Quality of the forums

[Shoryuken]

Originally Posted by Gousgounis

Sorry If I sound condescending or bring a sense of entitlement, but I have not given up on these boards, there are many intelligent people here, that I value their opinions. Bandwidth and hits are not all that matters, if the material here is becoming less a discourse in gaming and more the equivalent of Gaming Jerry Springer.
Gous

Amen to this. I have been reading FoH's forums since Furor was posting updates on the progress they were making in Plane of Air on Noows.com back in what was it 99 or 00?.

The site was slow as shit on 56k back in 2000/2001 but it kept drawing me back with some kind of strange magnetic force that I guess just turned out to be real, straight forward, but tough posts from Furor on the state of things in game in Everquest.

There was a level of competency unseen before in gaming reviews mixed together with a wit full of humor, but fundamentally Furor wanted what was best for EQ, and by and large they, though slowly, would implement his ideas, because they just made fucking sense.

Time progressed and the level of dedication to the game that FoH appeared to commit to was unreal, and they had a rather impressive career, if you can call it that, in being pioneers in game land, killing the newest, baddest bosses in record breakingly small forces, racking up hundreds of server-wide first kills. The competition was weak in comparison, Afterlife, Legacy of Steel, those guilds just could not match the accomplishments that FoH had had up to that point.

The game started to shift slightly to the zerg side of things and this was a gigantic bitching fest for Furor, and made for some great reading. No longer were there fights with complex strategy done by small raid forces that were directed by great leadership, it turned into a system which optimized subscriber base, namely by slowly becoming easier and more accessible for us wee mortals who maybe had some server firsts but rarely a server-wide anything.

It seemed like this shift tore a hole in the MMOG time/space continuum because it was not to long after the various iterations of these forums became this particular spot that things became less and less intriguing and more people started to just try and imitate Furor in order to garner the same sort of respect he was rightfully given. The problem was that Furor was very much original, and the rest of you are just fucking stupid sounding half of the time.

More time went by and Furor took the obvious path and got a job fleshing out Blizzards future (back then) MMOG venture, which we all know has done marvelously well. I have no idea what he does, but my guess is the same magic spell that has always drawn me and obviously thousands of people like me to this board was channeled into WoW. I don't know cause I have never ever played it.

The downside is that magic no longer exists here, and we as a collective whole are all standing around the party after its over waiting for Furor to bring the drugs back to get us high again. But alas, he has moved on and has the real world to consider.

The guy was our Robin Hood, he stood up against the mean Verant, eventually SOE, and spoke for us with zeal and vigor, and they fucking listened to him. There were times when things, changes, were made to EQ in direct correlation to Furor's moan of the week. He called Gordon Wrinn aka Abashi a fat piece of shit who did nothing productive for EQ because he was. He told McQuaid and Smedly they were idiots who got lucky with timing a game release when the market was ripe like a virgin for a 3D MUD, which was fairly accurate. He cut these "Gods" of gaming down a few notches, and it helped, he became our Hero.

Sadly, even though I imagine Furor is well and healthy (which isn't the sad part), living his life however he does, our Hero is dead. These boards will never be that light breaking through the canopy and the sweet humming sound of rightness they once were. Part of me is fictionalizing the reality of the past in order to have a nostalgia orgasm, but honestly things have changed.

The reason I wrote this is simple. You are not Furor, and your rants make you seem like a pussy rather than a pioneer. Furor made us all respect the eyepatch on his characters face (old school model) and the scar on the newer one. I pictured his character standing a foot above his guildmates, which was always a shock in the screenshots he would post. Furor made me want items from dragons and bosses. He made anything they got seem so spectacularly cool it made us all itch for our chance, of course months later, of getting said thingy.

No one here has that gift. So if you don't have the gift, you can't go balls out crazy in your rants like he could and get respect. You are killing the quality of this public forum just as if you came to my town and ruined my park. Since I have invested 7 or 8 years keeping my eye on things over here, I want this place to stay as vibrant as it can. I watched Sean go through puberty. I watched as Tigole, and Hobben and various other EQ celebrity would come here and give respect to the Don. That's gone, and I am blaming you for it.

