I really don't think you've delved too deep into Steam's community, other than just a curious glance to satisfy your already made up mind.
You are going to have to make up your mind, I'm not trying to sink going with Steam. Who we are in our forums is exactly what Skuzzy posted and even worse. Pretty well dominated by grown men from the high end of gen-X and past who don't appreciate questions seen as frivolous or regressive to our institution\orthodoxy. Going deeper into Steam's Community, I don't have the time to research farther into the individual game community specific forums. I spent enough time reading the available Steam game forums that I didn't have to create a Steam account to get at. Those as Help Desks are well behaved versus our forums and put Steam in a good light, so to would happen for our game. We look like fire breathing trolls who will eat the innocent casual gamer compared to them. And if they use the Steam AH3 Help forum then pop into ours, I can see what Skuzzy is unhappy about.
No one is going to warn them that the hardcore Steam game forums make the AH3 BBS blow torch forums look like a kiddie carnival. They will have only a first impression of us as we blow torch anything they offer just like we did to nugetx. Even if they are worse than us in one of their other Steam game forums, they have the right to not be blow torched for what they bring to our forum like we did to nugetx.
Just like with TV programing where your wife tells you "honey you can change the channel or turnoff the TV if you don't like the show". Instead you just stay on the couch and yell at the program for being stupid. When nugetx was grating our nerves, we could have ignored him and not read his posts, and refused to respond. Instead we sat on the couch and yelled at him for being stupid. I don't get the impression the person using the nugetx ID is a stupid person, but we gave it a good try at convincing him he was where our institution\orthodoxy is concerned.
That is the crux of Skuzzy's problem with us and this whole nugetx scenario. These forums are not our institution\orthodoxy, we invented that over nearly 20 years as the common ground of our player driven community. And today we defend it reflexively and blindly with our blow torches locked at crispy critter.
Look at Skuzzy's response again and wonder just how much we defending our institution\orthodoxy helped to shrink our community and loose HTC opportunities for new customers. The only reason a group defends an institution\orthodoxy with as unified a front as we organically muster, is to tell outsiders they don't fit in with us as they are presenting themselves. Just a species of the same social dynamics problem which caused Hitech to split the MA into two arenas once. And why we treated nugetx so badly.
One never knows where the next good idea might come from.
He has been very gracious in the face of an adversarial community. I find the negative treatment of any new person to be disappointing.
Sure, I can edit those negative posts, but that does not fix the issue. And no, the issue is not a new person making suggestions about the game.
The calls and emails I get with the phrase, "I am not posting on that board so they can brow beat me" is quite frustrating.
Do any of you see us at HTC verbally beating up people for posting ideas?