No. As I've already said, I am in no way defending GOG. All I'm doing is giving the straight dope here:
They don't give a crap and probably never will give a crap.
Is it good? No. Should they get a free pass on it? Not in the least. But it's the reality of the situation. Once again I tell you that they promised they were going to fix the rep issue FOUR FREAKIN' YEARS AGO. What in the world do you or anybody else seriously expect to get from them regarding that other than the classic "We're working on it!™" line? Is one of them gonna suddenly break down and go "Look, I'm not officially supposed to tell you this, but...the rep? We've been betting on it as an office game. Firek has $50 riding on tinyE hitting the negs within the next 3 months. Oh, also, we gave the 6 who came to visit us 500 rep each to keep them quiet."
Alaric's insane antics already quite thoroughly proved to us that pretty much anybody with actual in-depth web coding experience could completely wreck this place with little effort.

Just read some of the previous postings the "whatever" six posted (including myself) and you would at least see that the first assumption is wrong. I also posted here that even in the invitation it was mentioned that we also critizised several of the latest decisions GOG did.

I still cannot say if the whole thing was a PR thing only but I doubt it. Just look at the costs they had and how many people are now pro GOG only because of that. Not many I would say. Most of them are now waiting for things to happen and the meeting did not change much in that regard. But now imagine the costs for GOG for six people coming to them. Imo not worth it if this was just a PR thing. I can however assure you that the OP is NOT written by any PR department. It's just JMichs draft which the other 5 added and edited some things. GOG just did check the writing to see if nothing NDA related is posted openly. They did NOT wirite anything in it.

Sophisticated? Really? Then I guess you did not have talked with really sophisticated people. I cannot say much more to it because as I stated above GOG did not write anything from the OP. It was told to us that DRM-free will stay even in the future and even though we can see that the gaming industry is moving towards multiplayer online ect. it will be possible to play the game at least in single player without any connection necessary. So how would you post this in an OP? Blame JMich that he has such a good wording in summarizing this fact?

Naivité in a business is not really an excuse - wouldn't you say? It was our understanding that they did not mean no harm when doing it the way they did. That does not mean that it still wasn't wrong so the only explanation must have been naivité.

Maybe both? Would that be so unreasonable?
GOG could as well told us that they are trying to fix those issues and they are planning to do this and that and whatnot. Instead they told us that they will completely rebuild this because this would be the best solution which we probably all agree to.

1) The NDA is even stated in the OP so there's no secret. And as it has been told mutiple times it's nothing extraordinary in business when you are about to talk business strategies, plans and numbers. It's a simple requirement and it was also stated in the invitation. So all of us knew that we had to sign this.

2) Everything by the 6 and none by GOG.

3) Because maybe we think (although I can only speak for myself) that it's better to be optimistic and try to get this work, doing constructive critizism rather that just yelling that everything was bad and therefore will stay bad without (reasonable) suggestions how to make it better.

I was three weeks. Still not very much time to plan things, but much better than one week. ;)

Then I wasn't specific enough. I did read the OP and I know that they signed an NDA due to being exposed to privy information. My questions is this: die they sign a NDA or gag order that prohibited them from expressing their true thoughts and opinions in the OP?
The OP still reads more like a fancy PR post disguised as an honest opinion or like a post on a news site that is actually an ad in disguise without being properly labelled as an ad which contains mild criticism and mostly positive aspects.

Why should I know them? From time to time I visit the forums to dissect more or less rdiculous posts or give my opinon.

I can't see what was exchanged behind closed doors. All I see is a pretty PR-ish OP making GOG looking good from almost all angles.

