Author Topic: Capricorn-scented fallout (split from Urgent Call thread)  (Read 4527 times)

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Offline Lorric

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Capricorn-scented fallout (split from Urgent Call thread)
The lacklustre response to BtA for me obliterated the myth that BP raised the bar and other campaigns struggle because they don't meet that bar.

But it's a lot bigger than BP, the problem. The forum culture is wrong. Because this place alienates and eliminates anyone who doesn't fall into a narrow set of beliefs and behaviours on the far left.

We had a dude come to the forum recently who went to work right away with real passion and gusto. We get like one or two such people in a year. Then he made a weird post in gen disc and was treated like human garbage for it, got banned for it. So he's GONE. And who could blame him.

I don't think content creators should be treated any differently to ordinary members, but that was ridiculous. He didn't actually break any rules, but the rules don't mean anything. He fell afoul of the site's protected class, and that's all that mattered. No one cared about anything else.

If you're a content creator, your audience is badly curtailed because of this. This applies to BP as well, except it caters well to the ideology of the protected class, so fares better than anything else because of that, and it also gets the most outside of the forum coverage too.

My role in the creation of BtA was a small one. But because I can see the internal forums and the SVN and saw it all taking shape, I know what went into it. Mjn put his heart and soul into that project and an immeasurable number of hours into it, I'm betting it's a four digit number easily, and I wouldn't be surprised if that number doesn't start with a 1. Day after day, week after week, month after month, that SVN got updated. It was incredible to see. Awe-inspiring. The man's a machine. His standards were exacting. And for what? He gave so much of himself for you. It's not right. There is no doubt in my mind if the culture of this forum was different, if it catered simply to anyone with a love of Freespace, welcoming all with open arms, his board would be enjoying the same kind of attention that BP enjoys. Because of the way this place is, he's been robbed of that.

 
Re: Capricorn-scented fallout (split from Urgent Call thread)
Lorric you're making this **** political when it doesn't need to be political. BtA being underplayed has ****-all to do with politics or culture. BtA isn't any more political than BP is and BP's politics have nothing to do with its success. You're comparing GenDisc ****posting with campaign discussion, and the two are completely unrelated.

Also I'm pretty sure this is more than "one weird post" and that directly attacking people even after being warned is breaking a few rules.
[19:31] <MatthTheGeek> you all high up on your mointain looking down at everyone who doesn't beam everything on insane blindfolded

 

Offline Lorric

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Re: Capricorn-scented fallout (split from Urgent Call thread)
Lorric you're making this **** political when it doesn't need to be political. BtA being underplayed has ****-all to do with politics or culture. BtA isn't any more political than BP is and BP's politics have nothing to do with its success. You're comparing GenDisc ****posting with campaign discussion, and the two are completely unrelated.

Also I'm pretty sure this is more than "one weird post" and that directly attacking people even after being warned is breaking a few rules.
You can think that if you want. I don't blame you for not seeing it, it took me years to see it, and I went along for a really long time completely oblivious to it.

However the second part of what you said is you being part of the problem. Oh I agree with you about more than one weird post. But being weird isn't WRONG. And you saying those things are direct attacks is what I really take issue with. He's just defending himself. He was the one who got attacked, he didn't attack anyone here, he's the one who got attacked.

 

Offline Aesaar

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Re: Capricorn-scented fallout (split from Urgent Call thread)
We had a dude come to the forum recently who went to work right away with real passion and gusto. We get like one or two such people in a year. Then he made a weird post in gen disc and was treated like human garbage for it, got banned for it. So he's GONE. And who could blame him.
I agree, you know, the way he passionately *****ed about how HLP wasn't doing things the right way and kept saying The_E was dead weight was really productive.  Such gusto.

 

Offline Lorric

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Re: Capricorn-scented fallout (split from Urgent Call thread)
We had a dude come to the forum recently who went to work right away with real passion and gusto. We get like one or two such people in a year. Then he made a weird post in gen disc and was treated like human garbage for it, got banned for it. So he's GONE. And who could blame him.
I agree, you know, the way he passionately *****ed about how HLP wasn't doing things the right way and kept saying The_E was dead weight was really productive.  Such gusto.
He was right though in his weird way. He doesn't know The E enough to know about his role on the site and what he contributes, but he was right that stamping down on free speech is harming the site.

 
Re: Capricorn-scented fallout (split from Urgent Call thread)
First of all, he was never attacked by anyone. He posted some really inappropriate **** in the Carrie Fisher thread and it got edited by Mongoose to be less inappropriate. That's basic social awareness, it's not harming free speech. He then got warned that if he continues to treat HLP as YouJizz's comment section he will get a gendisc ban. He then told Mongoose off and got a gendisc ban. This got him really mad and eventually got him banned outright.

