State of the Forums

State of the Forums

  • Alive

    Votes: 17 33.3%
  • Dying

    Votes: 20 39.2%
  • Dead

    Votes: 14 27.5%

  • Total voters
    51
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Yes, it's not like it used to be but it' definetly active! :)
 
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That's why I said "dying" and not "dead". Kain is right about the minion thing. It was bare, and even I would sparingly check the forums because it would always give me a database error for so long. THAT's when most of the people left/forgot about ESF. Off-topic is pretty alive, the rest of the sections are rather barren compared to 2 years ago.

As for the rules, I've never really got into a snag with it. I've seen some topics that did not need closing, or when a thread for silliness is cut down short, but I haven't really seen a lot of mod "Nazism". One issue would be I see a lot of "get back on topic" posts, as if we can not deviate from the main point every now and then.

As for Lee, people were just complaining that mods don't get a fair treatment. Lee went against another (super?) moderator's actions and disrespected him, just for a spam thread. I don't think it needed to be closed, but I don't think Lee had to what he did just for a spam thread. I personally am indifferent to those. I see some funny posts here and there, but I guess I'm just not interested in total randomness for long periods of time. I feel oblivious, but I wish people could explain specific example of mod strictness so I can see where they are coming from, like Enix did.

I think when 1.3 will see a revival. People grow up. People lose interest. It happens.
 

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I think when 1.3 will see a revival. People grow up. People lose interest. It happens.
Thing is, after 1.3, people who play the game will have nothing to look forward to.
 
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Seriously, if it is dead. Why the heck are you people posting here? That's not dead like, that's active like. Dead is something that people no longer post or barely check the forums. You guys, are checking the forums every single day, you also post and within the chat box as well.. Why do you call that dead?
20 active people = dead, imo.
 

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People call it dead because we used to have like 5 lines of active members on the currently active list. Now we're lucky to get one.
 
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I voted "Dead", though it's not really dead.. In theory it's still alive as there are indeed people posting and all that, but the forums now are a faded shade of what they used to be, so in my book, it's dead.
 
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Well, i think the forums are 'dead' because they aren't advertised enough. Most of the members that were here 2 years ago came by this place because ESF was a hyped thing back then (even though most of them started caring less about the mod itself and began posting their models, maps, skins or just posting in off-topic).
Frankly i have no idea about how ESF can be advertised even more than it is, but the fact is that the new generations of players have no idea about this game, DBZ being less popular is one reason for that.
Actually, i got one idea: More gameplay movies from the people still playing on youtube. (and i mean GOOD ones).
 
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We need to get those 50 guests that are viewing the forums to register. -_-
 
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I'm not sure how i should vote :p This forum has no life to begin with xD

Ok, in all seriousness i guess the only section alive is offtopic >_> I wish art section was more alive. I post a drawing expecting comments and crits, but get 741 views and 1 reply instead :/ Sad.

Not exactly, but its something like that :/
 
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i wish people wold pay interest at other things than offtopic, even dough there are ppl on the forum, if it aint in off topic it aint worth viewing i guess...
 
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I just want something cleared up. I don't want to feel like a scab/traitor.

People have been criticizing the staff for being lenient on moderators or not disciplining them in public. Lee went against an administrator's decision, challenged him, and insulted him. Minus the reopening-of-the-thread, if anyone else had did that, they would have been disciplined.

Isn't that what we wanted? Equal treatment, disregarding your user status? I don't think Deverz needed to close that thread, but he really didn't do anything wrong. I'm just confused. We wanted moderators to be treated like everyone else and now its bad that Lee was banned insulting an administrator's life...?
 
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I don't think they're dead. But they are becoming awfully bleak.
 
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I just want something cleared up. I don't want to feel like a scab/traitor.

People have been criticizing the staff for being lenient on moderators or not disciplining them in public. Lee went against an administrator's decision, challenged him, and insulted him. Minus the reopening-of-the-thread, if anyone else had did that, they would have been disciplined.

Isn't that what we wanted? Equal treatment, disregarding your user status? I don't think Deverz needed to close that thread, but he really didn't do anything wrong. I'm just confused. We wanted moderators to be treated like everyone else and now its bad that Lee was banned insulting an administrator's life...?
It doesn't make sense to be diametrically opposed to a single spam thread, but I understand that Dev was just doing his job and enforcing the rules. Could Axman have handled it differently? Absolutely. Did it have to go that far? Not really. If it was that big of a deal, Dev or Axman could have waited for Cuc to show up, say "Wtf this isn't allowed" and take care of it.

My problem isn't that moderators are being handled in private. My problem is that people are being punished for stupid things. Words should not hurt you. If they do, it's because you've allowed them to get under your skin. Only you can be blamed for that. I keep hearing, "THIS ISN'T *****!!!", and that's fine. I hate ***** (4 to the ch to the an) and I hate memes, but if the rules of this forum applied to the real world, Voltaire, Jefferson, Churchill, Huxley and everyone else you can think of who were critical of specific people and ideologies would have been "banned" (I guess the real world equivalent is death or a lifetime behind bars).

