Quoting Kyorisu, reply 10
Quoting awuffleablehedgie,
reply 3
The problem with Bioware is that they actually BAN. Yes. BAN. you from playing your game if the developers or moderators want to. I will never, ever post on a Bioware forum, ever.
Well the obvious solution then is to not be a dick or create another account not tied to your games. Personally I'm not too fond of having accounts linked in anyway and rather like Valve's approach of having separate accounts for forums and support.
It is not always about the person that gets banned is being a dick. There are many times when a thin skinned dev can't take the criticism and bans the person. And this does happen more than you think. I've seen it happen many times on the forums of different games.
Now I really doubt this will happen here Frogboy and his crew are some of the best Devs in the gaming industry and they are also gamers. I have seen Frogboy get pissed on the forums but he handled it very well and no one got banned. Yet he did fight back agienst the poster which was cool.
Personally though my biggest problem with game forums are the hard core Fan boys that turn a blind eye to the game that they supposedly love which can actually hurt the game. They will tell the Devs they are doing fine when they are not and the game suffers because of it (if the devs listen to these Fan Boys.) These are the ones that will attack anyone with any sort of constructive criticism of the game no matter how minor or how well these criticisms were presented in the forums. Luckily we don't see that kind of Fanboyism here on these forums.
I find this hard to believe. I think people posting anonymously on the Internet have a very warped definition of what constructive criticism is. A good underlying point delivered in the rudest way possible isn't constructive at all. I visit the Blizzard forums from time to time too and I'm really amazed at how people like Ghostcrawler can respond without losing their temper.
Frogboy brings up a very good point. He got pissed off reading the retardation in the Blizzard forums. Guess who else is pissed off? Almost all the good posters are. It's not just game developers who don't like to visit lightly moderated forums like that. Most of the good posters in the community with something to contribute avoid it like the plague as well.
If you've ever followed Blizzard's games, almost all the good members of the community are in fan forums like Elitist Jerks and Tankspot for WoW, TeamLiquid for Starcraft and Lurker's Lounge and Amazon Basin for Diablo. Almost nobody with anything worthwhile to contribute does so on the official forums. It's just a whinefest over there.
Some posters may be right that companies need to cut their paying customers some slack to act like complete douches on their official forums. However, other paying customers do not have to cut their whiny, rude, childish brethren the same slack. Almost every popular game has an official forum that's garbage with all their constructive posters posting in other, popular fan forums. The difference is that the fan forums are way more moderated.
