Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Lorric on January 27, 2017, 05:26:26 am
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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.
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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 (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?action=profile;area=showposts;u=39567) is more than "one weird post" and that directly attacking people even after being warned is breaking a few rules.
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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 (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?action=profile;area=showposts;u=39567) 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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That's wishful thinking, pilot. The internet doesn't fit that utopian ideal. The garbage floats to the top and generates 34039 page threads in which people don't do any FreeSpace modding.
There's a code of conduct posted in public where you can read it line by line.
Feel free to start a dead vagina thread in protest of the neofascist moderators, I guess.
If you're very concerned about left wing bias, maybe don't post in GenDisc, the ****ty forum for political discussion.
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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.
I don't want to be anymore. I couldn't work with you (meaning the staff as a whole as an entity not you personally.) I would be ashamed to wear the blue or red badge because of what I was tied to by association.
Why did you delete? That was like the one thing left you guys were reliable on not doing.
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That's wishful thinking, pilot. The internet doesn't fit that utopian ideal. The garbage floats to the top and generates 34039 page threads in which people don't do any FreeSpace modding.
There's a code of conduct posted in public where you can read it line by line.
Feel free to start a dead vagina thread in protest of the neofascist moderators, I guess.
If you're very concerned about left wing bias, maybe don't post in GenDisc, the ****ty forum for political discussion.
But if that's your concern we might as well just remove gen disc if that is all we want people to do.
It's just words. It doesn't mean anything.
If I was going to protest I would have done it when it happened. It would do no good.
Would that stop you if the roles were reversed?
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So you're basically saying you don't give a **** about the capricorn incident and are just using it to whine about people disagreeing with you in ****ty Gendics threads. Okay, got it.
Seriously, when was the last time anyone got banned or warned for posting a stupid, immature, or far-right opinion if they kept it relatively civil?
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Why did you delete? That was like the one thing left you guys were reliable on not doing.
Read the comment. Mongoose gave his reasoning there.
It's just words. It doesn't mean anything.
Wrong.
If I was going to protest I would have done it when it happened. It would do no good.
And yet, you are vigorously protesting now.
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Seriously, when was the last time anyone got banned or warned for posting a stupid, immature, or far-right opinion if they kept it relatively civil?
A looooong time ago.
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Dog I think gendisc is so bad I demanded a permanent ban so I'd never get my dumb ass involved in a misinformed debate about alternative facts again.
There's nothing of value to be gained by repeatedly failing to change each others' minds on a modding forum.
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So you're basically saying you don't give a **** about the capricorn incident and are just using it to whine about people disagreeing with you in ****ty Gendics threads. Okay, got it.
I do give a ****, and no.
Why did you delete? That was like the one thing left you guys were reliable on not doing.
Read the comment. Mongoose gave his reasoning there.
It's just words. It doesn't mean anything.
Wrong.
If I was going to protest I would have done it when it happened. It would do no good.
And yet, you are vigorously protesting now.
I did. But it used to be forbidden.
Well of course you're not going to admit it. Though it does puzzle me why you guys don't and persist with the charade even now. Especially when Scotty basically threw the guidelines in the bin wholesale months ago for all the forum to see and most of you went along with it.
It's not the same, since I'm talking wider HLP. All the same, possibly more fool me.
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Seriously, when was the last time anyone got banned or warned for posting a stupid, immature, or far-right opinion if they kept it relatively civil?
A looooong time ago.
That's because in many cases it doesn't work that way.
The way it does work is one side is allowed to do pretty much anything they want while the other is persecuted. Double standards.
Dog I think gendisc is so bad I demanded a permanent ban so I'd never get my dumb ass involved in a misinformed debate about alternative facts again.
There's nothing of value to be gained by repeatedly failing to change each others' minds on a modding forum.
Ah yes, I remember your self-requested bans now. Fair enough.
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It's about considerably more than politics. It's about the fact that a position of responsibility is about being balanced and not 'passing judgement', something that HLP severely wobbled on for quite a long time. I left because, rather than simply take action to stop a confrontation, it was instead decided that a decision should be made about who was 'right' and who was 'wrong' based on assumptions, so rather than simply stopping the problem, it was instead chosen to exacerbate it.
Seems to me the HLP does need to think seriously about what it expects from GD, because trolling isn't defined by the fact that it doesn't agree with what a Moderator 'thinks' the truth is, it's an action, not a position, political or otherwise.
-Flipside.
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This thread needs to be locked, the plough run over it and sown with salt. There is absolutely nothing that can be gained by letting it run on. Lorric is Lorric, he will never be able to understand why deleting posts about Carrie Fisher's dead vagina is the work of decent people rather than censorious feminazis. This thread is in the rut of a hundred lorricthreads past and it's going to be horrible for everyone involved if it continues, especially if it keeps on rolling as a thread for everyone to post grievances at the mods.
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It's about considerably more than politics. It's about the fact that a position of responsibility is about being balanced and not 'passing judgement', something that HLP severely wobbled on for quite a long time. I left because, rather than simply take action to stop a confrontation, it was instead decided that a decision should be made about who was 'right' and who was 'wrong' based on assumptions, so rather than simply stopping the problem, it was instead chosen to exacerbate it.
Seems to me the HLP does need to think seriously about what it expects from GD, because trolling isn't defined by the fact that it doesn't agree with what a Moderator 'thinks' the truth is, it's an action, not a position, political or otherwise.
-Flipside.
Hi! Wow. Where did you come from, and why not just use your old account?
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This thread needs to be locked, the plough run over it and sown with salt. There is absolutely nothing that can be gained by letting it run on. Lorric is Lorric, he will never be able to understand why deleting posts about Carrie Fisher's dead vagina is the work of decent people rather than censorious feminazis. This thread is in the rut of a hundred lorricthreads past and it's going to be horrible for everyone involved if it continues, especially if it keeps on rolling as a thread for everyone to post grievances at the mods.
Agreed.