In a nutshell, freedom of speech shouldn't be something we toss to the wayside because, you know, someone's feelings might get hurt.

Cuc's post annoyed me a bit, too. If we think the forum is dying or dead, we should just leave? Really? You're telling the remaining fanbase, ESF's diehard fans, to up and leave because they don't like what the forum has become? How is that not counterproductive? If the people who voted dying and dead took your advice to heart, this forum would've lost 24 active members. That isn't helping this forum and it sure as hell isn't helping the people who actually slave away to make 1.3 a reality.

And really, you guys should care if whether ESF is popular or not. If you're pissing off potential players, it's not longer just a forum issue. Now you're hurting the mod. I can't cite any specific examples of this happening because if it did, I obviously wouldn't hear from them, but it isn't farfetched.
 
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Cuc's post annoyed me a bit, too. If we think the forum is dying or dead, we should just leave? Really? You're telling the remaining fanbase, ESF's diehard fans, to up and leave because they don't like what the forum has become? How is that not counterproductive? If the people who voted dying and dead took your advice to heart, this forum would've lost 24 active members. That isn't helping this forum and it sure as hell isn't helping the people who actually slave away to make 1.3 a reality.

And really, you guys should care if whether ESF is popular or not. If you're pissing off potential players, it's not longer just a forum issue. Now you're hurting the mod. I can't cite any specific examples of this happening because if it did, I obviously wouldn't hear from them, but it isn't farfetched.
You won't take my advice to heart unless there are warnings attached, why should I believe that 24 of you would suddenly listen to me now?

That aside, my point wasn't that you should leave, its that *****ing about rules being the reason behind sudden downturns in the forum populace is bull****. Minion, the unsmooth move to filefront, and the decline of DragonBall Z on TV, in reverse order, are the reason we have a lightly active forum. This mod once enjoyed Toonami as free advertising, lightning fast response time under full load, and security. All of those have been compromised, and people who find rules constraining are never good for building a community and would chase away more people with free reign than they themselves leaving from boredom or banning.

As for Deverz, he has the right to act on his own. He's a full admin in his own right and needs no input from me. Lee always forgets that the mod/admin status comes with responsibility beyond your patrols. You, as staff, need to act as an example at all times or no one finds your authority plausible. While it's impossible to be perfect, blatant insubordination and flame threads are certainly running in the wrong direction with Olympic ardor.
 
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You won't take my advice to heart unless there are warnings attached, why should I believe that 24 of you would suddenly listen to me now?

That aside, my point wasn't that you should leave, its that *****ing about rules being the reason behind sudden downturns in the forum populace is bull****. Minion, the unsmooth move to filefront, and the decline of DragonBall Z on TV, in reverse order, are the reason we have a lightly active forum. This mod once enjoyed Toonami as free advertising, lightning fast response time under full load, and security. All of those have been compromised, and people who find rules constraining are never good for building a community and would chase away more people with free reign than they themselves leaving from boredom or banning.

As for Deverz, he has the right to act on his own. He's a full admin in his own right and needs no input from me. Lee always forgets that the mod/admin status comes with responsibility beyond your patrols. You, as staff, need to act as an example at all times or no one finds your authority plausible. While it's impossible to be perfect, blatant insubordination and flame threads are certainly running in the wrong direction with Olympic ardor.
How long are we going to blame Minion and the move to filefront? Minion didn't do anything other than leak a beta. If they did hurt the forum and the game, it was by releasing a product everyone felt was severely lacking, especially after there having had been many years of so called "development". I don't know if that was the most recent beta at the time, but it certainly wasn't too far off. The betas released afterwards in the...uh...long planned Open Beta you guys had been talking about long before the Minion incident (o.0) made that clear to everyone. In fact, the Open Beta probably did a lot of damage to the mod's credibility at that point in time.

The move to filefront actually did hurt, but it's been quite a while since that ordeal. The forum is working now, right? Why haven't all of the oldies returned? Because they have better things to do, I'm sure. It isn't so much that people forgot about ESF. People just don't care, and it doesn't have much to with DBZ not being popular. It has to do with the amount of time 1.3's been in development. Even to this day, many of the people who actually play the game aren't entirely convinced anything is really being done to finish the game. I don't blame them, but that's an entirely different story.

Note I said if people took what you said to heart, this forum would have lost 24 people. The issue is you're basically telling us to go **** ourselves, we don't have a reason to be unhappy or dissatisfied and everything is just peachy over here. Are we just imagining things? I certainly hope not. Maybe we're experiencing a prolonged mass hallucination. I hope it ends soon.

If you don't think you (you being the forum staff) have had a hand in The Crappening of this forum, you're kidding yourselves. The forumbase and the playerbase have always been quite separate, and one rarely affects the other. The people who frequented this forum were hardly ever found ingame, so it's safe to assume they were forum prowlers and not superfans of ESF. That's always been the case, really. A little downtime wouldn't prevent people from returning unless they felt they had nothing to look forward to, or they felt going to the forum was a lot like going to an airport.

