I figured as much with the true intent of that rule, Reddit wouldn't really work well if upvoting or downvoting or golds were not allowed - I just felt like pointing out (tongue-in-cheek, as it were) that, if taken in a strictly literal sense, that is indeed "psychological vote manipulation". I'm willing to bet most of those golds came from within SDC, but who knows.
Yes, we all know that Fdev has to step up and make an official statement. They rightly are proud of a public image of being communicative and open to the community, especially compared to other games I could mention, anybody with 2 bits of common sense could have predicted that move - which is why it's easy to imagine SDC wanted to provoke that response on purpose.
The reality is that Support, like any other help center in the world, has to prioritize and discriminate requests based upon their relevance and level of dire need. It's the only way they can possibly hope to meet the demands of such a job. Hiring more and more people to work in Support is neither cost-effective nor will ever solve that problem unless you get a 1-1 ratio of Support workers to customers...and with a playerbase of millions, that's a hell of a lot of people you're asking for Fdev to hire. Plus, "temp staffing" only leads to uninformed & poor Support service, in my experience, and Frontier has a rather high standard thus far to uphold - so that's also not an ideal answer.
If even I can read between the lines and see that these SDC tickets are loaded, presumably with the intent of stirring up drama, I don't blame Support whatsoever for not glancing at the youtube videos in question - and again, as Dale and others have already pointed out, whatever is in those youtube videos is often entirely irrelevant to what Fdev actually does look at to determine whether a combat-logging exploit took place. (I would imagine the netlogs, telemetry, etc. are what's looked at.)
Additionally, the fact that you yourself declare combat logging to be outright "cheating", when there are many cases where it is not, makes me inclined to question your supposed impartial bias regarding all this....
Which merely adds to my just-mentioned skepticism.
I've lurked on the Elite subreddit since before I actually started playing Elite myself. I've seen for myself what SDC has posted on reddit in the past. It has been of a derogatory, discriminatory, rabble-rousing manner, same as it has been here on the official Elite forums. While I admit, lately, I haven't seen many SDC posts like that, there's no "duplicity" here where SDC is just some honorable PvP group over on Reddit who just happens to be ostracized and hated on the official Elite forums. It's a grand narrative to carry, but again, it's just another comical farce.
HAH! Tell that to "Hello Games".
Yes. Because I can trust that Adles Armada wouldn't have posted a big stinkthread on Reddit with the intent of stirring up a crapstorm, intentionally painting Fdev in a negative light and casting themselves as the heroes of the people. I'll point out the fairly obvious fact that they haven't done so, too.
Yes, I get the humor, but these '50 reasons' can be summarized into the following:
1. Powerplay (I highly doubt this is a big slice of the pie)
2. "They aren't part of my player group, so they must DIE" [rolleyes]
3. "I, unprovoked, shot at other CMDRs minding their own business in a spot that is being publicized on the forums and would obviously have other CMDRs heading there! Why, what's wrong?"
4. Piracy (which doesn't actually dictate the act of shooting the target, despite what NPCs want us to currently believe...)
5. (Ziggy already mentioned reason number 5 on my list.)
6. Reason 42 is actually valid, assuming one's mother has a reputation to uphold!
Our varied modteam are happy with the the Reddit currently: we're the 2nd largest ED community, traffic is nicely steady (tracking with the game's active playerbase as expected), and gaining 100 new subscribers daily - so we must be doing something right :S
