The thing is i can tell you from personal expierence that there are moments, especially in the "beginning" of your breakdown, when the house of cards is falling, there are people who do not have the energy to tell anyone literally anything. And then the whole feeling guilty shit starts, which doesnt make it any better, trust me.
And im not here to defend that behaivor, even tho its because of mental health issues, it is still bad behaivor. And it is your right to critizise that behaivor, and im also sure that there are a lot out there who use that to abuse shit like patreon. Which definately adds to the anger when people realize work on a project stopped. Because giving people the benefit of the doubt only really works, if you can be as objective as possible. Which we all know, doesnt work on a personaly level as often as it should. And since you say yourself you heared/saw/witnessed cases where people abused it, if you see that often enough, the chances that you think "ah fuck it, just another one of those idiots" instead of "Mhm..poor guy, lets hope he can sort his shit out" skyrocket, and you cant really blame the people for doing so, since there is literally no way of proofing anything. And doubt is a strong emotion, once you have it, its super hard getting rid of it.
As for the thread ratings and threads in general, i agree and disagree at the same time. If we would only ever have Devs publishing their games here, we would ofc end up with A LOT less games. Sure its Publicity for the game if you put it up here, and the more people you reach, the higher the chance for customers i.e people who might end up paying you on patreon. Which is the basic concept of this Forum, period. Anyone who believes anything else, should leave their naive bubble already
. However since its not just Devs releasing games here, you sometimes create two parralel communities about one project. And even if the Dev itself releases it here, you do the same, but you are doing it yourself, which usualy increases your awarness of stuff.
Now for the most part, the Dev runs his shit including patreon and the like.. maybe discord and whatnot. Everyone who is your patreon, automatically becomes a VIP for you. They support you openly by paying you money, you want to satisfy those first. And no matter how many people are here on this forum or any other for that matter, doent matter at all. Sure they vote on yourr threads which usually gives a rough indication whether or not a game is "good". But if you have 1000 Patreons who continuously pay you Money and are the people who make the whole thing happen. Even if there are 20000 people on a Forum who hate your game, as long as your patreons enjoy it and stick with you, you couldnt care less about that guy on the forum posting "SHIT GAME, SHIT DEV, BLA BLA". Just to bring everyone who runs around in this foum into perspective.
Most of the people here, are here because there are games for free, period. There are definatly people here who also support or have supported a Dev/Serveral Devs on Patreon, i wont deny that.
But most of us dont, and yet once a project goes south, everyone acts like as if they were a patreon of the project. They complain, badmouth, stirr shit up, and on top of that you have the forum trolls, who over the past few years have evolved into flat out assholes. The typical old forum troll who did shit for a laugh, is as rare as a unicorn these days.
So the summary is the following, you have people who come here to enjoy free content, acting as if they were something special, whenever a project goes south. And if you watch the threads on games that went south, you can see that the amount of people, who come back every Day/week/month to kick a dead horse, is immense. And i agree Man of the House is at the moment probably the best example for when a Project is executed well. And sure people praise the Dev whenever there is new content. But if i recall correctly, the first few endings on some of the characters were already implimented. Now im obviously not the Dev and therefore i have no idea how much of the road on this game is left. But starting to impliment endings usually is a sign that it wont continue for years to come. And mark my words here, the second this game finishes, or maybe not finishes because the Dev doesnt have a good new idea yet, but still has 1500 patreons paying him, and the content starts to get worse, because once serveral endings for characters are implimented, there is just so much you can do in that invoirment. People here will start to go ape shit, pointing fingers at his patreon, calling him a Thief and such. It might not happen, but i've seen similiar cases happen when it comes to things like this. And the shitstorm from people that were not even involved into it i.e not being patreons and stuff, every single time was so big that you thought that there was some raping someone on a daily basis in RL. But when you ask the people involved i.e the patreons, they will tell you that it was early annouced that the project would end, and that eveyone was told to end their payments, because everything beyond this point is just bonus. But those creating the riot didnt know that, but didnt stop them from the riot, in fact thats usually the reason for the Riot in the first place. Because people have a false feeling for sympathy, its like the white Girl making a 30 Minute youtube Video telling blacks how they should feel about some behaivor in society, bitch i didnt ask you for your opinion ^^
