In my opinion, my opponent would be totally within his right to call my strategy 'annoying', or some variation of the term. Why not? I wouldn't say that he is personally insulting me if that were the case. All it is, is that the series of decisions I've made in the game have contributed to, for him, an unfun gameplay environment.
All that being said, your opponent in the first picture obviously went overboard and wished death upon your family. Personally I would probably laugh my ass off if somebody said something so ridiculous to me after an AoE game, but I can totally see how somebody could be genuinely hurt by a comment like that. There's an obvious difference though between what the guy in the screenshot did, and just simply calling a strategy 'cancer' and being done with it.
Most of the back and forth is not whether that behavior is acceptable (which it should be noted, some seem to disagree with somehow,) but whether or not creating a culture where people freely castigate certain strategies makes the "overboard," behavior more likely to occur -- after all Streamer jimbob called the Frank Scout strategy cancer, toxic, garbage, ****, etc. I feel confident and comfortable with calling opponent X a cockbag because I lost to their Frank Scout rush.
Or on whether labelling something "cancer, degenerate" et al is appropriate discourse.
Or how there is a difference between losing to strategy X vs. strategy Y, when the game makes no distinction.
Some people don't agree that this is the case. I think it's fairly obvious that this has impact(s). Some don't disagree, but opine that it's not their responsibility. (ie: my actions may or may not have consequences but I am not responsible, even if contributing to such an environment indirectly.)
Rest of the posts are varying flavors of vanilla of the above in support of or against.
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