When they get to name calling then let the mods do their job. I think all this flagging is petty and we really have no answer as to why they are being flagged other than the fact the guy who is flagging is nothing more than a big fat baby whose feelings got hurt.
…
If we had mods able to act we wouldn’t see so much flagging, and other stuff that gets in teh way. Or at least not have to wait so long until such situation would be taken care of.
2 Likes
Part of me wants to say flagging should have a penalty associated, like “you can’t post for 30 minutes if you flag”, but that just discourages raising things to mods’ attention.
The solution is more mods. I don’t really expect to see it. The team running this game really hates delegating any power to outsiders, or isn’t allowed to.
1 Like
It’s not quite irony I think, but there is something interesting going on here.
1 Like
What if we made a Capture the Flag forums game out of it?
1 Like
Oh snap you’re right! I need to get modded. Me and my biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiig mouth! 
1 Like
Is it?
I used to own and run a 45k+ member community in G+, and never appointed any mods nor censored anyone: the community did that themselves by blocking posters whose content they disliked, and skipping over any comments/posts from members they may still want to interact with in the future.
It did not become a troll breeding ground, and instead members could find compatible interactions even in topics that may not be the mod’s cup of tea.
We already have a censorship trend officially incorporated into these forums since late last year: seeing how things were in these forums since I joined somewhere in 2018 (lack of any significant trolling) and what they have become since official censorship was incorporated (documented selective deletions even in non-bug posts), I’d argue that we need less censorship, and more of a Lyya approach.
Not sure More Mods would achieve that target.
2 Likes
There is a huge difference between fanmade groups and official business forums for feedback and game design interaction.
Each new forum user joining will not instantly be aware to block someone fooling around with profle pictures of political personalities, from the present and past, or someone trolling for the sheer joy of causing dismay and chagrin to other people.
I find strange that people are afraid of moderation, and just to put more emphasis on it I’m speaking of MODERATION not CENSORSHIP. Both things are quite different from each other.
3 Likes
Censorship is illegal. If you want to accuse the devs of censorship, then you should be talking to a lawyer about it. People overuse this word and water it down, this is being done so actual governments that want to practice censorship can more easily get away with it using whataboutism. “My political opponents didn’t let that child rapist and white supremacist have his protest at a funeral, so I don’t think your environmental protest about fracking should be legal either!” False equivalence.
This is a private forum operated and moderated by a private entity. They get to define what is good and bad discourse here. They can suppress or promote any kind of speech they want, because they are not a government and this is not public property. “Public property” has a legal definition, this isn’t it, and I’ve already wasted too much time so if you’re legitimately curious about censorship law use the internet to study it.
As to moderation style, I’m glad you had such a large, vibrant community. Here’s my anecdote to counter yours. I’ve been part of communities of every size from a dozen to millions. The ones that self-moderate like Reddit or Stack Overflow like to say they are civil and peaceful, but the users self-organize in ways that alienate and exclude people who they don’t like. The people who operate the site rarely see that because they aren’t the ones being harassed and excluded.
So I’m skeptical and believe you have nostalgia glasses on. Your community was probably peaceful for a 45k+ member community, but you’re probably downplaying a handful of major problems that arose and were dealt with to your satisfaction. They still left some parties unhappy, and since you individually weren’t as accessible as you might have been in a smaller community you either didn’t know or didn’t care.
GoW is a small internet forum. We already have “less moderators” in the sense that for large periods of time we have “no moderators”. We already have “hide” in the sense of flags. And we have a very different problem from your community: problem members in the GoW community abuse any feature they have to harass people they don’t like. For example:
- Regulars lost the ability to moderate by editing titles because one member decided to start editing every one of my titles to insult me and his other targets.
- Users have abused the flagging system so much it’s been weakened.
The moderation style you propose is appropriate for large forums with a general conversation focus. Aside from hyperbolic examples, it’s too hard to define what’s “too controversial” so it’s best to let users police those. I called out above this still alienates people, but such is the burden of government: it’s mostly about defining a process for defining who you care about making unhappy when a decision has to be made. If your community’s goal is NOT to avoid alienating any opinion, it works.
I have a feeling that will go wrong for GoW forums, because at least 25% of “discussion” about any game feature still involves members aggressively and rudely expressing that the people who believe things should or should not be changed should shut up and injure themselves. You yourself have been the victim of flag abuse. All I see in your idea is you think it’s wiser to let members police forum content than the owners of the forum. I warn you: more members disagree with your personal slant than you think.
Thus, I think it’d be better to appoint a few community members to police content. My opinion is the handful of people I think are worthy are less likely to delete your posts than the devs who already do it. I behave very differently when I moderate than when I’m a user. I feel like they’re likely to explain via DM why a post was hidden, so long as the person asking for explanation made a good-faith request for the reasoning.
As-is, we do self-police. Occasionally I’ve seen your posts deleted or hidden in bad situations. I try to raise inappropriately-flagged posts to the moderators that do exist. The problem is our moderation staff has very obvious periods where they do not or cannot access the forums that last more than 24 hours.
