Before Christmas, a funny thing happened in Destiny 2, and by funny, we mean terrible. Bungie introduced the holiday Dawning Event, which was little more than a vendor everyone refers to as Eververse, a vendor that sells items for real money. Fans were… upset. Now, more than a week later and with the holidays over, we thought we would check in to see if the forums had died down. While the rage has abated some, the forums are still clearly raging with hate, as the entire front page is nothing but criticisms of Eververse and Bungie.

There is something seriously wrong with a community when one of the top voted posts on theforum is to burn a vendor. And this post, which has 600 upvotes, says only a single line in its post: “Burn it to the ground.” We’re no experts on community building, but it sounds a lot like Destiny 2 needs to be trying to figure out how to put out this raging fire as it consumes their fanbase. We aren’t sure waiting for it to burn out is really the best approach when people are close to raising literal torches to come after you.

Interestingly, Bungie’s response to constant threats of torching their vendor has been fairly understated. In fact, Bungie has only responded once to the chaos of their forums and fans in the weeks that this has gone on, and they did so casually and hidden inside of a post about other content. After two paragraphs discussing factions and Raid Itemization, Bungie had this to say:

It sounds a lot like Bungie’s answer was to tell fans they would deal with them later, especially because they end the post with a comment about vault space as another ‘hot topic’ they are working on. But we aren’t sure vault space qualifies as a hot topic until your forums are consumed by threats of burning them to the ground.

Some companies have embraced interacting with communities, and some have just pretended to. League of Legends dealt with a similar controversy – although much smaller – and their response was much different. They came out and not only said ‘we hear you’, they came out and said ‘we fixed this within hours of your complaint’. And they took to Reddit to have a real person type a response to a complaint. They didn’t bury their response in a load of BS about other updates. But Bungie has been taking pointers from the EA community management team, which is mostly to let your content burn and then try to sift through the ashes looking for cash.