Meursault wrote on Nov 22
nd, 2013 at 2:16am:
I never got any infractions (I know, wuss) but I gave up on the official forums after seeing posts like you describe dissapear. I am OK with personal attacks against players dissapearing, but silencing debate on game issues is stupid and wrong.
Turbine also has a stupid policy of shutting down derailed threads rather than giving heavy infractions to whoever did the derailing. It amounts to a "heckler's veto" -- if there's a thread about something that you disagree with, just keep derailing it and making it about personal stuff rather than the original game issues until it devolves into stupid arguments and Turbine will just close it at no cost to you. It doesn't matter who was bringing up good points or anything. And once it gets shut down people are less likely to bring up the topic again -- or at least, those that follow the rules about not re-posting closed thread topics, since it's sometimes hard to distinguish if a thread was closed/removed because of bickering or because the topic itself was improper.
The "exploit!" crowd uses this confusion as to why moderation was done to the fullest. When Shat posted his solo raids, people would be quick to say "hey Shat must've used X exploit! What a cheater!" and when those posts were removed they would then follow up with "see the posts got removed because X really is an exploit!" even though, you know,
accusing someone of using an exploit is against the rules (either the accusation is false and you are "Posting or commenting with the intent of provoking ("trolling") another user or users" or the accusation is true and you are "Creating a thread, post, or comment on any of the Community Sites that calls out another player(s) for their actions in the game"). Since it takes time to point out the flaws in their arguments (i.e. give an informative response rather than just do their style of blanket accusations), more often than not the posts would be removed by the time I or others were able to post, with the result that all everyone else sees is accusations of exploits followed by their removal in those threads, without seeing the responses to them.
And the kicker is, of course,
that those people are still happily posting away with no ill effects. We simply didn't want to retaliate in kind even though many of them were using obvious exploits in what they posted. And I don't mean "obvious" in the sense of "you must have used some (unspecified) perch spot" like what they were posting about Shat; to this date we still have no idea what was the "pillar dirt" exploit that Shat supposedly used. I mean "obvious" as in I could directly state what exploit it was, how you could tell, and how there was no other way except that the exploit was being used. This third point is key because anyone can always hypothesize some hidden unseen exploit that would fit the screenshots (similar to the "God of the gaps" argument where you can always say that God exists in the stuff we don't understand yet i.e. the available data) and since Shat posts the threads after completion, it's impossible for him to go back and get more screenshots to disprove them, without taking the effort re-solo the raid again.
Of course I had mentioned this to Turbine (sent a PM to either Tolero or Cordovan about it, forgot whom), that people blanket accusing others of exploits in the achievements forum with no basis was bad for the community atmosphere and against the forum rules (and detailing specifically how those people were wrong i.e. answering the specific accusations that were in their removed posts) but nothing ever happened; the same people continued posting their exploit accusations, meaning Turbine removed their posts but they either got so few infractions that they didn't care,
or they never got any infractions at all for it.
That's why Shat eventually just posted that if these people were really serious and adamant that Shat had used any exploits, they should just directly report Shat for exploiting; he doesn't mind Turbine investigating him, and in fact we already sort of suspected that Turbine was snooping him when he soloed the raids to see how he was doing it, since he posted about them as he did them. So obviously we didn't plan on using any exploits when going over the solo raid strategies (not that we're aware of any). That those posters didn't (or at least, we never heard from any GM about it) just shows whether those posters were really serious about alerting Turbine to exploits being used, or were simply trying to fling mud at other players.
Neru wrote on Nov 22
nd, 2013 at 4:04am:
Not just that. During my time of official forum activeness, the turbine moderators for some strange fucking reason always sided with large, loud guilds such as Soulless of Sarlona when they still existed.
You had a minor disagreement with a member of Soulless then you get slapped on the wrist with an 2 point infraction by Cordovan. Sadly, I am not kidding.
Not only that, but Turbine showed obvious favoritism to certain posters. For example, Shade could accuse Shat of exploiting in raids with impunity. Shat, when refuting one of Shade's posts, used the word "bullshait" and got the post removed and 2 infractions for it. Shade then referred to the deleted post saying something about how obviously even Turbine agrees with him, part of his "disagreeing with me is against the rules" schtick (which is violating the rule about referring to deleted posts
and putting words in Turbine's mouth, somewhat violating the rule about impersonating Turbine, especially since in Shat's infraction PM it said it because misspelling filtered words was against the rules) and didn't actually address any of the points Shat mentioned. Obviously, Turbine never did anything about what Shade posted that I'm aware of. Obviously, Shade is now in another game claiming that everyone else is exploiting, so nothing's changed ("I'm the best, and anyone that can beat me is obviously exploiting" philosophy).
It'd be nice if Turbine would actually enforce the rules evenly, but certain posters know they can troll others all they want without catching any flak from Turbine on the DDO forums -- blanket saying others are wrong without any justification, accusing others of stuff, etc. Amazingly, those posters don't post on the Vault, despite the Vault ostensibly not having rules against such behavior, and thus the Vault doesn't suffer from the same kind of disruptions that they unleash on the DDO forums. I wonder why that is?
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