Edit: as of mid-January 2019: Changes were made to moderation in the Discord, and if things continue this way, my arguments below have been satisfied. If you came here to be informed about what to expect from the community, I would say as of now I do recommend giving the Discord a try. There is drama in the community that causes some problems, but that is separate from "moderation", which I would consider to on an upward trend.
Edit: as of January 2019:
If you are a new user who has come to the forums to learn anything about this system, I highly advise you use other platforms instead, or move on to other games. The community that remains in the SAGE-based C&C games seems to be completely unable to police itself, and a vocal minority seems to have control over any and all discussion.
Hey all, right away going to say that this forum has tons of sub-forums, and I'm not even sure where this is supposed to go, so hopefully you won't mind if I drop it here.
Also, what I'm going to be talking about here is relative to places like the Discord (C&C: Online), and not necessarily within any of the games like C&C O provides support for.
I'm a new user, actually came back to C&C3 from C&C Rivals. I feel like C&C O is well-designed, and it was super quick for me to set up. But like, keeping in mind that C&C 3 as a community is pretty niche, and that it competes with many other newer and more lively RTSes (and their communities), it's my opinion that the community cannot afford to allow much of the behavior that goes unchecked. As a new comer, this toxic behavior is very discouraging, and as I've said to some in Discord, imagine all the players who have come to the community that have just simply left without saying anything like I am. We'll never know what they think, and they won't be around to participate in any "polls" I've heard some of the sub-communities may have had.
I want to come to the Discord to meet up with people to play with who may not already be logged in to the games, but to do that I need to wade through and put up with such incredibly malicious language. It's not smack talk, it's not even just your usual trolling. The things I've been seeing in Discord are perhaps the most vile malicious things I've read in a really long time from random folks in a chat like that.
And imagine my surprise coming to this forum to see right on the front page that a user was banned earlier in the month, being told "too bad" at his request for an unban, and yet here they are, and I've already considered muting them in the Discord. What happened? Are there many other users who have been banned and unbanned many many times? (Also, to this user, I've got nothing against you, I am sorry I have to use you as an example)
On that note, I also want to share my personal opinion that if such bad behavior goes on long enough, at some point moderators have to share some of the responsibility. Some people have DMed me trying to reassure me that there's not that many people who act that way, that it's just so hard to find normal players, etc. But I run my own Discord, I know how this goes; those normal players are there, they just aren't talking because the Discord is a toxic shit hole.
And as an aside, someone had mentioned in Discord that the community is already small ,and I can understand that trying to discourage old regulars from logging in seems like a painful thing to do. But take my word for it, as a new comer, I'm sure I am not the only one scared off by this behavior, and trying to discourage a few people from acting this way will surely net a gain in active users.
Now, this was definitely quite a rant, but I am hoping voices in the community with more experience than I do can share their thoughts, and have an actual discussion about moderation. And judging on some posts on Discord I feel like lots of people really would like that.
Edited by tartarusmkii, 19 January 2019 - 07:38 PM.
