IchiroKeisuke wrote:

But, I find that the people who really enjoy BYOND - are the players, not the forum-dwellers.

I realistically don't agree with this sentiment. It's a mutual relationship that requires both parties to succeed. The vast majority of productive developers are frequent users of the forums and the vast majority of players never really look at the forums except maybe to see new games coming out. The forums, colloquially speaking, is a place generally for developers and contributors and, believe it or not, it's much more mature of a place than a lot of game lobby's are.

We have our own set of issues, but what it really comes down to is people blowing everything out of proportion or taking offense to everything someone says. All of these "BYOND is dying" and "Mods do nothing!" threads are generally a product of a short series of happenings along with confirmation bias and brings people to egregious conclusions.

BYOND isn't a toxic culture, it's not dying out any time soon, and everyone can agree that the worst person on the forums is probably Ter. I mean, let's face it, we don't need that kind of horseplay around here.

Something something beating a dead horse.

It's not okay to harass people. Period. There's a big difference in harassing someone and calling them out for being rude or pretentious. I have nothing personal against you, but your posting history in particular lends to a lot of why people constantly seem like they're butting heads with you**. You come across as rude and snarky a lot of the time and while I understand it might not always be intentional, really reading what you have to say from an outside-in point of view will really help you make more friends* in the long run.

*Not saying you don't have friends.
**Not saying everything you say is negative or deserves to be countered based solely on the fact that you're the one who said it.
(Just posting that so no bunches in any undergarments are formed)

Nb4 removing tasteless comment. Apologies if anyone read my first draft and was somewhat off put.

@Lugia: I don't think you are being harassed. People are just pointing out to you over and over and over again that you act in a manner that destroys actual thoughtful conversation, and then defend yourself by arguing that matters of opinion are "facts", and then parading around like you won some grand debate when all you did was insult, ridicule, and put down other people.

The "I'm right because you didn't play by my rules" attitude is really frankly not a way to have conversations. It's all good to defend your ideas, but you aren't defensive. You are hostile and aggressive in your manner.

And for the record, it's really not just me pointing it out. Pretty much everyone in the community other than Johnny is on the same page about the way you talk to people. You are on the pagerban list of almost everyone here, and it's not because the people here are unreasonable and overly sensitive. It's because there's very little that you actually contribute other than needless aggression.

Your threads are some of the most insulting and toxic stuff on this board these days, yet every time someone calls you out on how you treat everyone around you, you hide behind the site rules of "no flaming", and "don't be a jerk" claiming total immunity to the consequences of what you sow.

You aren't getting back what you put out there. You are being told that what you are doing is annoying, unwelcome, and completely antithetical to good community behavior. That's a far cry from harassment and flaming.

Over last year, I've pretty much stopped caring about biting my tongue and trying to be soft with people who have repeatedly demonstrated they don't deserve it. You fire shots, you deserve what comes back your way. Only you aren't getting what you deserve. You are being chided and given the opportunity to improve despite an utter lack of demonstration for being at all interested in improving behavior that will see you shown the door before too much longer.

Frankly, I miss the Lugia that was actively trying to improve his knowledge and make games. Well before you got frustrated and started lashing out at everyone around you for why this place isn't better.

Your behavior is part of the problem, and not a vehicle for improving the community, language, suite, or website. All it does is drive users away.

But I know you won't own any of this, no matter how accurate or deliberately it avoids insults. You'll take it as harassment despite the fact that harassment by definition cannot happen in a public community in a conversation that you are actively responding to and among people who have made no effort to bypass multiple attempts to block them. Further, if your response is on par for the course, you'll say a ton of really rude, insulting, and straight up egotistical stuff that ultimately will do nothing but further deflect the blame to everyone but you and further antagonize everyone around you.

The worst part is that you aren't entirely incompetent. You've got a good head on your shoulders that could do some good around here, but you've become too cynical and jaded to see any merit to anything but passive trolling and stroking your own ego despite a complete lack of actual contribution to justify or demonstrate reason for such an inflated sense of self-importance.

It is really disappointing when users go your road. I've seen it dozens of times. Falacy, GS, Pop, Garthor, F_A, and a number of others were really great folk, but for a variety of reasons they eventually just gave in to this persistent destructive attitude that does nothing but ensures your own ostracism.

Of course, I'm sure you'll interpret this all as personal insults and attacks, but really I'm actually trying to get through to you and explain to you why you are in the position you are, and explain the root of why people criticize your actions.

Ironically enough, you listed all of the actual respectable people. Falacy? Great game developer, probably the most competent one on this website. Well, would be, but he was banned for pointing out flaws in BYOND or something. Ironically enough the same behaviour you accuse me of doing (that is, banning people for disagreeing with me?). GS, Pop, Garthor? Love those guys, very helpful when I started out here. F_A? I don't rightly know what happened to him, but he did well to get out when he did.

Oh, but rest assured, I'm still improving my knowledge and making games. I'm just not doing it for BYOND. I'm done donating my talents to a site that doesn't have the capacity to appreciate them. Python is a better language and Unity is a better platform. Deal with it.

And really, what it boils down to is this. People don't like being wrong. And I'm always right. Since they cannot assail my arguments, they resort to name calling and harassment. Or they say, "It doesn't count because you're not nice". And if I've said it once, I've said it many times: LOGIC DOES NOT ADHERE TO YOUR FEELINGS. Imagine if it did.



Oh, does being poor hurt your feelings? Do you really really want that god power? I guess I can just let the if go through, since you'll cry if I don't. Do you see how dumb this is? If you don't like the way my facts are presented, fine. So be it. But never suggest that because you don't like the truth that the truth isn't the truth.

If you truly believe that you are correct, you should have no fear of presenting your case.

