Nino...One of the upsides of VG.

[Braen]

Originally Posted by Kodylan

Put Gallenite in charge and it'd be a recipe for success, as he's proven to be a solid producer in the MMO genre(he was the producer during Planes of Power in EQ as well I believe).

And he designed the EQ1 LFG tool...

[teneran]

Originally Posted by Requiem

I've deleted a number of posts on this thread personally attacking Utnayan.

I know there's a whole lot of you that want to drag him through the mud right now. That will do nothing but make this thread erupt back into what the nerd rage thread was, and I'd say we've beat that dead horse enough.

Please, let's not get back into a trainwreck.

With all due respect, the real problem is you still allow people like Utnayan posting priviledges here. That's why this board is, and will continue to be, a trainwreck ... because there is very little real moderation.

As long as you continue to allow people who post continued extreme negativity and Bill O'Reilly levels of grandstanding near free reign, this board is going to gravitate towards a drama filled "nerd rage" trainwreck, to use your words.

Think back to what has happened everytime developers such as Brad McQuaid, Jon Smedley and Nino etc. have tried to post here, and communicate with the community. The haters such as Utnayan (with the help of many others) have hurled insults, dragged them through the mud, etc.

And you allowed it.

Why didn't you delete posts in the past that personally attacked Brad McQuaid? What's the difference?

If people like Nino will no longer be posting here, and people like Utnayan will, frankly, about the only thing this board will be useful for, for me anyway, is to check patch notes on Vanguard. Any real disemination of game information or discussion, what little might be present, is going to get drowned out ina sea of self important grandstanding.

[Neric]

Originally Posted by r.gun

How delusional can you get? This isn't a matter of "Ok, VG sucks, but lets call the haters dumb." It's simply the fact that Ut has always been preaching about how dishonest developers, Brad in particular, are and then he goes around and posts something that was written in confidence.

...to show that Brad was dishonest.

I mean it's a dilemma. If he doesn't prove his statements you call him a liar, if he does you call him traitor. Looks like a no-win situation to me.

[Maegril]

Originally Posted by Rayne

Well, considering that this forum is predicated on advancing and improving the genre, how do you preserve those ideals with heavy moderation? I know sometimes Ut and others go right off the deep end, but shutting down the voice, as whacked out as it may sometimes be, also tends to shut down the ideal.

By requiring criticism to contain valid, rational thoughts and be constructive. Staying on topic about the content of the thread (rather than the character of any poster) would help too.

This used to be a great board to come to in order to get an idea of the difficulties and how they might be solved in MMO design. Maybe it's a matter of the change of more singular vision after Furor left; maybe it's just harder to maintain vision in general when you're spanning 10-20 games instead of one or two. But whatever the reason, the S/N ratio here has pretty consistently shrunk to the point where it's not worth trying to tease out any good information or ideas from the fungal carpet that most of the threads have become.

Simple moderation based on: "Does the poster have a point? Does he make it succinctly? Does he avoid extraneous diversions and jabs at people/institutions/games?" would go a huge distance to fix that. It really doesn't even matter who does the moderation.

If you're worried about, for example, community reps moderating out the negative, all it would take is a few threads started with cogent, well-thought out posts in the unmoderated section saying "I posted this in the moderated threads, but for whatever reason they didn't think it was a valid enough thought to be allowed through." to pretty glaringly highlight any type of systematic disinformation campaign or spin doctoring.

Not to start a cross-forum flamewar, but one of the things I value most about EJ's forums is the fact that if someone is being a fuckwit it's pointed out, they're told to stop it, and there's apparently enough respect/fear that they do. Actually having people do the same thing here could nearly singlehandedly snap this place back into a forum that had discussions that were interesting and pertinent.

[Neric]

Originally Posted by teneran

With all due respect, the real problem is you still allow people like Utnayan posting priviledges here.

It's only fair. They allow you all posting priviledges too and all you have written so far was 201 comments on board rules and who sucks and who doesn't...

[xmod2]

Originally Posted by teneran

Think back to what has happened everytime developers such as Brad McQuaid, Jon Smedley and Nino etc. have tried to post here, and communicate with the community. The haters such as Utnayan (with the help of many others) have hurled insults, dragged them through the mud, etc.

