Since we have some newer patrons coming in confused about the hate, I’ll write a quick summary of the more recent drama so everyone can more or less be on the same page. To start off, lets go all the way back to 2017 since that’s probably earlier than a lot of people here have been on. Helius Started his project by appealing to the sort of old school person who likes to pirate before you buy it and hates microtransactions (mtx) /gacha.
And the mods were happy to continue talking down mtx even up to the release of the beta in late November.
Even outright lying that the game wasn’t free to play gacha days before it released as free to play gacha.
This would be a bad look on it's own, without the solid base of people against this. So what happens when you cultivate a fanbase on the idea of no mtx/gacha only to release a free to play gacha? Well, you get the drama that happened in November/December. A lot of angry core supporters feeling scammed. It doesn’t help that the mods were kinda dicks around this time.
Not to mention, as you can see, deleting posts that were critical of the game. This is why there’s a large split between the discord and forums they don’t control, since of course banning anyone for dissent will cause them to go fester elsewhere, with their concerns remaining unaddressed and making the feeling of being scammed that much stronger. Also if you wanted to collect on that refund good luck, they’d just close your support ticket or talk shit to you more. Hard not to have that feel like a scam, even if this refund request was never authentic basically taunting people with their money being gone is a douche move.
To try and answer Karb’s question late, the people then were speaking for about 1/3 or more of the supporters, probably more as long time supporters are replaced with new steam supporters.
Also this drop isn’t because of the hiatus, they actually grew supporters during the first hiatus before they screwed over their old supporters.
They did eventually release an apology for this, months after when it was clear they were losing money over it. Kinda falls flat at that point, and most people who would’ve liked to see it were already banned.
They were just also shady in general about giving out news, like saying you’ll never be able to buy currency before announcing the conversion rate to buy currency a week later.
It really kills their credibility to see stuff like that. And before someone says patreon donations don’t count as purchases, that’s a really flimsy loophole to try and exploit and few people outside the discord will agree with you, a conversion rate is pretty damning for able to buy. Also Helius himself would disagree with you as he considers patreon a purchase.
There’s also debate about stuff being censored, Galatea is the prime example of that. I won’t go into as much detail on that. Just know Helius is pretty tight lipped on it, often deleting his own posts on the matter. It’s again another reason people feel he’s stringing them along.
All of this just scratches the surface really, I'd suggest reading back in the thread for more if you really want it.
Just in general to avoid people being argumentative the thing to keep in mind is there’s a lot of long time supporters here who get a sense of schadenfreude watching parts of the project fall apart. It’s something they enjoy, and the amount of money down the drain means they're invested in this whatever happens. You can’t expect to come to an established community and have them stop talking about something just because you weren’t there for it and don’t understand or find it relevant to you at this point. It looks childish and overly self important.