I wasn't sure whether to post this or not. However, I did, and you can see all my rage quoted in the first post of the thread, so lets not go down that path.

If you receive a ban or 'suspension' on Giant Bomb you are an exceedingly small exception to the rule. This is not a site that fucks over every user for saying a swear word. The problem is that, maybe because of how few are banned and how many of those are obvious trolls or spam bots, there's not a whole lot of thought put into how the banned are managed on the site.

If you get banned, there is no way to appeal. If a moderator says you deserve to be permanently banned for saying they're silly, that's it. Even on forums like the [awful] IGN Boards, you had a reply slip you could maybe use to talk to the moderators. Giant Bomb is objectively worse in this regard. Before I was officially banned, I was warned, but a glitch occurred and I was banned. I had to find a moderator in the live chat to fix this problem. It goes without saying, but you shouldn't be put through that process and a ban response form would be one solution. An archaic one, nonetheless and I would expect a better idea than that.

If you had the best moderators in the world, you should still be able to appeal your bans because of human error. Beyond that, unfair bans exist. I realise that other sites have worse systems and this is par for the course on web forums, but I have higher standards for this website, let alone when I subscribed twice. It is frustrating that the staff have seemingly zero control over the moderation of the forum.

It's not like it'd be hard for the staff themselves to be at all involved, aside from the occasional spammers, nothing really happens on this site worth moderation. In any case, the service is very poor. I served a month ban, ridiculous considering the 'offences.' The first was saying 'suck my dick choke on it' in an obvious joke. Very anal and harsh, but fine, that is arguable.

The other offence was such bullshit that I could write a book. In the chat, I was already banned for two weeks, but no moderator said I couldn't post in the chat and as far as I know, it's not written in the rules. So I'm sitting there posting every now and again, bored because it's that long, tedious 7^th February X-COM TNT. An hour in, Vinny overlays some cartoon face on Brad so I say, “@brad Your face,” which somehow merits a 600 second cooldown. Immediately I'm being insulted by about half a dozen or so users. I assume it was because of the previous joke comment, I'll assume it was Brad himself as he did later post “fuck the haters” in the chat. The cooldown put on me glitched the chat so that it was unusable. This would all have been avoided if the mods simply contacted me and told me what was the problem or been receptive to any of my messages.

It turned into a disaster and if you really want to see details it's quoted. I stuck around in the chat after, mods still on, but I got no response. I had stopped caring at that point. However, within ten minutes of the chat being ended by the mods, I get a reply in my inbox saying that because I insulted the 'moderating team,' I have a two week extension on my previous ban, making it a full month, for “you insulting the moderating team." This is true, however, I really don't agree with the notion that insulting mods is equal to insulting specific users. In my opinion, they should let this sort of stuff slide and it is unusual for mods to ban for this reason, at least from my limited memory of other forums. Now I'm on the verge of being permanently banned.

There are certain double standards at play on this site and this makes for a very confusing user-experience. Staff members can freely insult everything, including each other, with colorful language like cocksucker, faggot, asshole, fucker, but when it comes to the comments it's patently unclear whether the same rules always apply.

I decided to clean this up a bit, because it was a mess.

I have read a bunch of discussions on this matter over whether SSFIV will have downloadable characters; personally, I doubt it. There have been the odd mentions of Yoshinori Ono talking about such an event, but this set-up makes little sense - at best Capcom would have to compete with their own branded DLC, like costumes, at worst they're splitting up the Street Fighter [IV] community in providing another alteration in which the game can be sliced up, as I'm sure at least one-million players from the original won't be coming over to Super.  
 
Tournament play out of the question, it would still require a hell of a lot of data to store these characters as downloadable objects - Ono has rather much confirmed there are no other characters on the disc to unlock, unlike the costumes, so it would need to be all new data. Street Fighter IV models are extremely high-fidelity and to match the rest of the cast would take some extreme storage space, in comparison to things like costumes. At which point, Capcom can of course not bundle characters - it wouldn't be worth the time or effort if they did. Then again, if they were to offer one character in a pack, who would that be? I can't imagine who would be popular enough to put out there as a standalone character, Ono has been talking about obscurities like Hugo and as much as I love that character, I doubt that Capcom would be prepared to put money behind that as the development team's current project. Soulcalibur IV did this with Yoda and Darth Vader, but these characters are extremely well-known in popular culture terms and it is quite a bizarre comparison to any prospect of Capcom releasing constant one-ups to the SSFIV cast. 
 
So I suppose the likelihood of it comes down to the possible conundrums one would face in handling this kind of project - how could Capcom possibly profit from it, who would actually pay for it and who would have the space or patience along with all the other downloadable content? It makes far more sense to package it all into an 'Ultra,' 'Turbo' or 'Bunghole' edition in 2011, where they can again charge around half-price and make money back on costumes or that ilk. RANT GET. 

I do love the quest system some - it's probably been the second biggest time-consumer of mine after the ERs on Giant Bomb and is a lot of fun, but where is it going with quests that require you to watch certain videos? Is Giant Bomb profiting from these quests, or is it simply spreading note of a game the staff likes? It doesn't seem quite as a agreeable as most previous Giant Bomb activity I've seen, but perhaps I'm being too suspicious, as it would actually be a great way to keep ads off of the site and what-have-you. I actually have no idea how the staff runs a website this well without constant streaming of horrible advertisements everywhere or a pay service somewhere, so I would be all for some quests that just require you to watch videos that GB got some green from.  
 
But then, I think what's most likely is just that this is another silly, fun quest that Dave thought up while drinking from his skull cup, right Zach? 

I had been watching the Endurance Run of the excellent Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 one day when it hit me that, in  fact, I spent several hours a day on Giant Bomb. This bit of information didn't really come to my full attention until I saw that Deadly Premonition was being ER'd by not one, but two teams. So, I figured, "why not sign up -- that way I can reply directly to the ER with my witty and original responses on how much I enjoyed the ER. Aside from that, I also was into watching those QLs and stuff; two birds with one stone. 
 
Then I saw these quests things and decided to post a blog. Now I have completed my first quest, Zach.