He wasn't banned because he was "weird" or because he spoke his mind.

Regarding your grand conspiracy theories that BP's nonexistant political statements somehow led to its popularity you couldn't be more wrong. BtA is getting excellent feedback from almost anyone who played it, so clearly the politics within didn't offend anyone. The people who haven't played it didn't do it because they couldn't be arsed to, not because the politics of the story they know nothing about don't agree with their political views. If BtA was getting hate you would've been right, but it isn't. It's simply not getting a lot of attention because a lot of people didn't feel like playing it.

If you just want to state the obvious and claim that anything made by the BP team will get more playtime than basically anything else then...yeah. BP is recognizable, has been around for a long time, and people will automatically play it. That's jut how popularity fosters more popularity, it has nothing to do with politics or the "protected class" or whatever else.

Btw mods could you please split this political mumbo jumbo, it doesn't deserve to be in a thread celebrating good mods people should play.
« Last Edit: January 27, 2017, 06:36:09 am by FrikgFeek »
[19:31] <MatthTheGeek> you all high up on your mointain looking down at everyone who doesn't beam everything on insane blindfolded

 

Offline Lorric

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Re: Capricorn-scented fallout (split from Urgent Call thread)
It's a lovely thing for you to have done Spoon, but the problem just isn't a lack of awareness of these campaigns or their quality.

Prove me wrong people. Play the campaigns and post about it on their associated boards. Those who already have, sell them here. I would love you to prove me wrong.

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: Capricorn-scented fallout (split from Urgent Call thread)
Please un-Lorric this thread so it can be about Spoon's good post again.

BtA is ****ing awesome and there's only one reason it hasn't dropped a big post bomb: no one plays FS any more. BP debuted almost ten years ago, when the playerbase was much larger. There just isn't an active base large enough to support that kind of response any more. I run into people all over the internet, even in real life, who recognize BP - because they've had ten years for the word to spread. If BtA had debuted then the exact same thing would be true.

Whining about BP's popularity is, like that one guy said, the definition of insanity. BP didn't appear fully formed as a titanic supermod with a huge fan base. One guy made a solo campaign with some music he'd remixed. That was it! All it took! And then, over ten years, other people got involved and gradually built it up. People should look at this and see why they *can* start something big with a small, personal, imperfect campaign. BP has never had super high production values - it's always been the more weird, experimental, rough-edged alternative to the megamods (that never released).

If anything BtA seems more like Diaspora or WCS (but not ****ty like WCS), a really polished product with super high production values that could basically be a package release of a game. But even Diaspora suffered from the falling player base - it was mostly better than BtRL but never reached the same level of buzz, and it didn't really produce a lot of fan engagement, which sucked.

BP was always the mod that did the most outreach and advertising for other projects - we'd plug other campaigns in interviews and stuff, and drop nods in the ingame lore. This was because HLP back in the day involved a lot of ****ty sniping and politics over whose mod was best (Mobius declaring that Diaspora would kill HLP was a low point) and it seemed like people needed a push to realize models, effort, and good old fashioned playtime had to be shared around the community, not sequestered.

Anyway in conclusion:

Make a BtA standalone. Push it everywhere. **** the lawyers. It's the only way to grow the base. The FSO installer is too Byzantine.

And get a two-sentence elevator pitch that doesn't need any FS knowledge as a hook.

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: Capricorn-scented fallout (split from Urgent Call thread)
Oh no, people are drawn to HLP to play BP. How terrible. Now they'll use up their lifetime allotment of Freespace playing on it. What a shame that playing good mods doesn't encourage people to play more good mods.

 

Offline Lorric

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Re: Capricorn-scented fallout (split from Urgent Call thread)
I love how you prove my point by digging at WCS and Mobius along the way while you complain about sniping and people putting down other mods.

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: Capricorn-scented fallout (split from Urgent Call thread)
You can take it or leave it on WCS (I wasn't a big fan - in large part because they forked their codebase, making it hard to share with the rest of HLP!) but Mobius was eventually banned for constantly starting drama. Calling a spade a spade isn't sniping.

The reason you're wrong is because BP came out ~10 years ago when lots of people played, and BtA (a much better mod than the first release of BP) came out today, when nobody plays.

 

Offline Lorric

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Re: Capricorn-scented fallout (split from Urgent Call thread)
Mobius is still here:

http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=93050.msg1839347#msg1839347

As for your assertion, you're not even wrong. What I'm saying is that the chance for HLP to continue to grow is stifled by the way it is run. People are being driven away, not the natural drift of something fading away because it has lost it's shine. Freespace only gets better with age thanks to the efforts of the SCP and others. It matches up well against anything there is in the genre today. There's no reason a new generation of gamers can't come to love it.

