50 moderators won't do squat if the company policy is to never ever ban people for insulting other users. I got called multiple nasty things, had my disabilities mocked many times, there are shitposters I can name right now who do nothing else but drive by shitposting and insulting people. All that ever happens is psychoticstorm showing up and wagging a finger. And those people are all too aware they will get away with anything. Only "insulting CB staff" by criticizing the job they did is, as I learned, soft-bannable. I got two weeks for that, despite nobody willing to explain to me what I exactly did above the nebulous phrase. I guess it's a cultural thing or something.
Maybe don't insult CB staff? I'm not sure what culture excuses insulting people in their own 'house'.
I'm not sure you've fully understood my post. That was the reason given. I've never insulted any of the CB staff. Never called them names or any of the sort. I criticized some of the work done by the team, sure. I may or may not have been harsh in my judgement, but that's beside the point. I may not like some of the stuff they've done, I may have had strong doubts about the choices they've made, but I have not insulted any of the CB Staff, whether they're active here or not. In the meantime, users who openly and boldly insult whoever they want see no consequence, ever. Psychoticstorm and his redtext finger waving is laughably impotent in solving the actual issues with really toxic posters this Forum has.
You and I have different definitions of insults and name calling. Understandably, you might not totally grasp when harsh criticism falls over the line of insults and abuse. But at least have the decency of self reflection to acknowledge that is a possibility. Moderation tends to be a pretty light touch, but that is part in parcel of PS is in a certain timezone so it can seem like nothing is happening because they're asleep while a whole bunch of stuff goes down and then the thread gets closed. More moderators might actually help this situation. I think like all of us, CB just hope for the best from people.
Exactly that. Moderators [sarcastic mode on] often have the bad habit of sleeping at least eight hours a day [sarcastic mode off] and in eight hours without moderation (this assuming that the Moderator spends the other 16 hours exclusively attending the forum)... World War III can be declared in a forum.
If I were to rephrase - I know for a fact I've never called any CB staff a name ("XYZ is an asshole"). I do not feel that I've ever insulted anyone of the CB crew either and it definitely was never my intention. They may have taken exception to something I've said (or how I said it), but I was never made aware of what that was. I was just suddenly temp-banned for 15 days for, to quote "directly insulting" CB Staff. I had no idea what it was about until the ban elapsed and I was able to read the PM I was sent. I asked in reply what this was specifically about but never got an answer. It also wasn't psychoticstorm who banned me, either.
I mean in one thread alone you called CB liars and that they actively engaged in deceitful activity. I'm fairly sure you've laid down unconstructive criticism about how useless or worse than useless they are at communication. You might think thats justified, or somehow #nofilter. But you got banned, so maybe you've misjudged how things have landed, and maybe, just maybe it would be worth reflecting on that rather than "I've never insulted anyone." For someone who asks that people spend extra attention to not misconstrue your communication, it wouldn't hurt to lead by example.
How we could forget that thread about volkolaks and hate symbols... Or accusing corvus for fat-shaming... probably more than once...
You have the habit, in your posts, of assigning motive to everything and everyone. So for instance, when Defiance is delayed, it's fine to complain about the delay because you want the product, but it's another thing to blame CB for lying to you about it. Decreeing that CB is ignoring customers because they haven't XYZ'd to your satisfaction, and making comments about long term trends to a couple points. There are definitely trolls to be found here, like any corner of the internet, but you can't really rage against everything. It's not always your hill to defend, let alone blaming the owner of the hill for everything. There might be a dozen reasons why they are not more restrictive, from time zones to language barriers to software or maybe they just prefer a hands off approach.
Well, since I have little to no other social clues in text and the company itself is communicating very sparsely, as the kinds of disabilities I have make it fairly hard for me to guess / intuit at motivations even in a normal situation (say, face to face conversation), the only way I can resolve those situations is an attempt to infer the motivation by logic, Ockham's razor and attempting to find a pattern of previous behaviour in a reasonably similar situation. Ergo, if I know for a fact that I've been misled once, at least underinformed the other time, when the third occurs, I can only assume that the situation is similar. In most of those situations I'd be gladly proven wrong or have my concerns assuaged. This occured a few times, when CB decided to communicate directly. Koni did that, Ian did that, the whole Defiance debacle was resolved when Belen stepped in and communicated. Most of the time though I'm met with either derision from the die-hard defenders of the company slash some of my really unkind anti-fans here, or with dismissal of my core concerns themselves. It's not an easy situation. The problem occurs when the company acts in a way that makes a customer like myself distrust the veracity of the sparse communication coming from them. All the Bostria memes have not come from myself, you know. When I feel like I'm being lied to or see that information is purposefully omitted, not relayed or disclosed in places that are not accessible, getting to only some people "in the know", there's little else to say than what you've alluded to above. Sometimes calling the company out on its (perceived?) missteps is a good thing, you know. They either communicate that this wasn't their intention at all or they fix the information. If they persist, it's more of a confirmation than not. Those are two separate concerns I think. The trolls ought to get banhammered off this place. Instead, since there's no reprieve from the mods, I need to block them and they will still freely bash me behind my back. That's not how an official forum should work, I think we can agree on that? And an official forum where a user can get called an idiot, a moron and get his disabilities mocked by the same 3+ users and there's zero repercussions? This is 2020, not the wild wild west of the Internet in the 90s, guys. Come on, do better.
