I was the front man for a HL2 mod called Dystopia. We never made it big, but we did have a decent sized, vocal and opinionated playerbase. I'd done my best to promote a positive community and for the most part all the feedback we received was fairly civil. I'm not trying to say that my experience was anything like what Fish and the guy from Treyarch have had to deal with.

With those caveats out of the way; when I did have to deal with abusive feedback, I focused on two things:

1) I could easily separate my real life person from the "Fuzzy" persona I cultivated on the internet.

2) If our little game had prompted someone to get so worked up that they were going to rape and kill my kittens because we were making changes to a weapon, then we'd done something right.

I'd been a hardcore, vocal gamer before I had to deal with hardcore vocal gamers. I wasn't abusive, but I had felt that passion from both sides. I didn't like, tolerate or condone people who were abusive, but I tried to understand where the passion was coming from.