Oh my god. Calm your tits people! We are friends, not enemies. Correct with kindness, not with harsh criticism, even if the article is not up to your standards.
I like harsh criticism a lot more than kindness though. It's nice to receive harsh criticism. When you receive harsh criticism, you learn how to improve whatever it is that you're working on, and when you've finally managed to do a great job and receive positive feedback from the same guys, you know that they're not just trying to be polite, but your work was genuinely good. Then you'll have more confidence in the future when you're doing more of that stuff, which helps you make better decisions and get better results.
When your work sucks and you receive feedback from people who are trying to be kind, you don't learn anything useful, your work will continue to suck, you'll keep making more bad works in the future, and you'll never improve yourself until someone breaks it down for you. In the worst case scenario, you have something else to blame for your mediocrity (such as, not being the best Dominion player ever, not having the most expensive top-end equipment for whatever it is that you're doing, etc), and then the wishy-washy feedback makes you think that you're doing a good job, but the other stuff is holding you back from creating excellent works, and then you just "accept" that your works can never be as good as the works by people who don't have the other stuff holding them back, or maybe you'll start trying to improve the circumstances in hopes of getting rid of your imaginary obstacles, but it will never happen because you're not fixing the main problem which is yourself. I have totally suffered from people trying to be overly kind to me in this way, and it sucks.
So yeah, if you want to be helpful, offer harsh criticism. If you want to be harmful, offer kindness. If you don't want to be harsh or harmful, just do what I've done here for the most parts and shut up.
This is not quite accurate, I think. It really depends on who you're talking to. Things vary by person, but in general when people are just getting into something, it's good to focus on what they're doing well so that they feel encouraged to keep working at it. When someone is already pretty good at something, it's much better to help them find mistakes so they can continue improving. I recall reading a study in which novice and experienced musicians were told to either focus on their strengths or on their weaknesses. Novices improved more with the former and experts more with the latter.
I do in general agree with you that honesty is better, but being mean or rude rarely helps.
I think part of the problem here is that it doesn't really seem like there's that much to say about HG. I mean, it draws a ton, is expensive, and has a TfB effect. It works pretty much how you'd expect such a card to work. I think the most interesting things I've seen are Stef's comments that you may want to overbuild a little more in the presence of TfB and that its close to twice as good as smithy.
