Damned if you do, Damned if you don't...

I was hit today with some news that has thoroughly disappointed me.  My character is basically being attacked by people I don’t even know (nor are willing to even attack me directly).  Slandering my name on a forum that I never even visit.

While playing on PGR2 on Xbox Live, someone let me know that I should check out the official Xbox forums concerning some comments about Xbox Friends Thing.

I’m being accused of first off showing fake screen shots for an application that doesn’t exist and then being accused that my web service is being used to steal .NET Passport credentials. I understand that this might be unavoidable, however, at least before attacking me, come up with some sort of proof. I don’t know if these people are just jealous or what?  And if they are, why? The only thing I can think of that would have ticked people off is when I stated that I’d prefer to not to shared some of the solutions to the problems that I encountered to the general public.

It’s crap like this that makes a person really reconsider creating a free tool for the benefit of a large community. My previous gamer community project that I released to general populous, AC Mapper, didn’t have anything like these kinds of people saying such things (of course, I wasn’t retrieving information from another source either), but it was still an application that got installed from an “unknown source”.  People used it and loved it. It did the basics… and spawned a whole slew of clones that took this concept much further than I ever imagined. More power to those people, they created excellent replacements to what I first introduced.

I do have to say, I really appreciate others that don’t personally know me defending Xbox Friends Thing… to you, I say “Thank You!”.  This might just be enough to keep me working on this project. I don’t know how I should react or feel. I worked pretty hard on this with many a sleepless night to solve the problems. The amount of emails I’m receiving is pretty amazing as well asking for tweaks here and there with some pretty interesting ideas that I plan on implementing. But if this is the type of thing that I’m going to be facing… I’m not sure I’m interested in fighting an up hill battle for something that I’m not getting paid for. Tell me what you think… I want to hear your opinions on this.

UPDATE: spell checkers… sometimes they work, other times… well… ;-)