You know who I mean, the guy who is destroying this place is the angry Foser (Furor Poser) who is trying to get just a sniff of the long gone eliteness we bestowed upon Furor and his guild of merry makers. The weird part is that people don't realize that straight up Furor was pretty easy to talk to and get along with as long as you didn't lay on a thick layer of bullshit you could pretty much just hop on IRC and join #fires and just converse, get your uber infos, or play trivia!

He was a real dude that we turned into a mythic figure who will go down as the first great guild leader in the pantheon of MMOG history. So stop trying to be like him, stop hating on devs cause he used to post news that addressed them. Stop trying to use complicated imagery in your message to enforce your point like he used to, it doesn't work for you.

Just stop it.

You are making it painful for me to come here and read good material. Lately I check out things here less and less partly because I am embarrassed to be wasting my time reading some of the things you guys come up with. Some of you are just so fucking stupid, how can you not realize this?

I cannot in good faith blame the success or failure of a game on this place, but we probably had just as powerful of an adverse affect on Vanguard as McQuaid himself. I don't know the stats now, but this place used to get a fuckload of hits, and the amount of just stupid anti-sigil and anti-vanguard stuff I've read over the last year is just mind numbing. Furor tried to HELP Everquest by ranting. You guys just cut each other down till no one wants to read or listen about that stupid game anymore. Good job at generating tons of bad word of mouth press for an industry that is still trying to really emerge into the mainstream.

Now I never purchased VG, primarily because of these boards, and I sort of feel lucky that I didn't, but on the other hand if this place had not trashed the game so badly it might have gone through less drastic changes and turned out to be a more refined product. MSFT probably dumped the game after reading this board. Yay we are helping to destroy the industry these board were created to reflect upon! We win.

And after all is said and done I am just as guilty as you are for whatever affect there is because I participate. I tell you what though, if this place continues to have a negative affect on MMOGs in their infancy I know I personally will feel compelled to move on just as Furor has done.

You can shove your vanboi and shill labels straight up your asshole.

Peace

[Nyuk]

What you may not remember is that furor was hardly universally respected even here. He had plenty of people who followed him around trying to take a shot at him and his rants and ideas.

The real big difference I see now from then is that the overwhelming mass of casual, softcore, and jaded gamers are as free and outspoken as the no life hardcore cutting edge players. That's the difference. It's not that furor isn't here anymore, it's that the people who are don't shove their opinions around, for better or worse. I know req led the rival guild to mine on combine, I bet this place would be drastically different if he made this section into a big eq1 rant haven (instead of adding a now dead subsection for it).

Things are just different now, they aren't worse. Screenshots is much worse, mmo general is not.





Oh but hey, go ahead and rant about how other people shouldn't bother trying to be like him, then close your giant rant by directing negative replies straight up your asshole. It really makes you out to be a giant fucking retard, hypocrit, and above all the kind of pathetic furor cock smoker that he himself would have shot done where he still here. I certainly hope you meant this to just be a reply and hit new thread by mistake. Do us all a favor and never create a new thread again.

[...]

Quality loss is due to the rose tinted glasses.

[Draegan]

Wow I never knew this place had the power to change the business directions of Microsoft. This place is awesome.

[TheCutlery]

Originally Posted by Nyuk

Things are just different now, they aren't worse. Screenshots is much worse, mmo general is not.

Yes, it is. The back and forth retardation that inevitibly destroys just about every thread that lasts longer than 3 pages was never this prevelant.

[Nyuk]

Originally Posted by TheCutlery

Yes, it is. The back and forth retardation that inevitibly destroys just about every thread that lasts longer than 3 pages was never this prevelant.

