Mass banning on Godus Steam forum

I have to wonder if there is something with The Trail they are going to releases soon and they are cleaning house to cut down on the shitstorm on the Godus forums.

How long do you think you will wait before you file a support call? Because it occurs to me that it would help boost our collective case if your call gets logged around the same time as ours, as this will help to underline our claim that its a mass banning that we have been subjected to
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Make sure to keep your tickets open.

In lieu of any response from mrdrpink, I have instead been collating up evidence to support a systematic and routine abuse of not just Steam users, but the Steam service and Early Access programs - which depending upon regional laws of those users where Godus is sold upon Steam, VALVe as the publisher/distributor may be held entirely responsible.

Deletions to antagonise users, spurious ban reasons as further antagonism, libelous remarks from the company's representatives upon both Steam users and Steam Community Moderators (I'll have them note to check Aynen's frequent "Not Me!" claims), intentionally misleading statements, intentionally misleading store description - and most of all - the degradation of the game from what it was initially in Early Access into nothing the Early Access customers wanted, not really taking on any feedback as per the entire point of the Early Access program.

Everything to show this title to have been a complete abuse of the Early Access program and Steam.

Since Dave doesn't want to do his job, along with this policy apparently being from the top there at 22cans, the matter will be escalated appropriately.

It's been several hours now. Are you still roaming free?

As for my report to VALVe...I'm having a difficult time here.

On one hand, I would like to say that I have given every opportunity for mrdrpink and 22cans to address this matter, short of e-mailing Peter himself with a collection of everything his moderators and current PR have been making into a liability for the company, and ergo his own reputation directly, except that it appears that their orders may have come from Peter himself.

So if I present this to VALVe with that information, it would confirm that this is a problem inherent to 22cans' operation, and so it will just result in the last paragraph when VALVe responds publicly in some manner or if they block Godus from sale upon Steam.

On the other hand, if I were to just report about the routine abuses (along with a ton of evidence) upon the Early Access program (especially with the switcheroo into a crappy mobile port and failure to really involve the community besides taking their money so they can test dev builds for what will be ported to f2p mobile anyways), upon Steam/VALVe (by misrepresenting the policy that 22cans is using to delete posts and ban to silence customers over as "the Steam rules"), and the users of Steam by doing all of the above while making defamatory excuses for these abuses, then it would look as if it were simply a matter of naive interns making a mess for the company.

So what would 22cans like to have in this case? Or try to put the matter to rest otherwise?

I can say one thing for certain, on the same note as any other game in which VALVe has stepped in to manage a complete mess:

It would undoubtedly spark off a media show that will go for a narrative that when 22cans were presented with problems of their game's development, the game, and worries about a company that said one thing to these people and then made themselves into repeated liars, 22cans could simply not care about any of that. The media would also still be able to point to the Kickstarter backers continually kept antagonised and bullied around a fraudulent contract they pledged into as they seek anything of what they were pitched and 22cans took the money and ran, numerous times over.

o.k. It's now been 8 days since I raised my support call with steam, and havn't had any response from them. Hard to express how disappointing their support is, I have heard tales from other netizens about steams poor customer service, and can now attest to having experienced it myself first hand. Looks like they took a look at the bad PR surrounding 22 cans, saw that there is more that enough to go around for everyone, and decided they wanted some of that to rub off on them as well.

This does make me now suspect that 22 cans behaviour may actually be a symptom of the disease caused by steams lack of engagement and/or general apathy towards customers, who have serious issues that require immediate attention.

With 22 cans also continuing to ignore the issue, it now means that I have to give serious thought on how I should choose to proceed, what do you guys think? should I hold out for a response, no matter what the delay? or should I now look to take some other action? (if you do suggest other action, what form should that take, if it's to contact media, please provide contact details that you would like me to use). One thing is certain though, I'm not going to give up until I get my apology.

Kotaku has a sub-blog specifically for Steam related items. If you clearly provide your facts, timeline, etc. along with your separate opinions, they may feature you.
Regardless how you feel about supposedly click-bait-ish "news" blogs, it's a decent place for a start to gauge whether you've got a story or not.
Maybe even address the same writer who did the previous Godus article.

Steamed

Sorry hardly, but if I were to treat any of my customers enquiries with silence of more than a week I would find myself with out a job, i'm not waiting any longer.

infact i've just fired off an email to someone (i'll let you guess who), i'll give that a few days to see if anything happens as a result, or if I need to resume contacting people. lets see what happens next

I'll wait to see what the steam support guys eventually get back to me with before i push higher up the valve hierarchy, its possible they might come to the correct conclusions but are just extremely slow to get started, i'll allow my request to them to just carry on as is, as I'm curious just how long it will actually take to receive a reply without upper management pushing down on them, just to gauge how good of a service response they have, so far its certainly nothing impressive to brag about.

However their delay means i'm now more than willing to involve other parties to bring extra pressure onto the situation, we will see if this new contact wants to get involved, or if I need look elsewhere.

I wouldn't really hold my breath with Steam support and Gabe. Valve is big enough that 4 unsatisfied people don't mean jack shit to them. You guys only got banned from posting on a forum of a small game that no one really cares about except those of us who got screwed over by 22Cans - 1st world Steam user problems
Hell, it sometimes takes weeks to get a response from them for a compromised Steam account, which could be worth more than someones bank account. Now imagine it took that long to resolve a stolen atm/credit card. It's no surprise they got an F in customer support.

I think the only way to achieve anything, is to get the word out to more people and make them care. That's ether via press or reddit or both. Maybe post something on /r/pcmasterrace, /r/pcgaming or /r/Steam. If you're lucky and the topic gets enough traction, some smaller media sites might even bite into it. If you do that, than make sure you post a link to the topic here, so it gets some upvotes from us, which is probably critical to bump its visibility. Also be sure to present the bigger picture and not just "I/we got banned". You need to make people care/involved.