There's a lot to unpack in this whole topic. I'm probably going to forget something I would like to contribute after mulling over it all day.
First off, I do want to apologize for how you've been treated upon the discord. That is not the welcoming experience we want to ensure in any part of the BattleMaster community experience in-game, on the wiki, on the forum, or on discord. I think what often happens, and what we've been attempting to address since Perleone was a big bloc of players drowning out other southern realm player voices, is that each individual, wanting to contribute, chimes in with their voice one by one. And when its an imbalance of many shared perspectives versus one, it quickly feels like a hostile dogpile. As these concerns, various increases in moderation have been adopted. Since your last night in Discord, we've implemented channel slowmode (limiting rate of posts per person per allotted time) and locking the channel from posts as moderator commands. That said, it does *not* excuse some of your own behaviour on the discord either. Overall, I felt very disappointed by that *entire* conversation. Overall, there is a strong lack of people *listening* to one another and I thank Gildre for raising this and Anaris for reminding us that we are all *real people* on the other side of the screen.
I will put this as simply as possible - you are saying the discord and the zeitgeist it presents has zero effects on the game? That it has never influenced writing a character motivation? That the concepts presented exist entirely separate in each individual's mind and that no contamination occurs?
Nothing has zero effects on the game. There are many conscious and unconscious ideas affecting our characters and it is upon us to do our best to be mindful of OOC knowledge intermingling with IC. There's also
different types of OOC influence between the negative misusing OOC information for IC gain and the positive developing your character for OOC enjoyment over strict interpretation of what ones character would do. Practically speaking, as Tom noted, there's only so much to be done to stop OOC discussions, they will occur somewhere; at least with discord, it can be moderated under our influence. As it has increasingly been when noted as necessary. When it is evident someone *has* circumvented the in-gane message system with OOC messages, yes the Titans will issue a judgment.
I will say when the devs can put a "give feedback" button on the account pages to get a broad perspective, why wouldn't they?
Player-wide surveys are something that have been worked with off and on for quite awhile. It was an idea in 2012. Tim finally worked on them I think in 2014 or so, but didn't get fully finished. I implemented new player surveys some months ago, though there's a bug I need to fix with some of them. After the huge Beluaterra ruler OOCfest in May, I started turning my attention to one-off surveys on related matters of the game's direction, government member performance, titan perception, player mortality et cetera. But summer tends to be a lowpoint in my BattleMaster-related time, so I haven't had the focus to sit down and complete them; I was fiddling with the mobile display for the surveys last I remember. As with most things in BattleMaster, they're a work in progress, along with what Anaris mentioned elsewhere about limited time and motivation being sapped.
