haha what a funny story. upside down emoji upside down emoji upside down emoji.
Here's the thing. As a live game developer, when you see this type of behavior - someone repeatedly and insistently asking for some weirdly specific thing in the game, over and over again over a long period of time, what you think is not "oh how cute, maybe we should do the thing they're asking for."
What you think is:
- This is annoying
- This is creepy
- I do not want to encourage or acknowledge this
- I hope this funny ha-ha thing doesn't escalate into a harassment mob
- I have a billion things to do already, I really don't want to add one to the pile on the whim of some random dude
- Is this person problematically overinvested in the game? Should we be worried about them?
It's presented jokily here, but you see the idea that doing other cowboy hat pokemon is 'throwing salt in the wound' of the cowboy hat caterpie guy. Like... at that point, you'd be having to change or rethink material going into the game (which may have been planned for months) to avoid stepping on the toes of one weirdo's insistent demand. This kind of thing is incredibly draining and grating.
Live service games are made by people, often overworked people, for whom this is a job. Do you go to your local all-night diner and keep asking them over and over to put up your favorite meme on the letter sign outside?
Like to be clear, I don't think this guy's behavior crosses over into anything worse than 'weird and unpleasant'. But this kind of weird and unpleasant behavior, in aggregate, is the background radiation that helps enable and normalize genuinely harassing behavior. Framing it as cutesy doesn't really help the cause of deescalating audience harassment of game developers, if people in games media want to pretend to care about that.
