Also with respect to the OP he’s absolutely right.
It’s not the forums specifically though, these forums are imo the most welcoming part of the ‘official’ CM community and the only places that are more welcoming are private unofficial discord channels.
There’s a clearly pervasive attitude amongst at least the senior devs/admins of CM to oppose people speaking their minds, offering feedback, discussing issues, etc. It’s been a problem for years but it’s been getting much worse lately.
The server is becoming calcified and nepotistic with a “friends of friends” approach required to actually have things heard and addressed; reputation with the right people matters more than truth, and you’ve thereupon got to play politics to change anything because honest discussion and feedback is almost outright banned.
When issues crop up the response to them is to censor it with nonsensical bureaucratic justification. Transparency is something actively opposed, which subsequently opens the door to unpunished abuse of authority. Think of it like this: When someone’s rightly banned for something, and they retell their story of it, they tend to leave out little details, they aren’t totally transparent - and those little details tend to be the actual justifications for their bans.
People just seem to naturally abuse a lack of transparency and this server’s staff are embracing it as a core principle. It’s a mistake IMO; eventually this sort of thing is going to blow up in people’s faces. It already is in a soft way, as we see with threads like this.
I remember for example, we used to show the win rate publicly. We don’t anymore though. People might look at it and use it as part of an argument regarding the current state of balance (oh no!). How is that even a bad thing? That’s only a bad thing if you want to push balance in a certain direction and genuinely don’t care what your playerbase thinks of it, so you have to deny them the information that enables them to inform themselves and make arguments in the first place.
I’m going to end this with a quote I love from a game I love:
Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
This servers’s staff is on a bad trajectory. That’s my gut feel.
