Just want to add I don't doubt that they were actually bullying/harassing you, its been going on since COH1 in Barton's case. Just stick to that. If you try to make this a "how dare they antagonize people like me!" issue, you won't get very much sympathy.
However, it will damage our competitive scene's & community's long term health since it tells people our top players can fuck with anyone, including other top players
Either the harassment is bad enough to warrant a ban no matter who was on the receiving end, or it was just mere trolling. It seems you want to go persecuting anyone that gets under the skin of a "prominent member" which is silly because you can't even quantify that. No, people shouldn't be purged just because they pissed off somebody that was livestreaming, sorry. I want them banned as much as anyone, but not because they dared troll the almighty shadowwada.
If your worried that people seeing Barton and Price being turds on twitch will have any affect on the playerbase size of COH2, Relic is already responsible for way more player loss by milking DLC, making Axis useless, Brits, etc.
Life would go on without Barton. But Wada the whole "they should do it for me because I'm a prominent person" attitude is stupid. What the fuck does that even mean? He should be banned because he's a dipshit, that's all.
Ban them. This is relatively mild by itself, but they should've been banned many times already. In the past Barton has: defamed people by using their names and acting like a fuckhead, suspended from Relic Online and GR for exploiting, exploited twitch bugs to make game crash for Relic devs while they are live streaming, harassment, bullying, continued bug exploiting in COH2, and the list goes on. Not sure about Price, but I know he exploits the shit out of bugs and hangs with Barton 24/7, so wouldn't be surprised.
And I don't like banning people because they did or said something that was a little mean, but when they are legitimate bullies, plus exploit the game and impersonate other people (which believe me has gotten people falsely banned from Relic before) they need to go. QueenRatchet and Nullist are both permabanned for less.
This is not how I remember things. The shitposting started long before release, during beta, because some could not - and still have not - come to terms with the fact that vCoH was no longer being supported and extended. On top of that, there was plenty of this bad blood and Relic-hate, for reasons just as silly and spurious, from the VCoH days anyway.
So no, this idyllic pre-lapsarian paradise of community involvement is, I think, a complete fiction, a figment of your imagination. Or indeed, of self-justification.
Well you thought wrong. The reality is you just weren't involved in it. How many Relic devs have you had come join your own teamspeak/vent server? My money is on zero. Reborn has had on PQ, Pierro, Eagleheart, and if you include SNF interviews then Tribalbob and Quinn Duffy. Just because some guys on the fringe were salty all along does not represent the community as a whole (particularly the original content producers and staff).
This is why the community must stand together. If we can steer relic into making good balance updates, our esports scene will grow. The bigger the scene, the more content we will have
I think you're relatively new to COH scene so I'll fill you in. This was exactly the attitude everyone had going back to the pre-release and beta days. Community members even helped Relic find leaked gameplay videos on youtube to get taken down just to be nice and build bridges. Relic proceeds to shit on said community by disregarding what most the top players were saying about balance and mechanics, milking DLC after having said they would not, their Toxicity™ thread here, and so on. Then about 6 months after COH2 release Relic went through multiple phases of these patch tester alpha groups, with mostly new faces. A handful of the old breed stuck around, but Relic wanted a positivity echo chamber feedback group. Then everytime they had one of these alpha groups that was comprised of increasingly newer players eager to be in the Relic good ole boys club, that naively thought things would be different this time, they got burned too.
Repeat cycle multiple times and fast forward 2-3 years, now many of the people that were brainwashed by some of the simpleton plebs on this site to blindly hate the old school COH1 "elitists" like Tommy, Aimstrong, Kolaris, Budwise, Inverse, etc. for no good reason, came to realize they were right and Relic just doesn't give a fuck. Then every now and then they might do some token PR stunt like making the community fund their tournament for them under the guise of buying skins, but its not enough to shake the legacy of Comcast tier customer support.
Don't count on them ever "fixing" COH2 lol. Even Relics crown jewel vcoh was abandoned before reaching that state. All they had to do was fix two glaring bugs and possibly a very small balance patch, but nope they couldn't even do that. COH2's balance is a far cry from decent, the game is polluted with who knows how many bugs, and DoW3 has been announced. COH1s farewell patch came before they announced COH2, so its pretty safe to say at this point that COH2 is RIP (there may still be minor patches, not much else).