That means if a user hides your post with flags, and they get 10 or 15 of their friends to also flag it, you are hosed for possibly up to 3 days, as we have been RE: the current good example of why moderation stinks here. Do you really want to reject a moderation style that is more likely to keep your posts in view?
TL;DR points
- I agree that for 45k+ active members, moderation for anything but hyperbolic cases is impossible. In these situations, giving users good self-moderation tools is key.
- This comes at a cost: the community can decide to snuff out good opinions just because they go against the grain.
- The solution for that is: moderators that enforce disagreement with self-policing.
- Keep in mind the worst-case scenario for democracy is when two wolves and one sheep are debating what’s for dinner. It’s not perfect. Neither are “solutions” to this scenario. What matters is if you are arguing we should care about sheep.
- GoW has maybe between 50 and 250 active members.
- In a small community, having a trusted set of community moderators works better than self-policing, because it’s too easy for a cadre of trolls to abuse self-moderation.
- If we went by just “majority rule”, we’d still have slavery in the United States. There was a war about this, and it’s the reason at some point Democrats and Republicans changed polarity. It’s also the reason we have “Baptists” and “Southern Baptists” still. I am exactly 1 Kevin Bacon number from people who still celebrate “Robert E. Lee Day” instead of MLK’s holiday, and they still vote for the candidate most likely to oppress. It is folly to pretend bad actors don’t exist in democratic systems. People don’t vote for what’s best for society. They vote for what most aligns with their tainted beliefs.
- This is why a powerful nation with both the highest infection and death rate from COVID-19 also has the only world leader exclaiming he’s doing a good job. That’s not a good model for building a community.
- It is possible for “what people want to hear” and “what is true” to be entirely different things. People want for COVID-19 to be over and go back to work. It doesn’t give a flip what people want. But people voted for politicians who say what they want to hear, not what they need to hear.
- This is why I inherently distrust a community that self-polices. They tend to vote for what they agree with, with little consideration as to whether uncomfortable but valid ideas deserve expression. Then they use “the community voted” as an excuse for “this is the only idea we allow.”
- At least in a “small moderation staff” situation, you can see when the community’s desires are dramatically against the moderators’ interests and decide who is the baby and who is the one eating vegetables.
- This is why a powerful nation with both the highest infection and death rate from COVID-19 also has the only world leader exclaiming he’s doing a good job. That’s not a good model for building a community.
3 Likes
From what I hear we have a couple non inf+2 employees as mods and that is fine. I don’t know who they are, don’t care tbh.
What I don’t want to see is more. We have enough holier than thou players on here as it is and handing some of them a mod position would make it worse.
There is already favoritism when it comes to warnings. An example, I copied and pasted the snail story from Training Day, censored the cuss words and it was removed and I was warned for swearing. Meanwhile I see multiple comments that are still up with uncensored cuss words, no warnings or comment removal for them.
There is no need for more mods on here.
1 Like
Appendix to my post, this is relevant re: people who were interested in my last comments:
If you allow me to polarize, I see discussion forming around two ideas here and creating three groups.
- One group consists of the people who are fairly happy with GoW right now. They are having a good time and want to have positive discussions about GoW. I’ll call them the “positives” for the heck of it.
- Another group consists of the people who are very unhappy with GoW right now. They make threads about what they want to change, what shouldn’t have changed, or what is coming that they wish wasn’t changing. I’ll call them the “negatives”.
- The Jerks have some overlap in both groups. Some are positives, some are negatives. What this group has in common is they seek to suppress any discussion from the other side and aren’t afraid to use malicious tactics or harassment to accomplish it.
The main discourse of the past few months has sort of followed two paths:
- The Negatives make several topics per week, whether or not there is a bug. If there isn’t a bug, there’s some aspect of the game they want to discuss changing.
- The Positives feel that negativity is dominating the forum, and there isn’t enough discussion about how everything is great.
- The Jerks fan the flames by inciting negative meta-discussion, derailing threads, and playing innocent when called out.
I think the positives fear more moderation because they worry if the forums are more negative than positive, new moderators will police positive content until it’s not possible to praise parts of the game one likes. I think the negatives fear more moderation because there has been a very real history of the devs erasing content or, in a recent case, openly mocking a player who posted a very civil thread about potential improvements. I think the jerks exploit that these groups are afraid of each other and work to create situations where a Negative and a Positive start an Actual Fight, while the Jerk stands back and says, “Oh, I didn’t do anything, I was just stating my opinion” etc.
–
In terms of video game forum discourse, there is nothing wrong with the discussion tilting “negative” in a long-lived live-updating game. Everyone has a favorite feature, and you probably have an idea for how it could be better.
So some people get mad that they post how they really like their favorite mode, and someone always posts about a flaw in it. Or they get mad because they feel people only want to discuss the flaws. Thing is, “I like PvP and hope nothing ever changes” doesn’t really invite a rousing discussion if the only thing people can do is agree. On the other hand, “I wish PvP matchmaking worked different, here’s my idea” is interesting, because if you ask 10 people there’s at least 15 ideas between them of how it might be changed. Negative posts are about change, which leads to more discussion.