Doubt it. As I already said, they'd have taken advantage of this long before now, sharing pictures all over social media and cheering about how they care so much about this community. The fact that this was done so completely under-the-radar disproves that theory, unless you'd like to argue that they're trying to butter up the forumites, which, considering how much lack of attention they've given this place, I'd find laughable at best. If they know ANYTHING about us, they'd know that even this would hardly be enough to suddenly stop us all from complaining.
Pretty sure it was based on who were their most intelligent critics. I know some of the people who were invited and can confirm they were some of the most eloquent and outspoken of the community.
That's just how JMich writes. There's even been a forum in-joke for years about it implying he's a secret agent working for GOG, unless you seriously believe he IS some kind of sleeper agent trying to brainwash us all.
Why would it be their highest priority? It barely affects them in terms of sales, and this is a store, after all. Unless you think they truly are caring about us from the goodness of their hearts, the only reason they could possibly care about the forum is to make it a habitable/tolerable place (we've gotten a bad rap for the amounts of toxicity that have run through here in the past). So yes, until they can get their collective rears in gear and rehaul this place, the best they can manage is better moderation. The introduction of it has quite clearly done SOMEthing to improve the place, considering most of the old, regular trolls who used to haunt nearly every thread are much more subdued now and in a state of relative dormancy.
There's an NDA, all of it was written by them, and to suggest any of them are incapable of critical, logical thinking like you are only displays that you know nothing of these people.
I thought CyraxPT got his about a week and a half before the date, or am I misremembering?
Even still, you'd think they'd have given more time than that if inviting people from North America who need to get passports together and such.

Well whats the point then?

The people who were chosen were chosen because they are known, respected, trusted even, by the community here. Full disclosure as you haven't read the thread, I was invited but couldn't go.

If you knew the people involved, as most regular users of this forum do, then you are more likely to be in a position to trust they are being honest, not because GOG has told them what to do or say, but because they are decent people with GOG and it's community's best interests at heart.

But if you don't know them, if you don't use the forum then of course it will just look like a PR stunt.

Trust me when I tell you they aren't under some kind of conspiracy-theory-level gag order like several others in the thread have suggested. The fact that they even bothered to invite CyraxPT, who was utterly pissed at GOG (and the community, for that matter) to put it MILDLY, disproves that for me.

I can understand how it looks PR-ish to you, especially if you aren't a regular and don't know the users involved, but...what else did you expect from the FIRST POST? The whole purpose of it (and this thread, really) is to give information about what they discussed and to explain, as best they can without breaking the NDA, the responses they received to their questions. If you want criticism, ask them their opinions directly.

Yes, I have to agree here. And yes, I think the fact that they did not make this a newspost was in fact on purpose to prevent people coming here seeing as a first thing that GOG is removing games. And like I said it is a small step and there probably is still much room for improvement. At least they did it a sticky after a while.

I guess it was more two weeks notice we had and they also said several times that this probably was not ideal. Remember that they wanted to have more people there that had to decline mostly because of the short notice. I highly doubt they did that on purpose to get us as unprepared as possible.

Edit: I just looked it up. I got the mail on 09/08/2017 and the meeting was starting on 09/25/017.

If the general perception of the OP depends on "knowing" the 6 people who got invited and their apperances on the forums and their style of writing and language it really wasn't properly thought through.

It's as you said: for people like me who don't know those 6 the OP looks like a PR stunt - and that is something that could've been avoided.

Not sure. He talked about it about it a week and half before the meeting, but I have no idea when he got the invitation. I got mine three weeks before.

For the most part your standard forum user isn't too concerned with proper language and grammar.
That in combination with the topic of the OP did raise a flag and I was compelled to investigate.

Wow, this thread got really stupid in the last 12 hours.

In this specific forum, I can think of 2 users who deliberately ignore proper spelling and grammar. There are a few more that make small mistakes (which can usually be explained through either typing speed or because English is not their native language), but in general the writing level in the forum is decent to good.
Do also recall that GOG's user base was on the older side when they started, so there weren't that many l33t speakers (even if it could be understood), and even though a younger crowd may have arrived, the older mentality (and writing style) still remains.

No, because it was aimed at the community who regularly uses this forum. People who know or recognise the various people who were invited (and there were a few more than just the people who went).

It's not really meant for anyone else, that's why they invited people from this community. No offence meant, but that is obviously not you.