I said:
I cannot really imagine that 40 people individually decided that Dawn needed reamed.
If you can tell me this is exactly what happened, then so be it. With a sample size this large with the same opinion, it's hard to believe that there wasn't collusion, subconscious or otherwise. I'm not calling for a conspiracy, and certainly not across the entire set, but 40 people? Yeah, not buying it was a statistical fluke.
edit: Let me put it this way: If one-fifth of the game's active population all individually decided that Dawn needed condemned, then maybe it wasn't a dog-piling. Maybe it was a real, if visceral, opinion of the game's population.
Staff decided that it wasn't, that one-fifth of the game's population was hatin'. That's...a huge chunk of the game's population, on any size game, to decide are abusive. Without comment to them about their actions.
Can you take a hater and make them play nice? I don't know. I wasn't given that choice. One-fifth of the game's population was. Call it good or call it bad, I'll call it a thing that adds into the overall staff culture. It is what it is.
My personal application of Occam's Razor in what I know of this situation (i.e., what's been posted here) make the 'small conspiracies' make a hell of a lot more sense.
(i'm done, i swear)