The Devs aren't your personal friends and valid criticism isn't "harrassment"

[Krotoan]

Neither of those words are abusive when used in proper context. Are they particularly harsh? The latter, yes. However, criticism tends to become harsher has time goes on and feedback is continuously ignored. Housing has been a known sore spot for half a decade now and we've seen once band-aid solution after another that never addresses the actual issues. Thus, players are becoming increasingly fed up.

If I used those words when talking to my subordinates at work I would be severely talked to and possibly fired. As much as I THINK them.. there is never any constructive benefit to using them. They add nothing to the feedback. You can be "fed up" all you want, but once you start using loaded language like that, you aren't making your case any better, you're just coloring yourself as a jerk.

In this specific circumstance, I feel "incompetence" is applicable. As is saying this "should never have happened." We're talking about a relatively basic coding error. If there were some random indie developer, I'd be far more forgiving. My expectations are significantly higher from a multi-billion dollar corporation. And as mentioned above, people's patience regarding housing is at an all time low due to yet another band-aid solution blowing up as the dev team stubbornly clings to a system that hasn't worked for years. What should be noted is criticism like this is usually isolated to a particular incident and not reflective of what people think of the dev team as a whole.

Seems that both of your suppositions were wrong. While the testing probably should have caught that problem.. it wasn't as simple as "we included 0 as a result". So in this case calling people idiots, or incompetent was pretty irrelevant, and at worst it was a lack of testing variables being available.

Once again a case for expressing disappointment or asking for other things would be fine.. but making assumptions and insulting people was not.