The Jerks are capitalizing on how the Positives feel about this, though. It means we’ll get a post that goes like this:
A: I was thinking about PvP and I feel like this kind of team scoring algorithm would work better…
B: You don’t like anything about the game! Why don’t you just quit or go play a game that’s made the way you like it?
B might be a “Positive”, but right now they’re playing the Jerk. Their goal is to either:
- Get the OP to stop discussing the game at all.
- Force the OP to only express whatever opinion B believes.
- Get OP to derail their own thread by getting involved in a personal argument instead of pointing out B is off-topic.
- Whine relentlessly about being oppressed when people correctly flag B as off-topic.
Negatives tend to want the game to be better, and are trying to bring that about by discussing improvements. Positives already think the game is fine, and want to have discussion about the game that doesn’t involve changing it. Jerks only serve to make other people miserable. No community is better for having Jerks in it.
So stop pretending the problem is that people want to discuss the game in a negative light. Acknowledge the problem is people who are very skilled at disguising their trolling as “just having a discussion”. It’s really easy to tell: they can’t make a post without listing why the person they reply to is bad, and rarely bother to lay out a case for why the idea is bad. The longer they linger, the more frustrated everyone will get.
This isn’t a problem flagging and downvotes fix. It’s a problem that takes a fairly heavy-handed moderation style to address, and I don’t think it’s bad enough to warrant that. However, currently the Jerks know they can get away with what they do for 3+ days with no consequences, and often they’re more interested in short-term gains than long-term reputation. That’s why I support a larger moderation staff with better time coverage.
4 Likes
Case in point! Here’s the kind of post that contributes absolutely nothing to the forums.
It’s a discussion about Life and Death, which gag me is so boring at this point. But so many people’s arguments boil down to what we see in this post:
- “You suck at the game.”
- “I’m really good at the game.”
- “If you were good at the game you wouldn’t want it to be nerfed.”
That is not an argument, and it’s not even on-topic. The thread is about Life and Death, and this post is just a personal insult wrapped around a flex.
This is the kind of stuff that should be flagged to oblivion, but when people flag it the same people who post it create giant conspiracy theories that people are trying to suppress their ability to insult other players with impunity.
4 Likes
At the same time I believe it all boils down to how people present their arguments sometimes and how it can affect the reactions of others about it. But not everyone can be on their best mood for discussions and that’s where sometimes we need more people interested in watching how things are unfolding.
Recently we had one change in the game that wasn’t welcome at all: Sunspear last Trait. I do remember a few people who seemed indifferent about the change, but generally speaking the response from the forums were mostly negative about it and some posts could surely have been a bit less intense, but due the feedback on the matter the class was changed back to it’s prime form.
Anyway, the complaints and critcism are usually the only things capable of guiding/bringing changes to the game, it doesn’t mean EVERY complaint is justified.
And we have yet to see by tomorrow if the Next World Event will have any changes to its score as this was one of the main issues, I believe, about it.
1 Like
contextually speaking, he was goaded into posting that. So if you’re going to take it out on him, you might want to snip a few things above it. or… just don’t?
2 Likes
I got offended with his remark about using our brains:
“In closing to all the devs/players/anyone, please make this game harder. Make everyone used to using their brains so they will stop coming in here to complain about something like life and death.”
This is a call out on all skelleton-like undeads out there you know?
But now jokes aside:
That he was goaded/baited, or mad from the very beginning about another thread for this weapon’s nerf, is something he should handle on his own. Not a justificative to say that people who are displeased with this meta can’t use their brains…
2 Likes
Do I not get to have a side? Why should I not argue the fact that it doesn’t need a nerf? Every time I say it is beatable you guys just attack me and say “give me all your teams”. Well that will never happen.
I said that comment after being told repeatedly that I might as well just say L2P multiple times.
I actually breath easy when I see life and death defense. It’s an easy win. The only problem version of the team is when the paragon has it on with 3 nysha medals that you cant get enough life to survive a hit from both hero and weaver, but still beatable.
Also you cant say I am flexing after being accused of being in low brackets and probably sucking. How am I supposed to defend myself other than stating facts?
Is there a list of things people can post that allow me to be a jerk without apologies? Can you compile it for me?
I think we don’t see eye to eye about who is goading who when somebody says “Make everyone used to using their brains [who agree with me]…”. I don’t think you’d be very pleased if I insulted your intelligence while making a post.
At this part I turned my head to the other guy whose name I’m too lazy to scroll to.
This is the other quality of Jerk behavior: once you call out a Jerk for being a Jerk, his Jerk friends show up and try to harass you into shutting up. And pretty soon instead of the topic of the thread (flags), now we’re all discussing whether it was insulting to say players who disagree are brainless. *The problem is not people who start threads about nerfs. The problem is jerks who turn it into, “You just want this because you suck at the game.”" They just want to agitate people.
As such, I’m flagging that discussion as off-topic. You can make your own thread about insulting players, and discussion about Life and Death already has its own dozen threads. If you don’t have any input as to whether we need more moderators or improved flagging systems, you can go find another thread to stink up.
Ironic that my post gets flagged in the put an end to all these flagging battles thread.
Off topic is off topic. No irony about it.
1 Like
It’s not off topic from the persons post I responded to which was the off topic.