Recent flurry of bans - Blue Tracker

#0 - Jan. 21, 2009, 5:38 p.m.

Some are justified. Some aren't.

Not sure what has you in a bad mood, Ghostcrawler. But I don't believe the draconian line you've taken in recent days with the ban stick is promoting better discussion on these forums.

There are many thousands of people that read these. You will never weed out enough trolls to effect a change. But you will deter a lot of mature, intelligent people from posting disagreements and thoughts.

"Mature, intelligent people know the difference" doesn't change the result of a draconian mod attitude. The forums would be better if you went back to just locking dumb threads and embarassing the occasional person with a post. That actually made productive people feel better about posting their thoughts. It felt like you were on our side.

A "madman leader strategy" of unpredictability will make these forums worse.

#51 - Jan. 21, 2009, 9:20 p.m.

We have no problem with posts that disagree with us. The forums are full of posts like that.

I think players are just used to being able to use the forums to trash talk, troll, flame or vent. However, these role forums specifically are never going to work with that kind of behavior. The signal to noise ratio needs to be very strong. Don't make players who actually care about the issues dig through haystacks to find needles. I know I don't want to spend my time mining the forums for occasional useful morsels buried under lots of players insulting each other's alts or predicting dire consequences for Blizzard's business model if we don't drop everything to implement their request.

I don't honestly think we are going to drive away players who have something intelligent to say. If it makes some of them pause for a sec or rewrite their post to be more constructive, heck, that's a good thing. If you really have trouble figuring out the difference, pretend you are sending an email to a boss, co-worker, teacher, professor, potential employer or someone else to whom you would normally show a modicum of respect. It is possibly to respectfully disagree with someone -- society is in fact based on that concept.

We do not take you more seriously if you act really upset, type in all caps, swear at us or threaten to burn our homes down (and yes that happens). Your arguments are evaluated entirely on the strength of the argument itself, not how you dress it up with colorful language or exclamation points.

And yes, players who can't figure that out or choose to violate it anyway will be banned and repeated or serious offenders will be banned permanently. We can ban your alts too. Maybe that isn't a very terrifying concept, but you definitely lose your opportunity for us to see your feedback.

I don't honestly have a problem with the occasional offtopic post (especially if it actually lightens the mood around here) or even heated debate. Just be adults -- that's all I ask.

I will leave this thread open in case something isn't clear.