[Jach]

> death threats are not appropriate

GP's word was "unacceptable", not "not appropriate", but I think yours is probably the better position for such a vaguely defined term as "death threat".

On the more meta level as one commenter points out how sometimes "death threats" can be used as a DDOS attack on a person, they can also sometimes be used to get undeserved sympathies. Making up alleged offenses is not new and many people seem to just take this guy (who we know is a liar) at his word that these vague terrible things happened that he doesn't want to go into more details about. (I should clarify that I don't really doubt that he received hate mail and possibly other communications that could be classified "death threat" by some people, this being the internet, and the people involved being gamers. But hate mail is merely inappropriate, generally speaking; it's rude. A specific piece of hate mail could be unacceptable, it depends.)

[jamesgeck0]

"Death threat" is a specific term; it has a legal definition in most states. There are no appropriate or acceptable death threats. It doesn't matter if you think they're not consequential; they had the desired effect on the person receiving the threat.

This whole argument is strongly reminiscent of attempts to discredit female game developers who were being harassed during GamerGate.