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NO. That's NOT ENOUGH. There should be 58912941208095810294 threads about it, because every special snowflake like the OP should get their OWN THREAD to "discuss" a topic to death and beyond. Damn Turbine for doing some sensible housekeeping.
Here's an idea. Go start a thread here about grouping vs. soloing in MMOs and see what happens. Then call the mods here Nazis, too.
As for the event thing, if you know it's boring and it's a TEST, why are you surprised they tried to dress it up as something awesome for those people who don't know? We're not all MMO experts, right?
I play LOTRO but honestly haven't been in the forums since I came back a few months ago. What I can only say about that is without actually seeing what these threads contained I can't just jump into a negative view of Turbines moderation, for all we know some one specific player or group of players purposefully flooded that particular topic with tons of negative comments? Again if you just say any thread with this topic in it is banned and then yourself lace that same thread with negativity it certainly makes some kind of evidence warranted. As far as the beta "event" I can't ride with that either all these comments with people complaining about beta testing *sighs* when you have to start your topic off with "I know it's beta test but" then you automatically fail in my book, you are letting the "fun" you thought you'd have override the fact that you are helping them test the game, don't want to work don't join (as I avoided doing as a policy since my last beta test). But what you shouldn't do is go to a community like this one with many players who take the players role in a game so seriously and look for some understanding.
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
What is your point? Omali was absolutely correct. People over use the term "Nazi" far too much. Showing me a dictionary definition is supposed to somehow prove that statement wrong? I don't get it.
We'll skip over what it indicates about your intellect equating a private company determining how they run their message boards in a way you find objectionable with nazism, since its been covered by others and proceed to another assertion that is just ridiculous:
Given the huge screw-ups by mmo's in the past 2 years, you think THIS is the worst PR screwup in a long time? Come on, thats not even remotely defensible.
Been playing LoTRO since early beta and can count the number of posts I have made on the main game boards on 2 hands. Most of those were post MoM release when they cut the heart out of my my Minnie for a couple of months. A couple of pathces laterl someone pulled their head out of their behind and made the changes most of us wanted. Beta boards I post on almost daily, but that is just me. ~shrug~ I do read teh regular boards a couple of times a week and one thing I can say for sure, Turbine does read them and takes the customers complaints to heart. It might take a couple of months at times to see the changes but if it is a valis complaint they usualy get around to fixing or tweaking it. Now if you are bitching about the F2P you might as well be bitching about the weather, F2P is a done deal and there is nothing to discuss there.
as far as the stress test anyone who has ever beta tested a game and been through one knows the only way to do them is to log your toon in, then read a book or log or and surf teh forums or something on a second computer. All they are meant to do is give the company some metrics with which to base their server needs on.
I miss DAoC
Yep, thread title was way over the top...also the OP clearly missed this trend starting MUCH sooner at Turbine. The road to this started when they "sanitized" the forums and blogs of all those inconvenient promises they made about content updates and features right before the big F2P announcement; then they stifled threads and banned anyone (like me) who gave them a hard time over it, regardless of how "civil" we were in discussing it.
The management clearly settled on a policy of "shut them up and bury it" to handle any unpleasantness along with the direction change. Nothing new really even, it's a classic page from the old SOE management handbook and honestly it generally works...most people don't forum watch enough to spot or object to the censorship; so "joe normal" customer just sees happy forums.
wtf are you talking about anyway? It's only been 8 months since Mirkwood. If you look at the timing on Forochel, and Evendim areas and the new area being added on in a couple of weeks they are right on schedule. You want a new free area added quarterly or something. Dream on
lets see what exactly is happening in September besides the F2P
1. Enedwaith - new area leading to Rohan
2. Volume III book 2 in the epic quest line
3. More session play options which is excellent fun and as far as I know something unique to LoTRO
4. New wardrobe changes - gottal love that . frees up inventory and the varied costumes really let you look like a individual in this game.
5. More scalable instances for the skirmash system.
6. updated the client for using DX11 for performance enhancements.
lots of good stuff still in the pipeline such as Isenguard, Helms Deep, and Rohan ( mounted combat ?). Rumor has it Legendaries are getting another round of tweaking soon and maybe an update to the housing system is in the works. All in all some great things happening now and in the future
I miss DAoC
Try reading any one of a hundred threads about "wtf I was talking about"...but you better do it here or on another 3rd party site because Turbine deleted most (if not all) of them on their site along with the precursor dev blogs and comments. Which was the point, you can disagree with me over the new "content" or the F2P move all you like but it has NOTHING to do with the point that I or the OP was making.
Turbine embraced aggressive censorship and forum moderation when they announced this move, that is not some opinion on game content or direction but rather a simple observation of what they did. They deleted forum posts and blog entries that ran counter to the "new" corporate line; They banned people from their forums who complained about that censorship, regardless of how reasonable and civil those complaints were. Heck, they deleted the vast majority of threads criticising the announced changes - again regardless of rational or civil they were. You can be in denial all you like, doesn't change it.
