Exactly what people with a “modicum of power” have been doing that? I’ve never seen either a Funcom staff member or a forum moderator do any of that. Those are the only two groups of people who have any more power than you or me here. At most, they close some threads – which I’ll talk about further below – but I’ve never ever seen them demean, belittle, or obfuscate anything here.
If you’re under the impression that the little sign that says “Regular” next to my name means I have some kind of “power” here, you’re mistaken. I don’t get access to any special knobs and switches, no extra buttons or links. To get the “Regular” title, you just have to reach the trust level 3 once, and then you can have the forums put that next to your name. You can fall down to trust level 2 or lower the very next day, but the title stays. And like I said, I never noticed anything especially different. If I’m supposed to have some kind of “powers”, I didn’t get the memo
Give me a little credit here. I might have many bad qualities, but I’m not actually dumb. I understand that there’s a big difference between PVE(-C) and PVP when it comes to base building. You guys build your bases in certain ways because you’re trying to defend yourselves from raids.
And I’ve never, ever denied that. Nor have I ever said that you don’t have the right to disagree with the rules. If you think the rules are not a good fit for PVP because you can’t play PVP without breaking them, who am I to say that’s false? I don’t play PVP. Other PVP players might agree or disagree with you, but that’s none of my business. So you’re free to disagree with the rules, too.
You know why I jump into these discussions? It’s because people invariably say things like this:
- Funcom admins don’t check the reports, they just ban people.
- That’s false, and it’s been proven false. Repeatedly.
- We need building limits.
- No, we don’t. I’m not even gonna go into details of why not, I’ve said it often enough.
- We need additional no-build zones.
- No, we don’t, not until 3.0 lands and allows people who don’t play on official servers to disable no-build zones.
- We don’t need any rules. They should stop enforcing the rules.
- Oh yes we do. Things we much worse before the rules. If you haven’t played back then, or don’t remember what it was like, or were lucky enough not to have any problems, that’s your thing. The server moderation was introduced because a lot of people kept pestering Funcom for a long time. More people than the “Ban Is The New Meta” brigade, and for a longer time.
- Cheaters don’t get punished often enough or fast enough, so other rules shouldn’t be applied either.
- That’s just stupid. Seriously. If there’s a spate of breaking-and-entering in your neighborhood, you don’t go saying that we should get rid of the speed limits. You ask for the bad thing to get better, not for a different thing to get worse.
- I didn’t break any rules.
- The overwhelming majority of people who have said that turned out to have broken rules, but didn’t know they did.
Oh, and by the way, I’m not a “there isn’t a problem” poster, since you lumped me in there. I haven’t been a “there isn’t a problem” poster ever since @Palm523 shared some actual evidence that there is a problem. I just disagree with most of you about what the problem is – and let’s face it, it’s hard to agree with some of the stuff people come up with here, like the tinfoil hattery about how Funcom is trying to get rid of official servers. The way I see it, the problem is that the rules are not accessible enough, the clarifications of those rules are not discoverable enough, there are still a few open questions, and the feedback from individual Zendesk cases is woefully insufficient.
I also happen to be doubtful about how widespread the problem is. People keep saying how this is killing the game and how it’s about to explode in Funcom’s face and whatnot, but it’s way too easy to make a lot of noise and make it seem like the end of the world.
Does that mean I’m saying the problem doesn’t deserve to be solved? No, of course it should be solved. But when the same bunch of people keeps behaving unreasonably all the time, believing that doubling down on what they’re wrong about and yelling harder will magically make them right, it’s perfectly normal to start doubting their claims about the scope of the problem.
And now we come to the closing of the threads. That’s the primary reason driving this whole “we can’t be heard” trope, because mods and community managers keep closing threads.
Yeah, you can be heard. But you should also be prepared to be reasonable and civil. Plenty of these discussions have been left open for a long, long time and only got closed when they became so freaking ridiculous and toxic that no sane moderator would leave them open.
I mean, seriously, do you really think a thread will stay open when it devolves into people accusing Funcom admins of banning people for fun and out of malice and because they have problems in their personal lives? When there are people taking advantage of a modder’s decision to stop supporting a mod to make a point about how the game is dying? When there are people resorting to insults and name-calling because they don’t like the discussion? That’s your idea of “being heard”?
We all have a right to be heard, but I don’t see why anyone should be entitled to be persistently toxic.