Lowbie hoarders and rare count

[Vanisse]

keep it on topic and polite, please.

[Nycticora]

I don't like censoring this stuff outside the graveyard/logboard. I really, really don't like it and I think it needs to stop. I'm just going to put that out there, you don't have to do anything about it right now.

[Olyn]

It would be even better if the entire immortal staff could rise above petty bullshit and refuse to take obvious flamebait while maintaining a positive and professional attitude on the forum and public game channels.

We'll always have a peanut gallery full of asshats, but I think that by not participating in the negativity for a couple of weeks, we will cause a positive shift in the overall tone of forum threads.

[Davairus]

This post is awaiting validation

[beia]

This post is awaiting validation

[Ergorion]

What even happened to this thread?

[Nycticora]

I said we should stop censoring the forum and it spawned an imm discussion

[Trojal]

This post is awaiting validation

[Ozaru]

This post is awaiting validation

[ottif]

Obviously not a very good one Nyc, if this is the best you guys could come up with...

[Ergorion]

This post has been validated

[Nycticora]

that's not a helpful post, Ottif. You didn't provide any useful suggestions.

[ottif]

Let me suggest you don't censor the boards unless it is cussin and hate speech

[Davairus]

Quite frankly I've kept a lot of things bottled up for many years and I haven't really gotten the hang of unleashing all my anger in a gentle way. I was bang out of order and in full fight mode, hurling fury. It needed to be cleaned up, and I need to do work to control that better, which I have been doing, but I'm not really where I need to be yet. Learning experience. I fucked up. Sorry.

[Nycticora]

I was reading the forum and logboard from 1999 to 2005 and it was 99% flaming and cussing at each other. I believe I have the type of relationship with Ergorion (or ottif for that matter, or even Ozaru and Bladefurry) where the two of us can flame and cuss each other out and still be friends afterwards. I'll let him comment on that.

I know some people have a problem with seeing negative comments on the forum. I don't care by what means the forum censoring stops. We can stop because nothing needs to be censored and that's fine. But if the choice is between flaming and a dead board, I choose the flaming.

I've brought up the idea of switching back to only having a logboard-style discussion forum and making these forums read-only. I didn't suggest this publicly yet because I'm worried it will alienate people who like these forums and don't want to see it change.

Another option is having a logboard-style subforum with no censorship at all and leaving these alone. We could call it "The Sewers" and put a link next to the graveyard in the main page top bar. The risk of this is that people like me and Ergorion may stop visiting these forums and we fracture the players (players who don't like negative speech simply don't interact with us anymore). A side bonus of this is that players could post more anonymously and would be able to post as characters just like the graveyard so they could have their permanent identities less tied to the characters they use when they feel like saying really super shitty things.

I've been trying to passively get the imm staff to adopt a policy where we censor only posts in the announcements and graveyards subforums, but that does not seem to be encountering wide adoption

What I do know is that the reason I click on the abandonedrealms.com bookmark and go to Community->Forum all the time is because I am excited to see what crazy shit you guys have said most recently and what the really important thing that's totally pissing the forum idiot off right now is, and it's very entertaining to me.

edit: negative posts on the forum, not negative posts on the logboard

[Ergorion]

I think Dav you made a point a while ago that some people who play the game do so to let off some steam. And I have definitely been in that mode recently and it spills over onto the forum. But I don't think that's a bad thing, per se.

We're not hello kitty island adventure. We're real humans that have real issues and this is a community I've been a part of for about a decade now where I don't feel like I have to put up a fake wall of happy-smiley bullshit if that's not what's going through my head. I think Ranix is right that we can flame the shit out of each other and realize where it's coming from and go a couple rounds in the flame ring before the bell rings and we shake hands and get doc to stitch up our bloody faces.

I also agree that censorship is not the way to go. Censorship is the prime tool of authoritarian regimes. Censorship incentivizes conforming to the edicts of a ruling class. A forum is literally a place of free discussion and what makes this game great is that we are truly a community. A community that bonds over heated agreements and disagreements.

When it comes to this game, we are a passionate group of people. You immortals literally donate your time to its upkeep and I never forget that. When I voice a strong opinion about changes it's because I care about this game. A silent dissent is no dissent. And when I'm in a troll mood, I completely expect and hope someone recognizes that I'm in troll mode and either dishes the troll shit right back or calls me out on it and gives me some perspective.

The argument that flaming is off-putting to n00bs I think is mis-guided. Censoring posts creates an atmosphere of insincerity and phoniness which does not gel with this game. An authentic forum, even if it does have its outbursts, will go farther to retaining newer members of the community than a sterilized, uniform song of kumbaya.

[Kornhole]

I think lowbies that horde are a bunch of cocksucking assholes that all need to die in a fire, and rank up so they can get pwnt at 50 by the real characters. But perhaps that is why I am not paid to think!

[tayyah]

I would rather have 5 people that are a god damn challenge to fight and can flame each other without worry as oppose to 20 people holding hands... but that's just me, I enjoy flame bait as much as ranix

[Davairus]

Well I didn't really make invalidate to censor posts with. I made it to give players a way to post ideas and questions to immortals privately on the forum. While I am on the fence about censorship (its obviously a quick ban for postingchild porn type stuff), I find there's definitely a benefit to privacy. And these invalidated posts are mainly imms talking to each other, privately. The exchange between me and ergorion shouldve also been private, I guess. I don't really see a censorship issue per se. I just think the tool was used to help enforce privacy. Also, I'm sure we create moderation powers with the hope we never need to use them, and nobody here is happier when they have to.

[Olyn]

Thanks, everyone.

I see the rare situation as a small, possibly nonexistent, problem. Here's what has changed in the last few years that I feel has helped us out:

* More areas, more rares - new content has increased the overall selection
* Auction house timers - unsold or uncollected auction eq poofs after a duration, putting it back into circulation
* Bug fixes - Two monthly purge bugs have been identified and fixed to keep things circulating
* Orderly eq - Players that play chaotic every time fight over a few wild axes to see bigger spike damage, but they are missing out on a nice selection of limited eq that tends to be available on a regular basis.