EVE General Discussion

While I agree that these forums need to be cleaned up, the heavy handed and in a lot of cases confusing moderation that has been performed in the last month has destroyed the very basis of the forums them selves.

All sorts of things have been cut for lack of content or off topic posts. Some have even been moved from GD and placed in the wrong forum.

Sending a petition is useless as the petition system is completely broken and not transparent.

I personally feel that CCP has ruled the forums are no longer part of the meta game and are just for talking kindly about thoughts and ideas. That might be all well and good except it doesn't really give a reason for GD to exist at all.

The current moderation levels remind me more of the CCCPs actions on freedom of speech.

What is there to moderate? These forums are dead anyway.

My .02 isk.

The only thing I saw was a bunch of players willfully posting an extreme number of posts specifically designed to provoke a response from the moderators. i.e. they were deliberately trolling the mods.

I have no idea what the original problem was that was being protested.

Thus, I have no sympathy for the trolls/protesters, I have no evidence of wrong-doing by the mods, and I'm of the opinion that the trolls should be banned and CCP needs to formalize and republish their forum guidelines.


disclaimer: And no, I'm not going to read through the previous seven pages in this thread to hear the protester/troll side of things. After watching the first page fill up with locked troll threads yesterday, I have no goodwill left. I'll rely on CCP to do the legwork.

/grumble

The main problem seems to be the ISDs have little to no experience in the field and are likely bad posters themselves.

They mistake ad-hominem discussion and glib remarks as personal attacks when they are clearly anything but, and so starts the deletions and locks, followed by bans (whoever reviews that is unknown).

There is a difference between "you are stupid" and "your argument is stupid" but the ISDs seem unable to see that.

There was a great thread in new-players last week where the "apparent" new player started a thread calling PVPers evil (and other expletives) and the ISD went ahead and deleted about half the thread as "trolling" despite it mostly being little more than a defensive stance from most. The OP remained, with just the cusses snipped. Let's also not forget Jades rampant conspiracy theories which largely went unmoderated, yet replies calling him out on it were repeatedly deleted as "personal attacks" -- apparently responding to a personal attack is bad, but starting a thread which is one long slander piece (repeatedly) is OK? Right.

This is silly.

You need to realise that eve-search exists and we can see the thread pre-moderation at any point, and people can draw their own conclusions which are largely poor.

If the ISD scheme is to continue it needs to do so in a different way, because volunteers simply can't be held accountable in the same way as staff (wage pressure) and I suspect this is part of the reason why the quality has been weak.

Let's stop the stupid argument of "but they do it for free, therefore-" and instead ask if volunteer moderators are really a good idea here.

At the moment they're basically prefects, and anyone who went through a school that had them knows what kind of individual wants to volunteer into a position of "authority."

This!

Signed


If nothing else change the name to something a bit more honest IAH

-1

We need more ISD members on this forum with more robust deletions and threads locked. The forums are garbage and I'm bored of having to wade through the junk and drivel spouted by so many people in order to get to the useful info.

ISD keep up the good work

The problem is Khanh'rhh, that many people are unable to objectively look at their own posting and see where they fall short in the first sentence you make above. (attacking the argument not the poster). You are certainly one to get over excited in the process of debate and lose sight of this principle. The reason my posts probably went unmoderated is that I have a personal rule (if I ever get upset on the internet over a forum argument I walk away from the computer and go do something else - mostly having a nice cup of tea.) Nothing good comes from posting-angry.

The whole wardec 1.1 scandal discussion was a pretty easy debate for me because well, the 1.1 changes were objectively terrible and I stand by my statements that they appear to have been made purely to advantage large alliances. I invited you many times to contest that perception with counter arguments or alternative viewpoints but mostly you just attacked ad hominen and I (and pretty much everyone else) skipped your posts.

Still, eventually you did come up with a reasonable compromise post and I agreed with you on it (while not the best option to my eyes it was much better than 1.1 changes.)

But back on topic, before doing the whole "Why does Jade get away with posting things I don't like!!" thing why not go back and read my posts in comparison to your own and try to step aside from the ego for a moment. I never sound angry, and I generally don't make personal attacks on the people I'm debating with. I might well have a poor opinion of the mental stability, personal habits, political viewpoints, general esteem of the person I'm arguing with - but all that goes unwritten because its not an appropriate body of content for a public games forum. I invite you to go back and read your own posts and see how many times you suggested I was a escaped mental patient/borderline psychotic for merely daring to suggest that the wardec mechanics were being misbalanced in favour of large alliances.



Whereas I would suggest the reason you perceive it to be weak is simply because you have been moderated. Nobody likes to be told they are "doing it wrong." Its human nature to rebel against authority. But watch the preceedings in the British house of commons and you'll see a bunch of highly paid politicians acting like forum trolls every day and needing to be reigned in by the speaker - for debate to happen you need to stamp down on personal attacks and out of bounds tactics.

The ISDs are terrible and should either have nuked almost everything you wrote or nothing at all--but should have applied that with every post in that thread. Instead, we got you calling people stupid while tinfoiling like a paranoid schizo about CCP being in league with Goonswarm (who just had 5 trillion ISK stolen from them by CCP so vOv I don't know what to tell you about how ludicrous it is that they are in cahoots) while the ISDs indiscriminately removed random posts, posts that were just as often dumb trolling as they were well-thought-out and coherent arguments.

That is why the ISD sucks.

Case in point: I just read your paragraph above as a complaint about how unfair the english language is that some people can construct a perfectly good, incisive and often cutting post without the need to personally insult other forum users, while some unfortunately (and apparently) cannot.

In EVE, most rhetorical contests are implicitly unfair because some are simply better at it.

Lowering the common demoninator of standards because some people seem to need low brow insult fests to make a point is not the way to go.