So this is why I am posting this here, in my dev journal, which is "my territory", so to say.
It all started a few days ago when I posted this thread in the Lounge.
It wasn't the most feasible or practical idea ever, but in a perfect world people would just ignore it, politely tell you why the idea is bad, or just debate on ways this could be done, just for the sake of it.
In the real world, on the other hand, and sadly on our colorfull Lounge in particular, just disagreeing with someone is not good enough. You have to act like a pig about it, and really insult and ridicule that person. You have to make subsequent idiotic parody threads, just to emphasis how much that person sucks. And don't forget the main ingredient: The rating system has to be used to it's full extent and just rate down that person, because, well, he disagrees with you.
This is obviously not an isolated incident. Over the time I've been relatively nice and polite on the gamedev.net forums. I did help people every once in a while, and lately I had rarely asked for any help in return. Either way, I believe I helped people far more than I've been helped. I never hesitated to share my knowledge on MMORPGs, either in articles, replies on the forum, or PMs.
I was also pretty open about my beliefs (mainly that there is a creator and inherent purpose in this Universe) and this caused a lot of people here to rate me down, because if I don't think like them I must be the enemy. Obviously, having divergent oppinions means that I am a moron, and morons are not only unhelpful, but also dangerous, and they have to be eliminated.
In the past, only a few hundread years ago, we were burning people for saying that the Earth is revolving around the sun (from a heliocentric point of view).
This days, fortunately, there are laws in most of the countries that would prevent you from killing someone just because they disagree with your views. Unfortunately, people's mentality didn't change much, so instead of killing you they are trying to hurt you with whatever tools they have available. In this case, the only tools are the rating system and the 'keyboard'.
Don't get me wrong, I am not leaving because of my rating. If it were under 1K, maybe I would have left because of it. But since it is pretty high, that's not the real reason.
The real reason is, as you might have guessed, people being assholes. Jumping at your throat and trying to exploit any perceived weakness. They belive that only because they 'know' that there is no God and the evolution (pure random chance) is the way it happened, they are supperior. It doesn;t matter that many of them didn't achieve anything useful in their lives, it doesn't matter if they know or not anything about science, what matters to them is that they are clearly superior for not believing in something so stupid as the idea of a creator.
I find this kind of attitude disgusting, and I do not wish to share my knowledge with such people, nor do I want to spend my time in their company. This is the reason I am leaving.
Oh, and I have nothing against those who believe in evolution, as long as they respect the fact that others don't.
To end this long rant, I will still update my journal until my subscription expires (in January) and I will respond to my PMs here.
Don't take it personally. We are all of us anonymous faces behind virtual identities. Some people view that as a License to Insult and Generally be an Asshat. They may abuse the rating system, but in the end it balances out. I don't pay attention to how high a rating is. The only thing that matters is whether or not it's red. In the end, the morons will eventually get banned and the good guys won't.
So rather than abandoning GDNet, why not just forego the Lounge and continue to put your knowledge to use helping others who appreciate it in relevant forums? Save general discussions like your Mars idea for rational people who have the ability to participate in an intelligent conversation and forget about morons who hide behind their anonymity.