In my experience, outside of the tightest core friend groups, it's pretty much inevitable that in any given social group (whether it's in school, at work, in hobby clubs, etc.) there will be people you dislike and disagree with, and there will be people that dislike and disagree with you. It's just the nature of people being different and having different opinions. In real life, however, there is more of a filter as people at least feel the need to be polite to one another that stops conversations from going this toxic. In internet communities, there is no such filter. There is serious evidence that tech platforms fuel increasing political polarization and I think this is just a microcosm of what's going on more broadly.
This problem is compounded as on FAF you have people from literally every corner of the globe, from different countries with completely different cultures, with different social norms and different ways of communicating. Look at how easy it is for people from more similar cultural backgrounds to commit social faux pas: call a woman a cunt in the UK and it's not a big deal; call a woman a cunt in the US and they just might murder you. And this is just between two majority English speaking countries. I do think that some amount of the perceived aggression that people experience in discussions here may genuinely just be due to cultural communication differences, and as people take offence and strike back that's how conversations turn into arguments.
These are not problems endemic to FAF, as some people seem to think: Rowey mentioned moving to the BAR community and contributing there as there instead. If you take a gander at the BAR subreddit, literally half of all the posts are about how toxic the community is and, from what I've heard from players who have tried BAR, it seems even worse. This does feel like the rule, not the exception, among internet communities, especially competitive gaming ones, in general.
I think it's this communication problem, plus a big fundamental disconnect, that really made the entire area reclaim discourse so taxing on the devs and so aggravating for the players.
From what I read of the conversations, the game team simply wanted players to test this new feature they thought was cool and would make the game feel better to play (without perhaps understanding the full history of the discussion that had already existed about this feature in the past decade or the gameplay implications of said feature), and decide whether or not to add it later after feedback.
At the end of the day what ended up happening was that tons of people gave negative feedback about area reclaim, some tested it, found it was as bad as expected, and the game team decided not to add it.
Everything happened as it should.
It was just that the conversations that led to this outcome were so abusive and nasty. We could've had more civilized discussions without the personal attacks and ad hominems and arrived at this outcome all the same. Just discuss the feature. There's no need to attack the person.
My man AUTO said this to me earlier today. I'm sure that in real life he's a nice guy, that he doesn't interact with people like this, and that he wouldn't be like this had we chatted in person, but because it's a discord chat that will scroll by in minutes, he feels there's no holds barred on what he can say.
I don't have the solution to this problem. People just need to understand that at the end of the day it's just another human being behind a computer. And they don't, or at least they don't act like it. I completely understand if @Jip decide to take his talents elsewhere and I respect the decision after the vitriol he received for investing his time into trying to improve the game.
Jeopardy music plays 