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: Capricorn-scented fallout (split from Urgent Call thread)
Nobody's being driven away except for folks who want to talk about a dead woman's vagina. Do you feel that we should encourage more discussion about dead womens' vaginas? Is that what HLP is for?

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: Capricorn-scented fallout (split from Urgent Call thread)
Interplay bungling the Steam release of FS2 was a huge blow. As much as we see HLP as the heart of 'living FreeSpace', most players are never going to register to post here. The best thing we can do for FS is to make sure there's a clean path from discovering the game to discovering FSO to getting it running: Steam would've been a nice resource to have, but shipping a broken game isn't a good look.

 

Offline Lorric

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Re: Capricorn-scented fallout (split from Urgent Call thread)
Nobody's being driven away except for folks who want to talk about a dead woman's vagina. Do you feel that we should encourage more discussion about dead womens' vaginas? Is that what HLP is for?
No. But we might as well not have a gen disc at all if you go down that road. But there would have been no encouragement, quite the opposite, with no moderator intervention.

The problem with that kind of moderation is they made that decision for us. That should have been our decision to make, how to respond to that, if at all. And that includes if we for some reason all wanted to talk about a dead woman's vagina ourselves.

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: Capricorn-scented fallout (split from Urgent Call thread)
No. The site has a code of conduct, which moderators enforce. Hard Light Productions is not a place for discussing whether we want to discuss Carrie Fisher's dead vagina.

This is gross.

 
Re: Capricorn-scented fallout (split from Urgent Call thread)
If we can't ****post about Carrie Fisher's vagina why even have GenDisc. I mean, if you can only post pointless ****posts about 99% of all topics why even bother? I bet there's this huge untapped market of Freespace fans who are driven away from HLP because they can't ****post about Carie Fisher's vagina or Roger Moore's cock.

If only we had a special "pure ****posting" board to accommodate that kind of discussion  :doubt:
[19:31] <MatthTheGeek> you all high up on your mointain looking down at everyone who doesn't beam everything on insane blindfolded

 

Offline The E

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Re: Capricorn-scented fallout (split from Urgent Call thread)
No. But we might as well not have a gen disc at all if you go down that road. But there would have been no encouragement, quite the opposite, with no moderator intervention.

The problem with that kind of moderation is they made that decision for us. That should have been our decision to make, how to respond to that, if at all. And that includes if we for some reason all wanted to talk about a dead woman's vagina ourselves.

Remember a couple years ago, when you wanted to be a moderator?

Aside from a lot of other issues, this misunderstanding of what a moderator does is part of the reason why you aren't one.
What we as moderators do is making sure that discussions remain civil and do not devolve into screaming. That means that certain topics get shut down hard and fast if they turn up, because we know that nothing fruitful can come from them.
In this case, there was a short derail which was quickly excised from its origin thread. Would you rather have a dogpile of posters drowning out whatever the original post was about? Because that would be the consequence of not having moderators.

If you want to talk about dead vaginas, take it to the chans. Around here, we're civilized.

If only we had a special "pure ****posting" board to accommodate that kind of discussion  :doubt:

Given that 4chan, 8chan and reddit exist, I don't see a need for a dumping ground of internet edginess on this board.
If I'm just aching this can't go on
I came from chasing dreams to feel alone
There must be changes, miss to feel strong
I really need lifе to touch me
--Evergrey, Where August Mourns

 

Offline Lorric

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Re: Capricorn-scented fallout (split from Urgent Call thread)
No. The site has a code of conduct, which moderators enforce. Hard Light Productions is not a place for discussing whether we want to discuss Carrie Fisher's dead vagina.

This is gross.
It doesn't work that way and you know it. There is no code. Our code supposedly forbids post deletion, and you went ape**** when Goober did that to a section of one of your posts.

We shouldn't be deciding what is and is not appropriate to discuss, as long as it is not illegal or an attack on our own members. It will happen organically. The garbage will sink to the bottom all by itself.

 

Offline Lorric

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Re: Capricorn-scented fallout (split from Urgent Call thread)
If we can't ****post about Carrie Fisher's vagina why even have GenDisc. I mean, if you can only post pointless ****posts about 99% of all topics why even bother? I bet there's this huge untapped market of Freespace fans who are driven away from HLP because they can't ****post about Carie Fisher's vagina or Roger Moore's cock.

If only we had a special "pure ****posting" board to accommodate that kind of discussion  :doubt:
Oh come on. You know that's not what I'm saying, and if this was a single isolated incident, I wouldn't have made that initial post. I already said it, if you're not on the far left, you're a target. About half the forum knows this by now, I've never seen it brought up as frequently as it is these days.