Just in case any of this is even remotely helpful, my 2 cents. I've lurked for a while, and recently begun posting on these forums. I recognize your name, alongside about a dozen others. For what it's worth, I find many of your points to have a healthy amount of legitimacy and relatability to them, at least in the beginning - but your conclusions often go way too far, usually with a heaping amount of bad faith assumptions in both other posters and CB staff. I find that with your more controversial/incendiary posts, there are 2 different issues: 1. What you call 'harsh but fair' criticism often crosses into insulting and extremely accusatory language. This becomes exponentially compounded with the next issue: 2. While your initial points are sound, you often bloat up the initial points with a lot of assumptions and personal interpretations, usually in very pessimistic ways. This is problematic, as even if people were on the same page as you to begin with, they may not feel nearly as comfortable as you in assuming the worst in people. This goes for both assuming incompetence and/or malicious intent in CB staff, as well as accusing any forum poster that disagrees with you as 'white knights' or 'blind fanboys'. It's unfair that you ask everyone to be understanding of your intent all the while remaining sensitive to your condition, yet you seem to not offer this same benefit of the doubt to other posters or CB staff. Add to that the general tone of some of these forums, some of which are dominated by overly negative, pessimistic, doomsday-prophesying whiners that cry foul at the slightest provocation, you need to acknowledge that for some occasional forum-goers, some of your posts (especially when they devolve into nasty personal attacks and defensive arguments) may paint you in a negative light, with or without knowledge of your condition. Mind you, I'm in no way accusing you of being responsible for the negativity and toxicity present in some threads, since I've seen you go against them plenty of times as well; but this may not be obvious to someone who is new to these forums, or only browses occasionally. I would assume people come to these forums to discuss the game and hobby they enjoy, and provide constructive feedback. Immediate bad-faith judgments of CB's every action are not constructive, nor is knowingly or unknowingly contributing to a nasty, defensive back-and-forth of toxicity. Finally, the trolls that mock you for your disability are dirtbags, and I hope they get held accountable for their words. As for the rest of us, while I feel for you that you have a condition, it's only partially the community's responsibility to know, understand, and accommodate for your condition; the rest is in your hands. Whether this is fair or not, in the name of constructive discussion and minimizing the amount of negative interactions you seem to be having, I'd ask you to try and be more careful in the language you use. Like you said, a lot of information is lost in text-only communication, so we should all be careful about our words being potentially misconstrued. This is even more important when you're making a legitimate criticism of anything, or anyone. It's not important whether that miscommunication is the writer's fault or the reader's, what matters is that our sentiments are being conveyed to each other accurately. We should all be working together for this end, since that's kind of the point of a forum. I don't purport to know you very well, and I'm not a regular poster on these forums (yet), but thought I'd convey my perspective here just in the slightest off chance that it might help you consider something relevant.
