i wanted to post this here for referance, because they are real quick to ban you when you say it in-game: the way darknet is moderated is dehumanising and, honestly, damaging the sense of community in an already shrinking playerbase.
recently i ran into a bug where my game froze every time i tried to zone. when i googled it, all i found was 10+ year old posts of people saying they solved it via petitions. we all know ao isnt officially supported anymore, good luck getting a response to your petition in less than 6 months. (or ever) so naturally i turned to the community, asked for solutions on darknet, where multiple people replied genuinely trying to help me solve the issue. sure enough, with their help it took me 5 mins to figure it out (turns out i had lower some settings like view distance etc)
one day later, i got a message from a dnet admin condescendingly telling me: “if google says petition then PETITION IT, this is your first and final warning!" they knew full well the petition system is dead. that kind of response isnt helpful. its dismissive, frustrating, and completely unnecessary.
the main issue is that moderation on darknet seems less about helping the community and more about asserting authority. a handful of admins are essentially power-tripping in a game with maybe 50 concurrent players, talking down to people for asking legitimate questions and trying to engage with the game in a postive and civil manner.
darknet can be a place for players to help each other out, share knowledge, and maintain a playerbase in an unsupported and dying game. when the new moderation took over all they really needed to do was to get rid of toxicity. but instead, their arrogant and ego driven behavior killed the sense of community entirely.
power corrupts man. even if its just running a relay bot in a game with 50 players as u said. (going on a power trip in a game with 50 players gotta be the worst way to deal with ur inferiority complex tho lol)
good thing is that darknet admins can only ego trip you if you interact with darknet. if theyre all douchebags, just dont use it. find an active org (there are still some on both sides), stick to discord, and youll be more than fine.
there are also other friendlier bots you can use like rfa questnet etc
Surely not all moderators are nice and smooth, also as humans they indeed may do bad moves in some cases - i know as i used to moderate myself, can’t always do everything perfectly while enforcing rules, always gotta face “smart” dudes interpreting (→ bending) it all their way and lacking the primary respect they want you to observe over em … glad i’m out this demanding volunteered priesthood xD
But honestly guys, do you REALLY think darknet moderators are the ones to blame for shrinking AO community ? Personnally i’d rather point over those abusing game and crashing servers repeteadly just to be the sole to enjoy specific content, happy to deprive anybody else of the whole game as long they want to. And as i got other fingers free, i’d keep some to point precisely over the lack of AO moderators to prevent such abuses.
Honestly, i wouldn’t care to lose a few mboxed cheaters (whatever income they represent) for the sake of keeping the whole playerbase presently unhappy of the situation. As now, we keep losing historical/constructive people too sad to see the game state, with inability to log or zone, hard lag waves and so on, etc. In a few more, AO will just be 20 cheating mboxers bragging micro epeen on top of crappy/empty ruins. “GG” to them in advance …
You’d rather post for what matters most, my 2 cents.
Ps : also reminder → any rulebreak in Raidforall was/is/willbe adressed by our (friendly but firm) moderation.