I can chart what happened in my opinion.
Just after kickstarter faith was at an all time high, we took DB at his word and we were finally going to get a updated Elite game that is to today's games what the original Elite games were games of the time, something amazing.
Until the release of Alpha that faith didn't waiver, there were plenty of debates on the forums about certain aspects which were heated but a lot of hard information was unknown so it was all conjecture and opinion at that point.
Things started to turn sour for me personally around Jan 2014 when FD started to be a bit shady about some things, missing Kickstarter dates and not even telling people, eeking out the £200 Alpha period to try and cream as much cash as they could out of impatient people, selling £200 Alpha packages days before it became worthless with P2W-eqse reduced insurance costs and early access to Betas which never happened (If I'd bought Alpha at that point for those promises they didn't deliver I'd have got trading standards involved, it was despicable) and culminating in the dropping of offline mode months before the release of the game. Those debates got pretty heated and certain people started defending FD no matter what they did.
Development also started to slow right down after the Alpha. During the Alpha period things went at a fair lick and you could see progress was happening in leaps and bounds, soon as the Prem Beta started progress seemed to drop dramatically. Between Prem Beta and Standard beta I think there was like 1 update build that didn't add a whole lot. As the game progressed to Standard Beta and towards release a lot of people where of the opinion that the game wasn't ready, that what we were seeing couldn't be all FD had to release. That's when I remember the hardcore fanboys really started crawling out of the woodwork with their vertical slice, magical mystery build rubbish which was subsequently proven wrong. Post release the fanboyism just intensified. As the issues with the released game became apparent the more swivel eyed these people became. They'd rush to defend FD when people were pointing out bugs with the game (only for FD to come out and admit there was a bug showing what weirdos these people were). If anyone said the game was lacking the standard response was that it was just the beginning, the game would get more content over the coming year (HA!).
FD did nothing to curb the fanboys and in reality encouraged them by promoting some of them to Mod status (Although I'm not saying all the mods are fanboys, some of them are cool). So as time has gone on these guys have become more and more entrenched, seemingly spending more time defending the game's issues on these forums, reddit and any website that happens to mention ED than actually playing the game. They don't get the infractions that might curb their behaviour because unless they really overstep the mark the mods turn a blind eye. They can continually go in threads, post off topic nonsense and not get punished, they can continually attack the poster and not the post and not get punished so their behaviour continues.
So no matter the post unless it's a fawning "Ain't FD brilliant" thread you get fanboys telling people to play other games or just go away and stop trying to pull them out of the fantasy land they like to inhabit where everything it awesome. Once a new poster gets a few of these they either just stop and go away because they can't face the crazyness or they themselves become entrenched and you get the current forums where entrenched fanboys and entrenched (I dunno what the term is for these but I'll call them) anti-fanboys flinging mud at each other. We don't even get a xmas sing song or game of footy like that thing that happened in World War Battlefield 1.
Your welcome
