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Phigs
Jan 23, 2019

I've got a couple complaints without solutions for ya.

Games is not a forum that's good for sifting through for new poo poo because of all the megathreads. The only times I find new stuff in games is because I hear about a game from somewhere else on the forum/internet and then go looking for it. And I guess now because things are changing and I wondered what new stickies we'd get. Some way of being able to actually catch the new stuff would be nice. Like a way to filter out old threads or a list of new/trending threads or whatever.

And for super old megathreads it's annoying to go fishing for the latest version of a game. It's especially annoying when the thread started on announcement, existed through early access, and is now well into release. Those kinda threads could really use some kind of timestamps to make them easier to get into.

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Phigs
Jan 23, 2019

A long post arguing for brevity is inherently funny.

Phigs
Jan 23, 2019

I feel like negativity and positivity come in waves. On release you'll usually get positivity if people bother making a thread on it. If it's a big profile disaster then you'll get negativity instead. While that is going on the opposing side won't bother trying to fight to tide but as the positive/negative hype finishes the people who disagree will come out and share their opinions for a bit. After that the threads tend to be positive regardless unless it's an especially fun game to hate because few people wanna post in a thread of a game they don't like for very long.

Phigs
Jan 23, 2019

Why does this thread suddenly remind me of that old Blizzwatch thread I unbookmarked a while ago because it had become absolute trash?

Phigs
Jan 23, 2019

16-bit Butt-Head posted:

most of this was already covered but i want to talk about a few things myself :D

imo thread bans do not work and they lead to absurd situations like someone eating a longer probation than the person actually posting stupid or offensive poo poo because they commented on a stupid post comparing mild griefing to rape. imo a poster should be punished for the posts they have made not because they broke some arbitrary rule about posting in a thread after an IK or mod told them not to post in it. hell... i actually forgot about blizzwatch for a while until i logged on and saw i had been given a day long prob for making fun of that post a day after i had already made it and waited out my sixer.

as for the blizzwatch thread itself. i PM'd Harrow my thoughts on the matter a few days ago don't know if he read or not and don't care because it wasn't an obligation for them to read it or anything i just wanted to post my thoughts about it while on probation. so i'll just give the short version of what I wrote. mock threads suck. they are only funny for a week or two and once stuff to make fun of runs out it either becomes a creepy cespool of goons stalking people like the star citizen subforum or reposting the same unfunny joke over and over like the doobie threads. chat threads suck too for the similar reasons because they form their own insular communities that are hostile to outsiders because they have grown accustomed to any weird behavior of regular posters in their threads

my final thoughts are that thread IKs are kinda not a good idea unless its the politics forums where slapfights are a common occurance. if a thread needs a dedicated IK just to moderate it then the mods need to evaluate the thread and decide if the thread is really worth having around imo.

I wanna add to this and say that the Blizzwatch thread was relatively good before it became a chat thread. Mostly because it was relatively slow. It was more of a thread that would drop down the page and then when something happened or someone ran into something they hated they'd complain about Blizzard in it and there would be some activity and then it would die down again. But, the fact that it was a thread that stuck around still caused some problems.

Firstly the thread grew its own history and identity. Certain people would behave a certain way in the thread and that would then become a part of the thread identity. So then people would come into the thread and attack the thread as being x or y or z, when really it was just specific posters within the thread. But because those posters were always in the thread their postings got tied to the thread. And because the thread had developed a sort of community over the long time it existed people would feel attacked by the thread being attacked. Then those people who complained about the thread became thread enemies, people who wanted the thread to die, etc. And there was this whole mythology over how all the Blizz fanbois hated criticism and etc etc. Just every fight kinda "stuck" and accumulated because the thread just kept going and it got pretty ugly. You're seeing that ugliness in this thread.

The chat part of the thread came about because of regular derails. Specifically FF14 derails. A number of people argued that the thread was about complaining about Blizzard but a bunch of the other regulars argued that FF14, as a competitor/alternative for WoW, was a valid line of discussion in the Blizz criticism thread. And that last opinion won out. Problem was this opened the floodgates and nobody could criticize the FF14 postings and they became much less "this is what FF14 does different from WoW" to more just straight up chatting about FF14. At that point it just became an anti-Blizzard and pro ff14 flavored chat thread. This aspect was even defended by mods/IKs (I don't pay attention to who is who) who said just let people chat we have a community here why can't they just chat what they want. But I agree with 16-bit Butt-Head that a chat thread built around negativity is not really a healthy thing for the games forum. It can be fine for the more drama-ridden forums like the politics ones but it really doesn't seem to fit games. It's just a massive source of drama. I mean just look at this thread now. You could throw it into QCS or D&D or CSPAM and it would fit right in.

I'm not sure about the exact ways to prevent what happened to the Blizzwatch thread but hopefully mods have some ideas based on how it went down.

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