Developers and Death Threats

So the recent news has been saying that Bioware writer Jennifer Hepler (Dragon Age) has left the company due to deaths threats from fans.  That said, the story has changed a bit and it's now being said she left for personal reasons or because she wants to pursue some other thing or whatever but at the end of the day she still received a bunch of fan harassment.

Now let me get something straight right here, I don't like Jennifer Hepler.  I think she's a terrible writer who quite frankly is working in the wrong industry.  In an interview 6 years ago she said that her least favourite part of video games is the actual game part and from what I can understand regarding her involvement in the Dragon Age 2 writing process, she was more focused on LGBT side quests rather than actually contributing to the mythos.

But my personal opinion about Jennifer Helper being negative or not doesn't matter.  The point is that on twitter and via email or whatever, this woman received all sorts of harassment after Dragon Age 2 and that interview in particular.  This is not cool and anyone who took part in the harassment should be fucking ashamed of themselves.

Sure, there was a lot of dislike about Jennifer's attitude towards video games and her writing but constant harassment is not the way to deal with it.  If the fans had calmly pointed out how toxic she was to game writing in a calm and constructive manner then I'm sure there would have been more people willing to listen.

Even if they weren't willing to listen, flinging shit on the internet just makes them and everyone who enjoys games look like complete fucking morons.  No matter how passionate you are about something, threatening people isn't going to make things go your way 99% of the time.  It's the same shit with another developer on Black Ops 2 getting death threats after a patch for gun balances. 

If you're not happy with the patch, email them and tell them why that patch is a bad idea and why the guns should be changed back.  Threatening the guy isn't going to reverse the patch and that guy doesn't deserve any of it.  Calm, constructive criticism will get things changed if enough people speak up, death threats will just make us all look like idiots and give the media more ammunition when they want to point the finger at games for something.

Final point, I don't want anyone to think that with this post I am condemning what happened to Phil Fish.  Hepler was just a person doing her job that happened to suck really bad at it, Fish is a horrible little urchin who needed a taste of his own medicine.