This was a major negative change in PR / customer relations from Turbines past, which I can only attribute to the change in top management or a deliberate decision to just "take the heat" and nuke the opponents of the change.
Your awefully vague you know that? You cant honestly expect people to shift through hundreds of pages looking for some threadtitle that screams "This got censored at Turbines froums, look at me!" to us. Atleast give us a fricking cue so we can use a search engine.
I vaguely remember a forum prune somewhere back in time(which applied to all threats above x age or something), but apart from EvE-O all major MMOs do that. And yes all MMOs break promises, most of the time those promises contained lots of "maybies" and "we want to do xy", but they are promises, nay pledges i say, practically contracts written in blood breakable only under peril of their souls.
And about the op not knowing what nazi like behavior means, if your a US citizen how about you asked some of your 2. WW Veterans what the concentration camps looked like which they freed(and ask them how they called the people responsible for them). Then you try to explain them the similarities between those nazis and moderation of private forums, gl with that.
Nazi is exactly not about short men with mustaches and bad attitude, its about being misanthropic to the extreme. Its about reaching that point where you mentally strip all moral/legal rights that you apply to yourself, your family and your friends away from a group of people because they dont fit into a ethnic/racial/religious acceptable box for you. They make ordinary racists that "just" want to deport other people look like a bunch of hippies.
And why exactly do we have to use the same term for harsh forum moderators that we use for those people who killed millions in concentration camps anyway(Nazi was the term used by the people inside the concentration camps to refer to their captors)? Whats next? Someone disagrees with you and he is a Stalinist? Someone pulls a joke on you and he is a rapist? If your eating Icecream your not pulling a Hannibal Lecter either.
People just lack perspective. They disagree over something totally trivial, and then reach for the name given to the people responsible for the most horrendous event in recent human history to built a analogy and describe it.
Get it into your head, Turbine forums are private, not public. They have the same right to remove posts from it than you have to remove Grafitti from your house. Also Turbine is a company, just like Coca-cola, Ford, Microsoft or Apple. If Steve Ballmer swoons over how secure the new Windows will be people take it with a grain of salt, thats called common sense. Taking everythign said to you as a promise or even at face value is called being gullible.
I have a question for you and the OP. If Turbine, on thier own forums, would have come out in the very first of the 100+ threads devoted to discussing this issue and simply said 'NO.' And locked the thread, would you guys be happy? I mean they read what you put out there, made thier view point known (I dunno, but locking well over 50 threads on the same topic looks alot like they TOLD you NO to me), and then took the action they felt necessary. I guess what I'm asking in simple terms is just how many threads do they need to lock before people get the hint that whats being discussed is not up for debate? Even the OP stated himself he already got slapped on the hand 4 times, seriously, it took 4 times for him to realize maybe he shouldnt post a 5th time?
People on these forums always seem to come full circle back to the same issue every time, they always end up thinking they have more rights than the company who runs the game and pays for the servers your forms are run on. You want freedom to say what you want, buy your own server, pay for your own domain name, pay for your own advertising, pay for your own legal team, your own moderators, your own bandwidth, your commercial space rent,and your own electirc bill to keep it up and running. Then you can do as you please and say as you please.
Oh and for the record, I dont know of any online forums out there that lets you go against the moderators discretion. If a moderator tells you not to do somethign, and you dont like it and do it anyway, you will most likely be punished for it. If they censor you and tell you not to say that again, and you complain more about it, catch a ban. I'm not saying I like everythign Turbine has done on this stuff, but they came out with an announcement and said this is how it is going to happen, not up for debate. People tried to debate and they shut them down, again they said, not up for debate. Not sure how much clearer they could have been.
(DISCLAIMER - The use of the word YOU in the above post is not directed at any one person in particular, but towards those who fall into the category itself - there is no personal attack here, neither intentional nor implied.)
I blame it on democracy. People are so getting used to demand their way in politics, not getting it, then complaining about it, that they think thats how everything works. But a private buisness is not a democracy. Its Private first and Buisness second(I mean Private Buisness as in not owned by the state btw).
If you dont like them, you dont have to buy their products or register yourself to their private forums etc. Thats called freedom.
And for those a little more slow, let me make an analogy:
In my front yard i place a blackboard. Its my board, and its on my property. People can go there and pin messages to it. Stuff like "looking for this kitten" or "this car for sale call xxx" etc. Can i now go and take down a message i dont like? Ofc i can do that, its my BB, its standing on my yard. I can even forbid you to approach it, for no reason whatsoever i have to explain to anyone. I can make up rules, but they are not like the constitution or even normal laws i can change them at any time or even ignore them.
If you dont like that your free to go to any other BB or make your own etc. Thats called freedom.
I'm not trying to be vague, but I am not going to try and rehash tons of things that were flogged to death in other forum threads either.
