The unfortunate reality, as with any internet message board, is you have to be ready for the negativity and the "keyboard gansta" as there are too many of them out there. Go to any site, ANY ONE whether its for sports gaming or movies or what not and you are always gonna find the immature minority upsetting those as well as ruining extremely constructive threads with 10 year olds nonsense. I think the "advertising" of developers coming to this site bought with it too many of those minority as I for the time Ive been here (2003) I have never seen so many "Number of Posts - 10 for example" members posting absolute crap in these forums as Ive seen particularly in this particular forum ever.
That being said Ian and Co. packing up their ball and going home can be to some point be just not wanting to deal with the negativity but the good points that seemed to be ignored (ie. Ratings and the Easter Bunny) that had alot of constructive criticism and valid points that screamed for some sort of feedback from EA in my opinion made me think that they discovered that this game had too many issues that they had originally foreseen and they do not want to deal with that feedback which is poor on their part. Yes there was some garbage but on a whole not as much as I saw in some other threads that they have responded too.
They could do something similar to the Shows developers did and perhaps grab 10 representatives from these forums (both the positive and the neagatibve) and do a chat or something and have the community feed these 10 reps what they want answered and they will present their gripes/questions/issues. This way there is more control and they can give an up front answer to the "OS community" to various issues and here the legitamite gripes.
Hope that made sense
