Author Topic: stopping ForumMaster from destroying BattleMaster  (Read 132291 times)

Fleugs

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I agree with what the anonymous long-time player has said. I was in BM before the forum came to life and I have witnessed how it changed the game. It has brought better things, like enhancing a community-feeling and enabling players to get to meet the player behind the character. While the latter should in a perfect world only lead to friendship between players, I have the distinct feeling that the forum often achieves the opposite.

While I am on the second page of those who posted most - and this entirely a surprise to me as I don't think I'm that active on the forum - I still do not feel like one who frequents the forum very much. My activity here often has a hiatus of more than a month, something my ingame activity does not have. Why? I believe many are frustrated because the forum enables conflicts between players rather than between characters. I have that same feeling. I will not state that I am innocent, but I do dislike it. In the past half year I have grown to dislike the forum more and more. Whereas forumposts should have remained written from a casual perspective I believe way too many people take the game too serious now. I read things here with which I totally disagree but I neglect replying because discussion on the internet is a tricky thing. This has lead me to actually start to dislike some people who are active on the forum. People who I now actively avoid ingame because I now know what they represent, and more importantly, because I now know they often operate in groups of same-minded people, meaning that whatever realm they play in is often not subject to change. These groups are too strong.

I was trying to make a list of things I do not like posted on the forum, but I realized that most of what I do not like comes from the "Local" message board. Threads like "Luria" or "Sanguis Astroism" are way too long. And to be frank, it's the same people constantly circlejerking about ingame events and spewing their own thoughts on it. That is what keeps people from feeling involved. Heck, I'm Luria's general and I don't even really feel involved in that realm because of the sheer amount of people posting and defining what Luria is on the forum. For not being a member of Sanguis Astroism I was once the naive believer that the forum thread would enlighten me with what that religion is all about. It's not. It just beautifully summarizes who gets to play a role in that religion and at the same times it sends out an underlying yet clear message that everyone who is not properly involved on the forum has a much smaller chance of getting involved, even if that is not what is actually happening. Do not assume though that I read the entire SA thread - it's so horribly long, soon you can mail it to a progressive-art printer and hope for a new trend in literature to get started.

The worst part is that when you get to know someone's opinion, you realize for yourself that you think person X is a total !@#$%^&. In fact, there is a certain person X in the BM community of who I know most people just entirely hate/dislike him/her.  Don't be fooled, I don't like that person either. Yet the dislike for me only came after the forumposts. Before I barely had any idea who person X was, so I couldn't care less. After all the odds of running into person X at random in the game is so much smaller than running into him on the forums where he actually is himself. I'm not saying this person must change, I'm just giving a clear example of how the forum can poison how you think about someone because you get to read too much of him.

I have been playing this game for over 10 years now, and if you ask me, the forums in their current form are not an improvement or a worthy addition to the game. I will even outright say I believe it contributed to the deterioration of the player base, even though I have no numbers or anything factual to back up my opinion. Just my gut feeling.
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