Have some people been irrational? Heck yeah; Does Turbine have the "right" to police their own forums? Of course.
That doesn't mean that we as customers have to be happy with it or continue to support their product.
If Turbine had come out back in January or so (when the decision was clearly made) and said something like, "We're sorry and we know this sucks, but all previous decisions and plans are being reviewed due to the current state of the game and the new management", I would have accepted it. I wouldn't have been thrilled, but it would have at least been honesty from them.
Instead we got months of silence and stonewalling where they locked threads asking about the state/future of the game and shut down the dev communications followed by a surprise announcement about the F2P move combined with a ridiculously propagandistic attempt to delete old forum posts/dev blogs which either denied the possibility of F2P or made other content promises they no longer adhere to.
For a company with Turbines history of relatively open and good customer relations/communications this was a massive screw up for their PR team. However, it is not "the end of the game" nor is going F2P necessarily a bad move for them; but the whole thing was handled very poorly and in ways that seemed certain to pointlessly antagonize many paying customers.
Lastly, while I support the "right" of any forum admin to enforce decorum and civility, anyone who thinks that the appropriate response to a polite PM saying, "I'd like to know why you deleted my thread as I did not believe I was violating any forum rules?", with a warning or ban is just nuts.
Ahh now i remember. That old dead horse. Some community rep or dev making a statement he had no buisness making(Unless he was CEO and majority shareholder), and then months later when it came to bite the whole company, who was in the process of getting bought by a company about 100x their size, into their behind probably ordered to remove it and shut up.
That was like beyond obvious. If you believe stuff like that holds any weight during/after a takeover you believe in fairies and the easter bunny too. I can totally see the boss of WB sitting back in his chair, smoking his cigar, and saying "Well damn, if that Turbine employee said that 6 months ago on those forums we cant do anything, lets cancel our plans".
Tbh sometimes it seems like a miracle to me how some people get through their lives. They must fight a daily battle with satiric comments, irony, deodorants that dont magically attract women and politicians who dont have your best interest at heart and infact have even been known to lie.
Load of hooey. Compleatly untrue. Drama.
Also, your FOX news like title, it is highly offensive to equate the killing of millions to moderation of some forums.
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"Anyone posting on this forum is not an average user, and there for any opinions about the game are going to be overly critical compared to an average users opinions." - Me
"No, your wrong.." - Random user #123
"Hello person posting on a site specifically for MMO's in a thread on a sub forum specifically for a particular game talking about meta features and making comparisons to other titles in the genre, and their meta features.
How are you?" -Me
The "we have no plans to go F2P" statements are an example of what got deleted. There were two such statements, one as recently as last summer.
WOW isnt great because it has 12 million players. WOW has 12 million players because its great.
So? plans change. Its business and nothing is set in stone.
90% of haters are begging for love. 10% just want a little attention -- Paulo Coelho
Just pointing out that Turbine isnt above removing posts that no longer fit the agenda. Deal with it.
WOW isnt great because it has 12 million players. WOW has 12 million players because its great.
Boy the amount of fanboism is a little thick. By all means if you LIKE discussion being censored or having topics which are taboo to discuss, please go frequent thier forums. Call me crazy, but as a free individual.... I enjoy being able to express whatever opinion I want whenever I want...and as long as I keep it civil, I generaly don't expect to be censored.
Now of course, private companies have a right to moderate thier forums according to whatever rules they decide to make up. Heck if a company really wanted to they could decide to yank posts by every person with red hair.
There is another side of this coin though... we are consumers.... we are under no obligation to use thier forums or thier products. Just as it is a privilage for us to use a companies forums or products.... it is a privilage for THEM to have us patronize them with our business and our attention. Guess who actualy needs who more in that equation?
So by all means....if you LIKE having your discussion controled, please patronize those sites and organizations who engage in heavy handed moderation. Personaly, I detest that....and when I see moderators engaged in such, I'll be out of there so fast it'll make your head spin. That's the wonderfull thing about the internet (and about the US as a country)..... while no one is forced to give anyone else a soap-box.... if you have something to express, there is generaly no shortage of places willing to give you the opportunity to express it... even if those places aren't the "officialy sanctioned" ones.
That's something companies generaly forget about the internet...at thier own peril. The more heavy handed they are in thier methods about trying to control thier message.... the more they loose relevance as a place where that message is heard and discussed.
So by all means, if Turbine is being heavy handed in thier moderation (I have no clue as I haven't visited thier forums in months)..... the absolute best thing you can do is give thier forums their forums a single digit salute...and go somewhere else to express your opinions....and encourage your peers to do so as well. I certainly have done that with other forums in the past.
The best way to deal with heavy handed moderation is to let the moderators know, if they keep up with such practices, they'll be moderating an empty room. Don't let companies have it both ways....if they want thier sites to be popular to use... let them know that they must be relatively open about allowing criticism and disagreement with the companies decisions (as long as it is civil).
This thread has gone downhill from the start. Locked.
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