we are arguing the morality, for lack of a better word atm, of the situation.  that's the whole point.  everyone knows this is stardock's forum and that they published demigod.  we don't like what they did regardless of this fact.  it should have already been implied that we know this is stardock's gig, because we're posting ON ITS FORUMS and arguing on behalf of someone they banned.  the effort on the part of warskull's friends is in order to get stardock to unban him.  (i'm basically explaining to you why the  thread was created, which i don't feel i should have to do but w/e). 

second, i was responding to people who initially referenced other companies.  i did not make the original vague comparisons.  someone else did.  i was responding to them with my experience.  even so, comparing other companies and their forums makes sense to me as a customer, especially when i'm observing how other customers are treated and how i could be treated in the future.  i don't think warskull was treated fairly or well at all based on my involvement in and observations of other communities, and i'm not scared enough of losing access to a video game to agree with treating an isolated incident of dissent with a complete ban

They will just use a 1-time cc# generated by Paypal. I'm waiting to see if Chaos figures that out and makes a return.

I want to note that I'm not expressing an opinion directly one way or another on the ban.  I don't have all the facts that I'd want to have to come to a sound conclusion.

No.  If I buy a broken car, for instance, the manufacturer doesn't come around to my place and fix it for free.  This is possible with software, and while some companies just dump broken stuff out there and walk away, Stardock has a history of caring for their products well beyond launch day, as they are doing right now.  I think the original release was not in an acceptable state, but I'll mostly forgive it if I can get a working game eventually.  It's not as if I'm short on other stuff to do with my time while I wait.

Now we are talking in circles. The morality of the situation is irrelevant regardless of much you'd like to believe it isn't. The idea of whether or not Warskull was treated unfairly is based entirely on your point of view which, as you've already stated, is calibrated on the behaviours of other communities and other moderators. Being as this community, this forum and these moderators aren't those whose calibrated your opinion and ideals of fairness, the standards to which the other communities and moderators are kept, and those standards are fairly low, do not apply here.

Attempting to counter-argue my point that people here forget that this is Stardock's show by stating that everyone knows this because the forum has their name on it points to me that you don't understand my original point. We know this is Stardock's forum because their name is one it. This part is correct. People forget that the rules here are created by Stardock, as clearly evidenced by the fact that two people have been given given life time bans for their forum behaviour, because they - like you - attempt to use other communities and rules and standards to measure. Perhaps saying they've forgotten is an incorrect use of the word forgotten. I think perhaps a better description would be that people are to ignorant to the fact that this community is different and by extensions it's moderators and owners are also different. Look before you leap certainly applies here.

Your didn't explain why the thread was created - the thread was created in a poor attempt to overstate a 'problem' and attempt to rally the communitiy into getting a player unbanned by causing outrage. However, from the posts in this thread, it's safe to say some people here view this situation as I do - a welcome change from the usual crap we're forced to endure when interacting with any online community via the forums.

And being banned won't be an issue if you keep things constructive and civil. View the non-Demigod focused parts of the forums and you'll get a great understanding of how this community functioned before we, the Demigod players, came.

RIP Warskull

You are falling very far from reality here.

First off, oppinions do matter. If SD wants to have a community (which I'm assuming they do), then they have to treat it correctly, otherwise people (myself included) will stop participating in the community because it may mean they can no longer play the game.

Second, I don't think that warskull broke any rules, just that someone got mad and he got banned.

Third, I don't think his dislike of the game is "the usual crap" at all. He was pointing out things he disliked about the current game and that SD has failed to fix them, albeit in an impolite manner. Forcing him out of the game because of that certainly does not add to the game.

Finally, you are biased. You obviously love this community which makes you think it is perfect.

All this relative morality stuff be damned, kicking someone out of a game (and all future games) for saying that they don't like the game and that the developers have thus far failed to live up to their promise is just plain wrong. You're lying to yourself if you try to disagree.

One of the nice things of being in charge of a privately owned company is that you don't have to put up with a lot of nonsense.

Now, as far as I know, I can only think of 2 people who were banned recently. That Chas guy who kept demanding refunds in every topic and saying how it was impossible to play despite having 20+ hours in online MP games  - so we gave him a refund.

The other person was the person who wrote this:

We are doing everything we can to make sure people get a good experience at Demigod.  But yelling at us is like blaming the fire department for not being fast enough about putting out the fire.

When the connectivity issues in Demigod came up, I, and Stardock's principle applications development team stopped what we were doing and re-assigned ourselves to develop a new network library for Demigod that was 90% from scratch.  Normally, publishers don't contribute code at all to a game.  Now, I'm not blaming Demigod's launch problems on GPG or Raknet or anyone else.  I am only pointing out what I would think is obvious: publishers don't normally have to intervene and write tens of thousands of lines of brand new code on a project after it's been released.

Anyone who feels that what the person wrote above was justified should leave now and vow never to purchase anything from Stardock again. That way, the process becomes self-selective.

Me and my team have literally worked over 80 hours a week since Demigod shipped to solve these problems.  As someone else pointed out, Stardock could have simply washed its hands and reported the problems to the appropriate developers at the appropriate companies to resolve. But we knew that would take too long so we threw our own guys at it to get if fixed a lot sooner.

And again: Anyone who thinks that a person who has played 20+ hours online already should get a full refund should read the paragraph above about staying far far away from our software in the future.