bta

It’s truly incredible that Fandom has managed to make me feel even worse about their company than I feel every time I am forced to use one of their many horrible wikis.

I feel quite safe in saying that any interest any audience has in anything you own is entirely in spite of the company, not because of it. You cannot “realign” this “media brand” in a way that will keep people watching. People are here for the personalities. They’ve always been here for that. And you’re going to learn just how much that’s the case very quickly.

Are you somehow talking about a different Marx...?

@devron8: Thank you for sharing! It’s been nice to see their response to this become a meaningful one; I’m hoping that charity stream on Friday does some real good.

You so easily could have just not said that last bit... sounds like good riddance, then.

Choosing to become a cop is nothing like those other things you complained about the “generalizing” of, come on. You don’t just end up as one.

Biggest one for me is probably Zanki Zero: Last Beginning. They kinda mainly marketed its vague staff connections to the Danganronpa series despite it being a dungeon crawler RPG, and while I understand why I don’t think enough people really bit. It’s certainly rough around the edges and has some skeevy bits, but I ended up really enjoying the characters and was pretty into the (kinda simplistic) RPG bits a lot too, to the point that I went through the fairly tedious process of Platinuming it. I was expecting the worst of its decision to tackle some fairly serious topics due to how Danganronpa had fumbled that horribly in the past, but for the most part it was actually pretty well handled. And similarly I was really pleasantly surprised by how strong the ending was, especially as I only saw it after the many hours spent on finishing stuff for the Plat and expected it to not hit very hard at all. They really leaned right into the stuff I loved the most about the cast, and months later I still find myself thinking about the final scenes from time to time.

Other stuff that immediately come to mind are Hypnospace Outlaw and Dicey Dungeons. For the latter I mostly played a ton the first week and then recently came back for the Halloween stuff, and that has me wanting to get back into it soon since they’ve patched it a decent amount. AI: The Somnium Files probably counts too. I’m probably forgetting some other big ones. And I’m finding myself playing a lot of visual novels during this last month or two of the year - Spirit Hunter: NG, soon Raging Loop, possibly World End Syndrome if I can make the time - and some of those may end up counting as well!

(And everyone saying SWH has reminded me I just need to set aside an hour and finally play it! I was so excited for a new Simogo game, just haven’t been in the right mood for it...)

EDIT: Oh, yeah, definitely Baba Is You as well! I devoured that too, playing hours and hours that first week. I think I’ve beaten the vast majority of it, but got stuck on what was left and it was at the point where I was barely getting anything done when I played it, so I fell off. They did patch some of the levels I had issues with and I came back to it for a bit after, but it’s been some time since then. I’d like to get back into it and see it through sometime, but...

@lemmox: There’s no point in engaging with most of this argument but I will again say: people were not “outraged”. They made reasonable criticism. Criticism you may disagree with, but it was worded reasonably.

Then people immediately (and pre-emptively, even!) flipped out complaining about the “outrage”, the “salt”, etc. and mocking anyone critical. If we want to talk about hair-triggers, apparently seeing someone being slightly critical sets people off into whining fits. Even if they were somehow overly critical (which most if not all of those critical weren’t), people insulting anyone who’s slightly critical makes me feel way more unwelcome than someone being overly critical.

Like, to be clear, the first page of comments had someone going “salty QQ comment tears!” with a picture of Ben, and that tone was frequent throughout. People constantly came in to complain about the comments in general... but they were complaining about people respectfully writing criticism, not those who were mocking/insulting them.

If you want a community that can discuss things respectfully, you have to start with the “it’s not ok to outright mock people for actually being critical of something”. Especially since people then started leaning into stuff like “this is what’s turning people conservative!” etc.

People posted reasonable criticism in the comments, and then others threw a tantrum whining about it and mocking them. So, honestly, the ones who needed to chill out were those that couldn’t take others being critical. And I’m more than a little disappointed to see that some of them were mocking criticism 2 weeks ago too and yet were allowed to do it again today.

I don’t think any of GB wants you to leave politics at the door either.

I wrote a decently sized response to a couple posts but just as I was finishing my last sentence, I think I mistapped something and the page reloaded, eating it. So that sucks and I don’t really want to retype most of it since it’s probably not worth it, so I’m just gonna briefly say...

@mike: I really hope it didn’t come across as if I was judging your moderation style here when I posted; I was legitimately wondering about what the differences would actually be and genuinely appreciate all the info you gave. I also 100% agree with what you and @sweep have said- it’s impossible to tell if someone is actually correct or just hiding (or in denial about) their own legitimately bad actions when they complain about being banned for no reason or vague “moderation issues”, etc. so I was not putting any stock into such comments when I was talking about Era in comparison.

EDIT: Oh, is tagging broken on mobile? Huh.

@mocbucket62: Oh, just to be clear- I don't blame you for picking it as best answer; I did answer the question after all. I was just surprised because 1. I had no idea that a forum would even have that functionality and 2. I was reloading the thread to see if anyone else had posted and thought my post had been deleted for a couple minutes.

I will add that it's very funny to me to hear that people think Era's moderation is less "strict"? Maybe it's over specific things I'm not picking up on (ex: obviously things are a little more hands off regarding talking about staff members just due to the nature of it being a different site, though if lines are crossed they'll thankfully pop in) but Era's moderation is, I'd say, still decently left-leaning in terms of what's considered appropriate behavior. And as I alluded to earlier, personally I'm in favor of that, and it makes me much more comfortable posting there knowing there are certain standards that are not up for discussion. So I don't think that differs too far from the "strict" moderation I'm hearing about here. Though I'm sure a lot more is allowed than here in terms of political/offtopic discussion, and also posters being warned and having a little room to walk things back a bit before they cross the line into explicit ban territory (or alternately shove themselves right past it), I guess? And the forum software allows those warnings/bannings to be a little more transparent. Hmm.

Also, I want to say @minipato (...having @ing someone being "calling someone out" has a weird connotation for me, huh) has a very good point! Being on Era in a single thread totally lets us, for better or worse, discuss pretty minor things about the staff/site. If you have to make a thread about it here... it can't really be a thing you talk about offhand and move on, you're dedicating a thread to it and treating it seriously.