When, in Tony's words, it starts to seem like there's "Elites" being allowed access when the common man isn't, like for example early chat server access in "Soon" "Paragon Chat", people who aren't selected are going to be a bit jealous at first. Then comes "Why wasn't I picked?"
They need to get used to it. Same thing happened with City of Heroes closed betas. People kept complaining about them, and demanding the practice stop. I'll let people in on a little secret if you haven't ever been in a closed beta: the closed betas were so much better in terms of quality testing, feedback, and discussion, that before deciding to terminate closed betas the devs would probably decide to terminate all betas and test their content by having chimpanzees throw poo at it.
Its not hard to understand why. Its not that every closed beta tester was a great tester, and its not that every single person excluded didn't have something valuable to contribute. Its that the people who were pissed off they were not included were statistically very likely to be the people you didn't want in it. If you were the kind of player they wanted, one day you could be randomly selected to be in the beta. You could then prove that by actually making noticeable and unique contributions. And then they'd remember you and bring you back. It was an imperfect system that generated exceptionally good results.
Every system needs testers. Open testing isn't going to cut it. And volunteer projects can't generally promise deadlines or feature sets. So they have to be secret, they have to have a small group of testers, the rest of us just have to wait. And if you can't wait, go outside and do something else. But there's simply no excuse for projecting a negative attitude and inventing your own facts to create a martyr narrative. A bunch of malcontents taking credit for getting Paragon Chat released is no different than me trying to take credit for writing it and claiming Codewalker copied it. Its an attempt to achieve undeserved glory at someone else's expense. And transparently so.
The thing I find simultaneously the most understandable and yet also the most baffling is that its understandable in a sense why someone would foster this self-delusion. Among their own circle of friends, its easy to sell. The only people in a position to see through it are probably total strangers. People like me, say. And yet, what's baffling to me, and has always been baffling to me, is why you would want to impress those people, those people around you how obviously aren't creating anything, aren't knowledgeable about anything, aren't capable of anything except sycophancy, at the cost of making yourself look like an idiot and a jackass to the very people who actually know more, can actually help you in theory, are the people more likely to be creating your future.
Something many people explicitly told me they found odd was that often when I was debating someone on the game forums I would be clearly steering the debate away from populist lines of attack. In other words, the person I was debating was saying things a lot of people, perhaps even the majority, would believe without question, while I would often make statements that were very difficult to easily agree with. And the truth is that I considered every post to be not just a reply to another single person, but a message to everyone reading it. And given a choice between saying the stupid thing everyone would agree with, or the intelligent thing most people would not agree with
but people who knew as much as me or more would find interesting I always chose the latter. Why look smart to people less smart and stupid to people who are more smart, when its the people who know as much or more than you that are the only people you can actually learn from. That's idiotic, or rather a blueprint to stay idiotic.
Jealousy and insecurity are common emotions, and its not hard to understand why some people would act upon them. But in a larger sense, letting them create a ceiling above you, such that everyone above that ceiling can see you for a jealous insecure person they would rather not have anything to do with, is self-destructive. Its a sweet form of self-destruction that has an extra helping of self-delusion (it goes like this: if people can't prove what I'm saying is false, then everyone claiming to know I'm wrong is just as stupid as I am, since they can't be certain they are right, so I'm justified in portraying them as inferior), but ultimately self-destructive all the same. I don't mind the self-destruction, I do mind the collateral damage it leaves in its wake.
Not that I think ultimately Leandro and Codewalker are going to care all that much in the end: its probably just going to be a bit annoying. But its something they shouldn't have to deal with. In that sense, there's really no excuse at all. And that's my counter-rant.