs its function perfectly. They also have an internal government that allows them to make decisions and act while satisfying their members. I do not know exactly how this functions, as I, and 'EB's last living critic' are not members of the team and do not have access to their private forums.

They produce a product that they are under absolutely no obligation to share with anyone, just as they are under no obligation of any kind to solicit anybody's opinion about anything. The fact that they voluntarily do maintain public forums of a scale that dwarf most other modding projects, and that they do listen to every (oft repeated) suggestion and answer almost every question however inane and redundant is nothing short of praiseworthy.

There are many mods that have not chosen to involve the public in beta testing: are they Nazis? Do you, fallen851, have a right to beta test any mod anywhere and dictate changes to the developers? The only case in which you do have that right is if you were to produce a mod of your own. Having done so, you are free to buy the bandwith and let other people try it, but you don't have to do this, nor do you have to pay attention to anything that anybody says about your work. Neither does EB, or Hegemonia, or RTR or anyone. These mod teams choose to listen to your opinion at all; it therefore follows that they are entitled to choose how much of your opinion they listen to.

No one is forcing anyone to play this game.

EB is not a nation, is not a polity, is not a republic, is not a democracy. It is a purely voluntary association of people who are completely entitled to define the rules of their association and to define the limits and extent of the participation of outsiders. It is a freely given labour of love that has been amazingly tolerant of assholes.


Fallen, your invocation of the Nazis and the Holocaust is demeaning and shameful, but not for the reason that Khelvan indicated. ( I'm sorry K, but it is wrong to say that only those who were victims of Nazi atrocities can use them as a measure for other atrocities. )
But comparing the development team of a free computer game modification who are exercising their absolute and undeniable right to slightly limit the unhelpful negativity of non-members to Nazis is simply foul and disgusting. Shame on you, sir. Be damned to you, sir.