I've seen this tactic used by another developer except they actually listened the result but they acted like 10 or so people who were active on discord during the poll were representing their entire playerbase on steam. I think it was rigged all along but obviously I cannot prove it since I'm not using discord. Something similar may be happening here.
I don't think Helius needs to do anything that clever given that they've banned just about anybody who even thinks about saying anything negative from their discord or steam. He just needs to make it
look like he's doing something, anything, so that new users who come across it ignore any red flags and end up paying for subs.
What they had before was a project that was clearly dead with users posting clear warnings to stay away everywhere. Now he's sprucing it up a bit with a deep cleanse of negative posts, a few minor patches with heavily padded changelogs, a post about a "major feature" being worked on etc.
If they just read Steam or Patreon 99% of new users won't know VR is a feature that was already in the game years ago, that the game is going F2P, that it's multiplayer only, that they just had a 14 month hiatus followed by a patch that didn't work for well over a month or even that it's not a "roguelike strategy game featuring squad tactics and deck building"...
So long as Helius can keep all of that shit buried he can perhaps drag this out a little longer whilst he pretends to be working on VR for the next 6-12 months. Fortunately it doesn't seem to be working that well. Subs are still down by ~800 since last month so churn rate is massively negative even with Helius trying to turn things around.
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