Hateful Gamers

The problem:  The Official Forums are so over moderated, that it’s most likely suppressed many fundamentally important ideas that could have moved the game out of it’s 1999 thought process, and most likely cost them 1000s of accounts due to alienating customers.

 

Remember problem 5? “The Last Straw” ?  The other day, someone decided to post the question on the offical forums:

GrunEQ wrote: I have been killing Enslaved Warboars for a very long time.  I have sent /feedback and /bug report, but still there has been no key drops from them to advance the quest.  Is it broken?  Also tried other boars just in case, but still no drops.  This is for the quest The Last Straw.

 

Well, you and I both know it’s broken.  Some nutbag was responding to the guy saying, “Dude, just kill more stuff! You are killing the wrong things and you suck” basically.  I decided to step up and post a copy of my correspondence with the GM’s, so this guy’s stupid misinformation would stop being spread.  I wanted them to see the hopeful response that GM Blassreitergave me, that said that he’d attempt to open a new line of communication with the devs.  You can view the post here, if you’d like.

Nearly a day later, I get this message sent to me in my mail box:

Tsunai the forum moderator wrote: Your post (quoted below) to the thread titled “The Last Straw” has been removed. Dialog between you and CS is considered private material and therefore quoting this dialog (especially with the inclusion of names) is against the Forum Rules. If you would like to post a summary of your dialog without names, that would be acceptable but we cannot allow direct quoting of private discussions.

 

Hey, Tsunai, was our conversation right here considered private too?  Guess I fucked that up too, right? For the record, my post was simply my conversation with the GMs, I don’t consider them private at all.  Don’t say anything to me as Customer Service if you can’t back your shit up. Instead of going into a diatribe about everything wrong with this, I’m going to include my response to his moderation, which will explain a lot of my feelings:

Hey there, Tsunai.

I just wanted to talk to you a minute, about the post of mine you removed.  Certainly, you probably get responses in a similar frame to this, and, for all I know you completely ignore them.  But I’ll humor myself and send you a message.

There is probably something in some TOS for the forums, or TOS in the game, prohibiting me from relating customer service emails on your forums, I’m guessing, right?  I can ‘maybe’ understand that. You probably had one bad apple, posting is, “GM TeddyRuxpin is ghay and banned me, wtf?! Read what he said here!” I guess, the best thing to do to moderate that kind of thing, is moderate everyone.

However, in my situation, I simply posted a response to a thread, that I had already spoken to the gm’s about.  My post showed GM Blassreiter in a good light, and made it seem possible that this quest would be worked on fairly soon, and fixed.  My message was something hopeful, and it brought something to the questing community, about a specific issue many of us have had.

If anything, I showed to the customer base, that the GM’s listened to our problems, and the dialogue brought nothing but positive feedback for you.  However, now all you have done is instill a deep distrust in me.  I’m sure you read my post (Atleast, I hope you did.) I’ve left this game for years, and just recently returned.  I have no desire to be in a community that I feel is over moderated and overhanded with it’s customers.  I’m not sure if you’re a volunteer staff, or not, if you are not, then I would hope my subscription means something to you.

My other question is, what is wrong with posting their fake GM handles?  It’s not like I posted their real name’s and addresses.  No one knows who GM TeddyRuxpin is, and it’s just a silly standard from past MMOs and Muds to have wonky non-existent names, whereas every other customer service entity works with a first name.  I’m sure there is a policy against it, somewhere, with me breathing out a GM’s name, but why? Why do you think that exists?  Am I not allowed to attribute anyone’s word’s with an actual person? 

Also, another thought.  Could I post my correspondence on my own blog, and just link to it and say something like, “Well, I talked to a GM and they said they would open some new communication with the developers, read about it - here.” ?  I don’t see why anyone would take my word for it, because I could spout that in every thread, atleast with a transcription of my dialogue, people could see that I was probably telling the truth.

 

I’m going to leave this with just one last thought I touched on.  Moderating is a fine thing when it blocks things that disrupt the community.  When we let the rules drag us all down, the helpful, etc.  You only stand to alienate everyone as a whole.  My infatuation with EQ2 isn’t so much that I couldn’t drop it at a flip of a coin, especially when I feel I’ve been wronged.

 

Thanks

Relon/Rookerith (BTW, if you transcribe this message to anyone else, feel free to include my names over there, they’re fake, don’t include any personal information, and what the hell, you know?)

I didn’t bother waiting for him to respond.  He wont.  I can only blame the 13 year olds sending pictures of penis to forum moderators the world over, every time they get banned.  See, forum moderators generally have God complexes, they remove posts without a second thought, and never listen to any objection to their behavior.  Good forum moderators don’t last, because they’re objective, and too caring to face the onslaught of idiocy.  It’s only the battle worn ones that simply see things in black and white, with no chance of a crisis on conscious that make it for any length of tenure.  These moderators don’t have time to read return messages…well, they might, just to see if any other TOS has been broken in the containing message. You go Tsunai!

Solution:I think Tsunai needs to get laid.  Maybe his power mongering “Oh oh, they broke the rules, fapfapfap!” spree would end.  My post didn’t need to be deleted, unless they’re allergic to my 15 dollars a month.  They did do one thing, they stopped me from posting on the official forums. Kudos!  You really want to get eq2flames.com to be the number 1 EQ2 forums out there, don’t you?  Oh wait, they already are?  How did that happen? Oh, right..you guys over moderate your forums!  *facepalm*

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 12th, 2009 at 11:00 am and is filed under EQ2, MMOs.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.