I'm going to start handing out bans here if people keep degrading this conversation, it's already skirting a very fine line. I'm gonna leave the topic open for now but I will lock it down and ban people involved it things don't cool off.

(And for the record, Falacy was banned for reposting a hentai game on the hub over and over after it was deleted, then spamming the forums with awful things as a result.)

Nadrew wrote:

I'm going to start handing out bans here if people keep degrading this conversation, it's already skirting a very fine line. I'm gonna leave the topic open for now but I will lock it down and ban people involved it things don't cool off.

This is actually another one of my problems with enforcement. Your only tools are

A. Deleting posts
B. Locking threads
C. Banning people

So what it comes down to is

A. Silencing opinion
B. Preventing discussion
C. Removing unsavoury fellows

Moderation has to be viewed as a correctional action, not a punishment action. The tools should be used to modify behaviour, not outright cordon off an individual from the community. This is why you need to go back to at least providing A REASON and possibly A POST (or sequence of) when you delete posts or ban individuals. Lack of communication between the moderation team and the community is a really big issue I personally take with it. Ideally, consistent actions would be applied. Personally I'm tired of threads derailing into horse threads "but it's okay because... reasons?" There's at least 2 threads on the forums right now where this individual guy makes multiple posts instead of one (possible in an attempt to bump their own thread) within the range of 5 friggin minutes. But it's okay because... it's not spam? But this is the thread we decide to knuckle down on making sure it stays on topic and fits the posting guidelines, yes.

I'm just gonna go ahead and tell the story of the time I got BYOND Anime "DDoS'd", because that one was pretty entertaining.

Lets set the scene a little. Once upon a time, in ... 2009? Guilds were doing their thing. Masterdan was guildmaster of BYOND Anime, but, he had been absent, away, doing plenty fine with women, and getting good grades. In fact, he was doing /so/ plenty fine with women at the time, that the BYOND Gurus had gotten kinda lynch-mob about the fact our largest official guild by member count had no effective guildmaster.

Along came a badger.

I had been helping Masterdan O'Brien moderate BYOND Anime, and kind of ... help with a credibility issue he was having among BYOND Gurus at the time. As he was absent, I kind of just fell into a defacto guildmaster role.

For some time, "shit was cash", as the kids say. We had a fairly good stream of blog posts on the guild, game reviews, anime recommendation posts and actual anime discussion on the forums. We also had a few "meets" in a chat-room, where anyone from the community could come in, participate in a discussion about how BYOND Anime was run, make recommendations on particular issues I'd brought up, and vote on them. It was pretty neat, we got a good 40 or so developers and gamers chatting openly and quite constructively about things like "What should be acceptable for a fan-game to do with regards to collecting donations/charging money?" and "How can we get people developing something /other/ than a Naruto game?".

Anyway, guilds at the time would list games relevant to their 'genre'. BYOND Anime had a problem though, there was an internal limit of 300 (IIRC) games that could be placed into a guild, and ... we obviously had a lot more anime games than that. Masterdan had pruned a bunch down to ~ 100, and discussing it, we decided it might be neat if we just don't list obvious duplicates (same base source code, basically same premise and functionality etc). The criteria for this wasn't so clear, but we kind of agreed "Lets list games that are making quality improvements that make BYOND look better, over ones that don't".

So anyway, this meant I had to de-duplicate the listings a bit, to reflect this. In doing so, I de-listed one of thoase DBZ roleplay things. The guy catches wind of this de-listing, and gets in touch on the forums, being quite upset.

I list off a bunch of reasons why an essentially identical game was picked over his, regarding mostly UI and usability improvements, and generally better interaction with the BYOND Anime community on the topic of ... UI and usability improvements. We have a bit of a back and forth about these, with some other contributions to the tune of "You can't de-list this game for looking like mouldy cheese, that's a stylistic choice".

We kind of come to a conclusion that I wasn't going to budge on this, and that's when it all kicks off. The guy does this amazing thing. He actually shuts down all his game servers, and commands the game's community to spam BYOND Anime until we list them ?????? or he'll never work on or host the game ever ever ever again, totes-me-goats.

These kids of course completely flip at this, and commence with their spam business. So I kinda keep an eye on it, banning spam posters and keeping them on a special list to unban when it all blows over, copy-pasta'ing the same "Sorry, but the guy needs to make his game less insane to look at" type ban reason. This carries on for ... I guess, a day, I guess, and some other BYOND Anime mods help keep the watch and maintain the special list.

Things quieten down a bit, but the game isn't up and hosted yet. The kids are withdrawing from their sweet sweet anime game hit now, they're reeling and upset with everyone and everything, begging people to list the game, or host it, anything really.

I figure ... probably should try to explain that what I'm asking for isn't all that mad, it's like ... 2 hours work with the interface editor and a bit of thinking, and you know ... I'm not exactly going to list a game that's spamming the forums regardless of how awesome it may or may not be. Pop onto some forum chat thing they have going, chat with their community a bit, explain the situation. The kids were fairly alright about it, to be fair, and understood I wasn't asking for all that much. They were fairly all but banned from the forums at this point anyway, so "spam them into submission" was looking less and less likely to work anyway.

A few days pass, fairly uneventfully, and, quietly, the game starts to be hosted again. No re-application to BYOND Anime, no UI improvements, no spam. The guy just kinda let his roid-rage pass, and went "Oh ... yeah, nevermind, no biggie". The special list gets unbanned a week later, and we all go on pretending that didn't just happen.

And that, boys and girls, was the Siege of BYOND Anime.

Proper arguments do not follow from "you're not listening". They follow from, "You're wrong, and here's why."

Except, the "you're not listening" thing comes after the "You're wrong, and here's why." bit.

You missed a cracking opportunity to reply with an epilepsy-inducing gif: http://i.imgur.com/GFVh6zT.gif