Sweet baby Thaliak, grow up! "Perception of greater subjectivity", that's meaningless word salad! SE was always 100% at their own discretion with whom they wanted to have a business relationship. Just because you can initiate that relationship as well, doesn't mean SE as a business entity forfeited that fundamental freedom of contract. If your "perception" was something different before, that was simply your inexperience and naivety!
Enforced by WHOM? And yes, that statement is indeed meant to send a message to their customers. Also, "can shape how the company applies its discretion". You just don't understand what such a policy announcement means, do you? The decision how SE will apply its discretion in the future has already been made. The course is set. The announcement is just that, an announcement. Top level management has already decided on the course.
And bloody hell does the "gaming community" need some lessons in how to behave as a decent human being in the 21st century, given the vile comments people have dropped in this forum and elsewhere about WL's voice actress. Or you know, all the threats and harassment against employees of a video game company, which is what prompted SE to actually adopt this new policy in the first place.
Again, meaningless word salad. No business has to have a business relationship with a customer they don't want to. You portray yourself like some resistance fighter, fighting some "good fight", instead it just shows how naive and inexperienced you are in how the world works. Consumers aren't entitled to "fair treatment", they are entitled to whatever the local law says they are entitled to. Stifling the fundamental right to freedom of contract as it's implemented by basically every developed nation in the world is something that has to be done with the utmost care.
My god, SE is a business. How they decide to deal with customer feedback is entirely within their own prerogative. And my "emotional investment" is about how you state untruths about the implications of that policy. You employ rhetoric like SE has gained new "powers of enforcement", which they simply haven't. This isn't about "opinion", it's about reality.
In other words, like way too many people on this forum, you have no idea what the words you write even mean. You cannot not communicate. Someone a few posts before quoted the ToS which YOU AGREED TO, in which it literally states that SE reserves the right to terminate a business relationship "AT ANY TIME FOR ANY REASON OR FOR NO REASON". You don't have any leg to stand on in the first place, because you already agreed to this kind of contractual clause when joining.
Because I know the difference between a state and a company. I don't need to "defend" anything, my main problem is the untruths that you write in here.
You are literally believing absurdities.
All your "concerns" and "arguments" have been nothing but meaningless word salad. Your "conclusions" are based on fundamentally flawed assumptions about how the world works. If SE's new business approach proves itself fundamentally detrimental, then that is their own business. The only allegiance a publicly traded company has, is to their shareholders. You are just a customer, nothing more, nothing less. The ToS have always been "vague" on the same level to moderate ingame behavior. If you don't agree with that, don't enter into a business relationship with SE. Or you know, leave the business relationship now that SE has changed some of their policies. I do it all the time with companies that have policies and business behavior I don't agree with.
A "productive discussion" doesn't just fall out of the sky by just writing some words. Your assumptions about the situation are fundamentally flawed. Your conclusions are equally egregious. If you want to have any kind of "productive discussion", you will need to start with a proper approach on what is and isn't real, otherwise, you will have no way to discern fact from fiction. And the truth of the matter is, that the new policy is just as much of a nothingburger as the previous outrage about the ToS changes that prohibited stuff like "taunting behavior" in PvP and people lost their 3 neuron minds about it. As if "not being a douchebag to enemies in PvP" is such a hard bar to reach. The same goes for harassing employees.