I don't disagree with Dev's handling of the situation up until the ban. Be it temporary or permanent, it was a bit overboard. If I say, "You're a stupid head!" in real life, are you going to call the police on me? Fight me? Stab me? Or would you just ignore me? I think you'd either respond in kind or completely ignore me. Why can't it be the same here? Why is it that the internet (this forum specifically) of all places has more severe ramifications than real life in this instance?

Seems pretty silly to me.
 
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Because we're all little kids that need our hands held Zeo. :)

At least they'd have you believe that. Which, quite frankly, is insulting.
 
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The betas released afterwards in the...uh...long planned Open Beta you guys had been talking about long before the Minion incident (o.0) made that clear to everyone. In fact, the Open Beta probably did a lot of damage to the mod's credibility at that point in time.
I can't entirely tell if you're being sarcastic or not, but I'll reply to this snipit as if you're serious.

I can only assume by the above comment that there was some misinformation given to the public.

There was no plan for an Open Beta. As you well know, Zeo, there was already one leak which had me working around the clock trying to contain it. After the Minion attack an "official" release was rushed, as it would be the best form of damage control we could mount. It should've been clear to anyone who played that there was not nearly as much progress as you'd been led to believe. As you said, I'm sure this didn't help in keeping the community active.

Now as for all this talk of being lenient. Have any of you in favor of this idea ever seen an unmoderated community? Worse yet, have you ever seen a community in chaos where the moderators only abuse their powers for e-peen gain? They don't tend to attract newcomers. It's only the same d¡ckholes coming back over and over. You should be grateful that there is at least some form of structure here, as it will provide at a bit of stability to any newcomers who wish to join our ranks. While most of whatever Cuc says has some sort of self-serving spin on it (guess I had another rotten tomato afterall?), he's right in the fact that if the forums were left to their own designs, newcomers would be a rare occurance. He's also right when he said that this forum shouldn't be /b/ junior. If you don't think so, I have a few dozen longcats for you.

Speaking of unmoderated communities, seeing Deverz reminded me of something I found out about a long time ago. Do you remember this or this? You can thank a super moderator and an ex-head moderator for both.
 
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I can't entirely tell if you're being sarcastic or not, but I'll reply to this snipit as if you're serious.

I can only assume by the above comment that there was some misinformation given to the public.

There was no plan for an Open Beta. As you well know, Zeo, there was already one leak which had me working around the clock trying to contain it. After the Minion attack an "official" release was rushed, as it would be the best form of damage control we could mount. It should've been clear to anyone who played that there was not nearly as much progress as you'd been led to believe. As you said, I'm sure this didn't help in keeping the community active.

Now as for all this talk of being lenient. Have any of you in favor of this idea ever seen an unmoderated community? Worse yet, have you ever seen a community in chaos where the moderators only abuse their powers for e-peen gain? They don't tend to attract newcomers. It's only the same d¡ckholes coming back over and over. You should be grateful that there is at least some form of structure here, as it will provide at a bit of stability to any newcomers who wish to join our ranks. While most of whatever Cuc says has some sort of self-serving spin on it (guess I had another rotten tomato afterall?), he's right in the fact that if the forums were left to their own designs, newcomers would be a rare occurance. He's also right when he said that this forum shouldn't be /b/ junior. If you don't think so, I have a few dozen longcats for you.

Speaking of unmoderated communities, seeing Deverz reminded me of something I found out about a long time ago. Do you remember this or this? You can thank a super moderator and an ex-head moderator for both.
Yeah, it was sarcasm. The official story at the time was the Open Beta had been in the planning stages long before the Minion thing, and was certainly not a result of the leak. Of course, we knew we were being lied to (as usual), and a lot of people were irritated by it. That irritation builds up over time and becomes anger and dissatisfaction, and then we have threads like this popping up.

I can understand people wanting a stable community, but the fact of the matter is, we're not attracting very many new people to the forum, and those that to come don't stay for very long. They usually sign up just to ask if they can play ESF with a pirated copy of HL or to ask about EVM. At this point in time, we should be worried about retention. There's nothing any of us can do to attract new people until 1.3 comes around, but there are steps and measures we can take to keep ESF's hardcore base happy.

This is probably a horrible example, but our clan forum is unmoderated except for if someone signs onto the forum with the intention of starting problems with someone or posts 2 girls 1 cup or something like that. You have to go out of your way to get yourself yelled at or banned by one of us. However, if there's a discussion that turns into an argument, and people start lashing out at each other, we let them be. Know what happens? They burn themselves out. At the end of the argument, they both look like morons and everyone laughs at them. I know that isn't going to happen here, but it works and it works well.

I completely agree with the anti-4crap sentiment, though. Some people think it's my generation's crowning achievement. I'm just not one of them.
 

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