It's a bastard and a half though for a person in my situation to predict how my communication will be construed. I've long found that however I adjust the mode I use in text, I get bashed for "being too emotional (as in 'whining, hysterical, unconstructive', etc.)", "not emotional enough ('detached, dismissive, on a high horse', etc.)" or various other things, on both extremes of the other scales. Part of these issues is also the desperation to communicate, inherent in all of us, but in this case it presents as instinctively trying to overexplain and oversaturate the communication, in hope of getting information across to people (because subconsciously I might realize there's an issue with how I'm sending the message, so I try from different angles, often multiple). I can dial back once I catch myself, but it often happens as an after-the-fact "Oh, I did this again, didn't I...". It's simply natural for neuronormative folks to intuit how their communication will be reacted to, for me it's mostly guesswork and high hopes, really. It's waaaaay better in person, when I can see all the social cues, body language, can hear the tone and phrasing better, intonation, cadence, etc.; text is generally horrible at this for everyone and twice as bad for somebody like myself. I'm not excusing myself here with a "I don't care how I come across, it is what it is", I'm rather trying to convey a "I'm doing my damnedest here, but there's only so much I can achieve, so please bear with me if you may". Constructive feedback is awesome. Some folks have sent me PMs amounting to "Hey, dude, you ok? You seem spiralling and just repeating the points now" and that's enough to give me pause and get into the "after the fact mode". That was cool. This and the whole post in general is hugely appreciated. Thank you for taking time to relate and assist me with your point of view. It's awesome to get something like this as a first reply from someone new. Cheers! :)
I’m specifically not calling out any particular posters, but I do think a lack of moderation is a problem in these forums. I’ve raised it with CB before, including during my time as a warcor, when I had slightly more unfiltered access to certain staff members (mostly @Koni). An international community of this size is not well served by a single volunteer; if @psychoticstorm is asleep, at work, with his family, on vacation, or at the dentist, threads can get badly out of hand with no one available to step in and enforce order. There have been a number of cases where multiple posters will get in a public yelling match with rules-violating behaviour on both sides, with no visible repercussions beyond a finger-wag and request for more decorum (which is not always heeded). It’s a problem - it reduces the value of these forums for holding constructive conversation about the game and it reflects poorly on the community as a whole by allowing a vocal minority to make all of us look bad.
Boo frigging hoo. Everyone except me is to blame. Same old story as in every other derailed topic. Can we get back to release disussion please?
the moderation in this forum is calm, which is a problem sometimes, it needs for users to report post, and some people report without basis, only because the post is from certain person or they don't like the topic. But at least now there is moderation. A few years ago, moderation here was biased to the point that a lot of people left the forum because of the "no moderation" to certain people, and called publicly only against some people, while other people had open way to insult.... so yes, in this forum moderation had problems. I've been menaced to be banned because certain someone insulted me and I quoted that post, but the person was not called by moderation then (then...and I've never seen it), it was clarified later, but the fact that the person was't (but other did) called publicly, was nasty. Recently there has been menaces to ban to someone who differed in rules with another staff person, without any insult or broken rule. And there might be more examples. Moderation can be improved, by beign more strict when needed and putting more moderators, but also by checking better the reasons to ban (or menacing to).
Not that we should turn the thread into discussing moderation or members or whatever, but I mean... We're in November and it's the October release schedule topic, so eh. I've never had any luck getting a thread back on track by asking, so there's that too. :)
Don't attempt to fill a pattern and use the created pattern to base entire conversations on. You will focus on the missing blocks as information, when you don't actually know why something was changed or omitted. Drawing conclusions and moving forward with them just comes off badly. The issue is, when you post using your assumptions as evidence, you come off looking like those same people. You look like you're meeting CB with derision and are an anti-fan. Most of them are pretty obvious, but you're asking folks to look beyond your words to see what you mean and that's just not how a forum conversation works for the most part. "I wish you'd do this" is better than "why didn't you do this, liars!" and your point should stand by itself without involving personal identities or motives in the process. There is a balance to a lot of things that might not be immediately obvious. Overly restrictive forums suffocate, un-moderated forums turn into cess pits. I don't think the forum is even an official method of communication with them when it comes down to it.
You're basically telling a blind man not to use his walking stick because he's hitting people over the ankles with it and it's annoying. I don't really have an alternative. It's not like I can get a companion dog on a Forum. That sounds awfully like "you need to put in the mental and emotional work to communicate and overcome your disability, even though in certain scenarios it's nigh impossible to you, but other people without such limitations don't need to do a thing when they communicate with you". Again, you're telling the blind man that people will walk into him and he needs to avoid them, instead of them making the tiny bit of effort not to tread on him, simply because "that's just not how sidewalks work, man". That's... not how polite society is supposed to work, I think. Fair, but that "I wish you did / didn't do this" often gets met with an immediate demand of "why?". And then it goes downhill as I try to explain myself. There's the company email, but I'm not sure that's sufficient.
Nuada, you equate yourself with a blind man trying to see. But when people try to correct you on your communication, you take it personally, attack them and double down on the insults and conspiracy theories. So to use your analogy, it's like a blind man stumbling and hitting people with a cane when they try to help. Vast majority of Infinity players are good, decent people that want to help. Let them.
See Nuada only wants attention. Don't feed him. Like any other troll. Just stop responding to him altogether. That's how we can rid of those derailings.