I didn't really see it change much until vanguard, I dunno. WOW you had phoenix and makata and a few others spewing nothing but shit about their own class, but that wasn't any different than eq days. I remember when I used to get so annoyed because I felt like monks were dominating too many discussions and if I wanted that shit I could just go read allakhazam.

[...]

There is a good bit of "my game is better than your game" going on that didn't in EQ's day. That was more from the board starting as an EQ board.

[kcxiv]

I was more of a Dr. Zaar fan myself for updates, but Furor had some good shit as well.

[Vernal]

The quality of the internet is rapidly decreasing

[Gaereth]

Originally Posted by Shoryuken

The downside is that magic no longer exists here, and we as a collective whole are all standing around the party after its over waiting for Furor to bring the drugs back to get us high again. But alas, he has moved on and has the real world to consider.

The only people standing around the party missing the 'magic' of the old days are those still wishing Furor would belittle them so they could be special too!!! The rest are actively involved in discussions that range from tame to tawdry and everything in between.

Yes....there are a bunch of idiots here, but there are also some of the most knowledgable gaming people around as well. You wouldn't see the discourse with the devs that we see if it was 'useless'. If you can't see that then you're looking for/missing something that probably never existed here in the first place.

[Kheldin]

from EJ's forums:

Worthless posts will be pruned and worthless posters will be banned.

If req wants more mods to help in the manpower side of things, just gotta ask, but it would be a huge step in the right direction to increase the level of administration in that regard.

[Kolle]

Care to give a list of post topics that should be here? Give us a few dozen examples of post material that would make this forum elite and super cool. Since some of you think that this forum is so terrible and in need of changing, perhaps you should just go ahead and start making those new posts. I'm sure that your grade A stuff will push the trash topics off the front page in no time. Then the forum will be saved and you will be a hero.

[Zarniwoop]

We all mock the retardism in the WoW forums, and rightly so. At the other end of the spectrum, there is some respect for the tight moderation on the Elitist Jerks forums. I see FOH as somewhere in between, with way better discussion than the Blizzard forums, but a lot more freedom than on EJ. That freedom has pros and cons. Some threads are way more epic and entertaining, but a lot of threads go to shit fast at the same time.

What I'm seeing currently is a ton of threads with good potential rapidly devolving into name-calling, repetitive posting, and shit slinging. As someone else posted in the "SOE buys VG, Sigil fires employees" thread, the thread has degenerated to the point where you just scroll through looking at the poster's names to see if it's worth reading...and it's quickly becoming not worth it to even go that far.

What I want from FOH is frank discussion about MMOs (and other games). I don't want to have to sift through people posting the same thing again and again, other people continually bashing that person and piling on, e-thugging, etc.

Clearly, a lot of people are unwilling to control themselves (and I'm sure are oblivious to how it looks to others) when posting. Some form of post-ranking or heavier moderation would be welcome in my opinion.

[Wodin]

This site serves a completely different purpose than ours does, and it's disingenuous to imply that you can use the same standards of moderation to a site specifically devoted to discussing and airing grievances about MMOs. We have one game as a focus, two specific aspects of that particular game(raiding and PvP) as further subfocuses, and there's a emphasis on empirically or experientially derived support for opinions and statements built into both the internal "culture" of the boards and the rules themselves.

You're comparing a bar to a think tank. There need to be standards of decency in a bar, obviously, but they're a fuckton more loose. Are there occasionally things posted here that I think are completely over the line? Yes. And I'm sure that Awake and the other mods will prune them if they feel it's appropriate.

Also, people whining about quality degradation are pretty funny. People whine about every long-running internet forum in existence. It's the same site I read back when I started playing these games and was interested in Lineage 2.

[Navaash]

Originally Posted by Wodin

People whine about every long-running internet forum in existence. It's the same site I read back when I started playing these games and was interested in Lineage 2.

Seriously. The only thing more asinine/pathetic is when people actually start sites *dedicated* to slandering and/or working to the destruction of said long running forums.

That's not to say certain forums don't deserve the mockery, though coughGaiacough