Forum dramas

Until now I've refrained from naming individual players for criticism, because it's unfair of me to do so from here. But this is a special case, and even if I'd not named him, you'd all know I was talking about Aramax. So here we go. The story. And my thoughts on it.

Unless you've been living in a hole for the past few days, you'll have undoubtedly noticed the fuss Aramax has stirred up on the forums. He's been gradually getting more and more abusive, spammy, annoying even, on the forums for several months. To be honest, he fitted right in with the rest of the people who post in the Lounge area.

Until he decided to post, over 100 seperate times, an image of a dead body on the forums. Vult saw this, deleted them all, then posted an "open" letter to the community venting his anger both a) about the images, and b) about people's bitching about the forums. Aramax's response was that his images were a protest against the lack of moderation, to which Vult replied simply with "gtfo". The debate wrangled on for around 20 pages before Vult decided to delete the thread, presumably to stop the fighting (and stop EO from looking worse than it already is to prospective players/sponsors). A couple of hours later, this popped up. Basically the same letter, with additions, in a place where nobody could reply or bitch about it. Aramax found himself banned, and it seems now that any reference to the letter or moderation is deleted.

So, what have we learned from this? At first I was annoyed that Vult had resorted to detectors in the first place, rather than human mods (see entry further down). Then after this incident, the fact that he decided to slap everyone on the wrist and NOT ban Aramax for it was even more worrying. Now that he's finally done it, I hope that this saga, plus the Sausage hacking incident, will finally convince Vult to wake up and do something about it. At the moment it seems he's moderating it all himself, but he can't keep this up forever, while working fulltime, AND on coding v26. Eventually it will start to slip, people will find more ways around the spam filters and we'll be back to the same old forum, with the only detectors catching innocent people out while the real spammers can do what they want, unchecked.

...much like EO itself.

A word to Aramax: I don't honestly think that you had this planned as a protest all along. It seems to me this was an excuse you thought up at the last second, which people believed and backed - the cause I mean, not the way you went about it.

A word to Vult (not that he's reading this): Stop being so soft with the forum bans. Most of the people who cause trouble on the forum rarely play anyway, so it's not as if they'll miss the chance to post anything useful. Instead of warning, deleting, or whatever, just take them out permanently. Saves a lot of time and future deleting. There are a lot of people on the forum who I personally think deserve a perm ban and won't be missed, but I won't name them here.

And to the rest of you: Give it a break. We've said our thoughts, and Vult's said his. Ultimately it's his game, his forum, and if he wants it to turn to crap then that's entirely his choice. We shouted, we complained, we pointed out the flaws, and Vult read them all, thought about it all, and hit the Delete button and kept on with 'His Way'. I'm fast losing interest in EO and its forums, so this may not be updated as often now. I'll be on RO enjoying a game with decent class, levelling, and PK systems until the much-hyped v26 hits. If you need my MSN for any reason, you can dig it up somewhere.