Hello everyone.
I couldn’t help but notice how since a few weeks the whole ambiant in the forums has been steadily going downhill. Constructive criticism is becoming less and less of a thing, users are more prone to make use of ad hominem, and fights between users has become much more frequent for reasons that could be as minor as a simple push on the disagree button. I won’t lie, it feels really disenhearting to see your own community tearing itself to shreds like that especially as the most active moderator here.
I do think that the major source of that toxicity is due to how negative we can be from time to time.
Negativity is a major reason about why DB has a hard time. Sure it’s not the only factor, but it does affects the game much harsher than you guys might think about. Negativity overall make the community much more gloomy, agressive and unlikeable, which will scare new players away by making them think that DB is a sinking boat while in fact we’re doing much better than most new FPS games on the market. It makes the dev team members dread the places where people are acting negatively due to poor overall reactions and how much it can affect them, which in the end can make them rather unactive among their own community and makes the communication between devs and users much harder. Due to dev inactivity, people are bound to become even more negative, which will draw even more players away.
In the end, too few participation from the dev team due to excessive negativity (which doesn’t make them feel welcomed at all) will draw the player to become incredibly toxic. Toxicity will scare the new players away even more which will prevent DB from aquiring its very needed fresh blood, which will definitely not help at fixing those ranked match you are so upset about since most of the issues are related to DB’s low player base. Sick of poor results and matchmaking in ranked, even more player will grow upset and start bashing the game with the same results described above.
Negativity is vicious circle, and it affects everyone : devs, moderators, beginners, normal users and veterans alike. And the fact that some of us are acting negatively when things aren’t going the way we expect is extremely counterproductive.
We all want to see that Dirty Bomb succeed : this is why we should focus on tuning down that negativity as much as possible in order to make DB a much more welcoming place for everyone. It will help communication, player retention and even ranked matchmaking in a much better way than what you might expect. Don’t make stuff blow much harder than it actually is, don’t focus on the bad aspects to the point of making it an obsession, keep your posts constructive and keep the feedback flowing. But most importantly, try to respect each other, and respect their opinions, because it all starts with the way how we treat each other.
Devs and moderators want to work hand in hand for a fun and thriving game, an awesome community and much more, but this is only possible with community support. SD is perfectly aware that having a stronger presence is needed on the forums and really wish to improve communication between players and devs. They have already started to work on that issue by becoming more active on the forums and answering feedback. SD truly wants to improve, but we have to improve as well if we want to make SD’s efforts meaningful. Tuning down all that negativity would be a very good start.
I hope we can all get along in the future and wish for a DB a brillant success. 