---

If people like Nino will no longer be posting here, and people like Utnayan will, frankly, about the only thing this board will be useful for, for me anyway, is to check patch notes on Vanguard. Any real disemination of game information or discussion, what little might be present, is going to get drowned out ina sea of self important grandstanding.

Well you'll have to, since there aren't any official boards.

Scott and Curt both post here and no one gives them shit. In fact, Curt has a very long, and very productive thread on the boards right now. Nino, when posting on his own in other threads, doesn't illicit a negative response either.

Face it, the problem isn't with devs posting and people giving them shit. The problem is with CERTAIN devs and a particular title. This isn't a problem in other threads.

edit: And Curt is "famous" even outside of MMORPGs. A great example of what the real problem is.

[Gnome Eater]

The question you have to ask yourself is if anyone reads those boards for Brad's posts or for Neric/Utnayan/Hiram tower. As much as Brad's propaganda is annoying, the people giving him shit are 1000x more annoying and they have absolutely nothing to add to the conversation.

[Bolero]

I still play the game and still sorta like it. But I have to agree that Brad's posts do much more bad than good. His posts are such fluffy bullshit that I can understand where some of the haters are coming from. You can tell from Brads writing style that he spends most of his time pandering to the moneyholders. That kind of talk here is not appropriate.

Posts from people like Nino are great and give me a warm fuzzy feeling about playing Vanguard. It's ironic that they would want to stop Nino from posting, since he does a better job selling the game than Brad could ever dream of. Instead of muzzling productive posters like Nino, Brad needs to muzzle himself. That would go a long way toward ending some of these rage filled posts.

[elrich]

Sweet jesus, that was most of my morning just reading through this thread. Wow.

Personally, I think for 'cleaning up' the forums (which aren't half as bad as many people here claim they are) some moderators with a low tolerance for bullshit and a wide variety of tools (variable length suspensions, banning people from individual threads/forums/etc) would go a long way towards bringing about the peace (or, an appropriate level thereof).

Trick is, finding good moderators. As for that, I have no good suggestions. Too much is worse than too little, but only by a little. It's always tough to get moderators who know what the right balance is.

And, wtf neric. Why are you going to such ridiculous extremes to defend Ut? Ya, Nino made a mistake by sending the info in the first place (only proven by the fact that it did bite him in the ass) but Ut flat out admitted to breaking a promise to keep the info private. *Indefensible*, even if the info he posted wasn't taken out of context and out of date.

[r.gun]

Originally Posted by Neric

...to show that Brad was dishonest.

I mean it's a dilemma. If he doesn't prove his statements you call him a liar, if he does you call him traitor. Looks like a no-win situation to me.

He wasn't showing that McQuaid was dishonest at all. He was trying to be a preacher and show how the evil Brad had released a game with *gasp* unfinished content at higher levels! McQuaid even admitted that the content wasn't there fully and should be completely in by Mid-April. All Ut did was needlessly quote a confidential PM in order to try to prove some obscure point he was trying to prove that "there isn't enough 35+ content", but because his sources were out of date his point wasn't really valid using the facts he had; so, in the end he just came off as being a douchebag.

Maybe he should try proving his statements (you should try too, with the whole "omg VG is doomed and we all know it" comment you threw out earlier in the thread) with relevant information that isn't a month old.

[Malakie Torsade]

I would just like to see stricter moderation. I'd hate for us to go as far as EJ as they are overboard, but letting someone de-rail thread after thread untouched needs to stop.

A rating system would be ok, but really, is it needed? After you've read the forums for a few months, you tend to mentally sort out the good posters yourself while those who obviously belong at the Special Kids e-table are glossed over for a good laugh.

