Forum goers haven’t changed. Users on forums such as this one have been largely the same in tone, in volume of complaints, in stupid posts, in constructive posts, in “I hate/love the dev” posts since forever. There’s no significant drop in the quality of the posts here, it’s simply a choice by Blizzard staff to not engage with people on the forums. Probably because of their own posting habits where they’d rather use these other sites, because of the increasingly soulless corporate nature of Blizzard, or because they feel that it’s more worth their time since they can probably reach a wider audience there.
That said, assuming that they are indeed hiding from the forums to avoid “overwhelmingly negative” comments, then that is truly pathetic. A lot of people will only come to the forums when they feel there is something with or in the game. Of course there will be an excessive amount of negative comments about the game and people’s frustrations with it, that is the nature of these things. Especially when it’s the forum of a game that has “failed” but still clings to life. Updates will slow, development staff will be cut, compounding the frustrations of the players even further as the problems they see are not being fixed, leading to even more frustrated posts.
Never should a game developer isolate themselves from the negative feedback they receive on their game if they care about its quality. Yes, there will be a lot of people throwing around dumb complaints. You don’t have to take every single post on the forum seriously, you can gloss over most of it. But, it’s a gauge to find out what sort of issues your audience has with your game. What do they like about it, what do they not like about it, what’s frustrating, what issues are gaining a lot of traction, is it something we can fix, are we concentrating our development time in the right areas, etc etc.
This is useful feedback that is critical to keeping in touch with the pulse of your playerbase. If you only surround yourself with positive feedback, and ask those that are already complacent what they would like to see in the game, then you will become blind to the problems that your game is currently facing. If your playerbase is largely unhappy with your game, then only addressing the happy ones will mean ignoring the majority of your market. No one likes being told that they did a bad job, but opting to continue to do the job badly while receiving a pat on the back for it is a far worse alternative.
And on the Paradox devs in particular, I have quite a bit of experience with HOI4 myself, and that game is a mess. The DLCs are expensive, the game engine has run like garbage since day 1 and still does to this day, each new expansion they add creates more and more problems with the game, playing on a version of the game that’s been updated for a new DLC without purchasing that DLC often leads to many game-breaking problems rendering it unplayable without purchasing it. Yes, I would imagine they face quite a bit of negativity in their forums because they continue to pump out new DLCs and develop new systems without fixing existing broken ones.