As for Ut, now I think he's fine. Old Ut needed a ban badly. The Ut who would go into every single VG thread, no matter what it was about, and type the same exact shit he'd post in all the other threads, over and over again. Once he came back from his absence (pre-ban,) he was fine... though that didn't stop the anti-Ut retards from ignoring what he was saying and just posting "HAY GUYZ UT IS BACK!!ONE"

In short, here is what I'd like to see an end to :

- Repeated thread de-railments (Ut several months ago)
- Repeated one-line quips that add nothing to the discussion (Duppin)
- People who don't understand you don't have to hit the god damned Enter key at the end of every line
- People who don't like 300 (optional)

As for Dev posting, the only "Trouble Dev" is Brad. Whether you love or hate VG, his posts as of late have been nothing but advertisements for his game with little to no worthwhile input for discussion. Giving a forum for devs to moderate would either be 1) ignored or 2) become an advertising platform where anyone who says anything other than "MMO X is great and cured my erectile disfunction" will be silenced.

Originally Posted by teneran

Think back to what has happened everytime developers such as Brad McQuaid, Jon Smedley and Nino etc. have tried to post here, and communicate with the community. The haters such as Utnayan (with the help of many others) have hurled insults, dragged them through the mud, etc.

Not true at all. Smedley got some shit, no doubt. But I can't remember a time anyone attacked Nino or Gallenite. In fact, Ut and others have said on several occasions that they appreciate them being upfront, even if they didn't like their respective game.

Lastly, as to the Nino situation, it's a shame really. First that the information he gave out trustingly was leaked... twice. Secondly that the corporate brass wants to silence one of the only honest, upfront voices from Sigil. While I don't see myself playing VG any time soon, seeing him be upset with the state of things and honestly trying to get to the heart of matters made me respect the company just a little bit more.

[Go Outside]

My theory is that VG threads exist to help some sinister person with his psychological thesis about the Sleeper effect - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

[Muligan]

Speaking of Scott... where has he been?? Smells like there's something up in the EQ2 warroom. Hopefully they're cooking up something nice.


I hate Nino is getting a hard time. I appreciate people like him and others who are up front. The people who really enjoy games take honesty much further than sugar coats and glossy layers. We've all played less than acceptable games in regards to issues. Most people understand the complexity and the size of MMO's. However, we also understand years of experience and life lesson's. I feel Brad made some verbal mistakes with Vanguard which really cost him much more than anything within the game itself. That really disappoints me as well.

[Bongk]

What people do not seem to grasp is that message was not sent to Utnayan. It was sent to someone who posts on these boards and is very Pro-VG who than forwarded it to Utnayan. (you can see Utnayan threaten this person to post this a couple days before he did)

At the same time I can assure you there was nothing attached to it than said (do not repost this) when Nino sent it. I have many PM's from Nino and he never ever prefaced any saying "do not repeat this" I just did not do it out of courtesy.

My inbox is full of PM's from Nino that could be considered controversial in the right light. No, I never posted any of them here word for word but I did talk about the content of them some times.

All it was, if you sent Nino a PM with a direct VG question, you got a reply that was no bullshit and told it how it really is/was.

I sent him many questions in the early days of VG about game issues, my problems with CS and all the DSC nerfs. I got a pointed honest repsonse every time and appreciate that fact.

Nino is the man and should not be in trouble for being honest IMO. He never bashed the game or gave out sekrit sauce info's. Just responded to honest questions with honest answers.

Utnayan shoulda had enough respect to not post that just to prove how "l33t" he is... Way to go bud, guess our days of honest answers are over so you can feel better about yourself.

[Twobit Whore]

Originally Posted by Bongk

What people do not seem to grasp is that message was not sent to Utnayan. It was sent to someone who posts on these boards and is very Pro-VG who than forwarded it to Utnayan. (you can see Utnayan threaten this person to post this a couple days before he did)

Utnayan shoulda had enough respect to not post that just to prove how "l33t" he is... Way to go bud, guess our days of honest answers are over so you can feel better about yourself.

Yeah, I tried explaining that several times. It's really boggling how he could have sent that to Ut and not expect something to come of it. Was Ut wrong in what he did? Maybe.. knowing how he his and what his messages are, I can understand why he did it.. but he probably shouldn't have. And he *did* try to deflect the origination of the information. No, that doesn't excuse it, but people are acting like he did it with the intent of getting Nino in trouble when he didn't.

The person who deserves the most blame is the one who Nino originally sent the information to, who in an attempt to 'show up' Utnayan turned around and sent him a private conversation between himself and a developer.