My non-warning in the game room

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1

Posts about moderation go in this forum, right?

Kinthalis makes a post about PC-specific features they’re adding to Skyrim to take advantage of the greater technical capability of the PC. He’s not saying HAHA EAT IT CONSOLE GAMERS, he’s simply happy to hear that the game he’s been looking forward to will make effort to give him more features.

Bosstone can’t stand this and makes what is a ridiculously feeble attempt to say “oh yeah, well our side gets this!”. He also deliberately notes that he’s being a douche in that post - his words, not mine.

Bosstone then makes a post in which he admits he was attempting to start a “tit-for-tat” argument about console and tells people to stop whining - which I guess isn’t rude because there are smilies in the post.

I see the fundamental misunderstanding at this point. To him, he thinks this is a PC vs console argument similar to stupid shit like ford vs chevy or xbox 360 vs ps3 - stuff where people get needlessly partisan about products that are almost identical. So if Kinthalis is happy that he’s going to get a better game than he expects, Bosstone thinks his side has been attacked and has to retaliate.

What he fundamentally doesn’t understand that PC vs console for PC gamers isn’t a ford vs chevy type pissing match. It’s more of a “how are you going to make my experience worse so that it can be viable on console” - we’re only concerned with it as far as it hampers our experience. I made a posttrying to explain that.

I didn’t personally insult Bosstone in that post, and I was actually in a way attempting to defuse an argument by explaining that the argument isn’t over what he thinks it is.

Now - I would be ok if the moderating objection was that I was hijacking the thread too much. But if that were the case, why wouldn’t the guy who admitted he was attempting to start a tit-for-tat argument also receive blame? After all, he was the first one who attempted to derail the thread, my post was only a response to that.

If it was for the insults in my posts, could you specify what insults were over the line? My post was passionate and bitter at a large segment of the population (in much the same way people might grumble over how good shows get cancelled while reality TV drek is everywhere because the viewing public are idiots), but I don’t feel that I personally insulted him.

I will add that after I was forbidden from discussing the subject further, he posted a response full of factually incorrect statements that I was no longer allowed to respond to - I would suggest that he likely did this deliberately.

I get it. I have a perception around here as a pc/console instigator. But I am not the instigator in this scenario, nor did I throw around personal insults. I think my passion on the issue makes it seem more like I’m an instigator than I actually am. I pass up opportunities to take snipes on the issue all the time, and the only time I bring it up is typically in response to something someone else said, or if I’m specifically starting a discussion about the failings of a game due to its multiplatform nature (for instance my thread on modern warfare 2). I almost never bring up the issue simply to bash other posters or score points. I’m far less guilty than LOUNE in this regard for example, yet I rarely see him getting moderated for his completely blatant snipes.

Bosstone in this instance is more to blame than I am for any hijacking, yet I was the only one singled out for moderation.

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Crap. Glad I wandered into ATMB when I did.

BossTRAIN made those posts. Not me.

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Woops, my apologies.

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No worries, I knew something like that was going to come up eventually when I saw his username and, shall we say, style of posting.

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Sorry, his post and your post had substantially different attitudes. His was much more “Don’t sweat the small stuff” whereas yours was “Stop having fun, guys!” You insulted console game players plenty in your post and he did not insult PC game players.

Mods made the right call and they were polite about it.

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I’m a PC gamer who’s been playing PC games since PCs existed and I think SenorBeef’s warnings were justified too. Look at the thread in its entirety: you’ve got 300+ posts in there, almost all of them waiting excitedly for Skyrim to arrive, then on page 7 SenorBeef has to wade in AGAIN with his rant about console users ruining what he thought is going to be an ultimate PC game but now because the console kiddies had to be placated the game is just a worthless shell and why the hell are we even going to buy it and etc.

Look, I know this isn’t the Pit, but I’m frankly tired of game threads being derailed by his console-vs-PC argument. Senor, if you don’t think Skyrim is worth your time because the devs had to placate the console crowd, don’t threadshit, or put it in the Pit. The rest of us would like to talk about the game. As the rest of you can see, after SenorBeef’s post the Skyrim thread went totally off the rails despite several attempts to get it back on course. Thanks man.

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You are correct that Bosstrain is the one who starts the “my system is better” tit for tat. You are correct in your assessment of Kinthalis’s point.

However, your post does get a bit derogatory toward other systems as “shitty little PCs” and" it’s all lowest common denominator bullshit for idiots". That kind of tone is fodder for the “No you suck” arguments.

Also, you kinda went off on a rant that was a bit out of place.

I think the comment to you was warranted, but suggest a note should be given to Bosstrain as well. His joking that he is being a douche does not lessen that he is starting rather than stopping the tit for tat as he claims.

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I think you may be confusing intent with effectiveness. His attempt to fire an opening shot in the argument was so pathetically feeble that you don’t even see him as instigating a fight, but that was clearly his intention. Why else say “HAHA SCORE ONE FOR CONSOLES, SUCK IT PC USERS” essentially? He just picked a horrifically stupid example because that’s all he had.

You also mischaracterize the thread. There’ve been “hmm, what are they going to put in it technically and what aren’t they” type stuff from the very beginning. I mean, why is discussion of what features the different version of the game will include in a thread that’s all about discussion an upcoming game off topic? Is Kinthalis threadshitting when he says “oh cool, they’re giving us higher res textures and a DX11 renderer”? Would I be threadshitting if I said basically the equivelant but opposite “oh, they’re going to have a poorly implemented console-style interface like Oblivion”?

But even so - even if the whole console vs pc thing is a derailment, which I already said I’d accept even though it does eliminate what would otherwise be legitimate discussion - he’s at least as guilty as I am (more, I think), and he should not go blameless here. It’s pretty unambiguous that he made a snipe that was deliberately designed to start the argument.

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See, this is your whole problem Senor. Even as a PC gamer I don’t see your two comments as equal at all. Kinthalis is happy he’s getting something, you’re ranting that he and his ilk took something away.

And I’m also going to say something else (although this probably should be in the main thread): it’s obvious you didn’t play Oblivion on a console. The interface on consoles was horrible. I ran out of the number of times I got dead because the arrow pad wouldn’t choose my spell and cripes I’m dead. The vanilla PC interface was much better–not great, but better. Oblivion didn’t get a bad interface because of consoles, Oblivion got a bad interface because of bad design decisions.

There were a lot of other ways Bethesda could have done it. But, the thing is, on a PC you can MOD it! You can do something about that bad interface. You download a mod and in 15 minutes you have a better interface.

So if it’s not consoles that caused the bad interface on Oblivion, and you can mod it, why blame consoles for it? It just seems like a naked attempt to start an argument to me.

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I’m not a gamer at all, and i certainly have no stake in the PC/console wars. The last game i spent any time with was either Tomb Raider or Myst Riven - can’t remember which.

While it may be that SenorBeef went a little bit over the line in his post, at the very least BossTrain deserved an equal portion of the moderation in that thread. He basically bragged about threadshitting and trying to provoke people, and got a pass.

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By that logic, the fact that you’re bringing up mods as an advantage is instigating a fight, you’re just taking a swipe at consoles. I just picked the interface was an easy example - if you’d like I could come up with at least a dozen other similar things. The interface - with 8 hotspells on a circular spell wheel, gigantic text you can read from across the room, etc. is almost certainly a result of multiplatform development.

Also, the idea that being happy and mentioning one positive feature the developers kept in for PCs being fine to discuss and being unhappy about a negative feature or a removed positive feature being trolling or instigating or whatever you want to call it is sort of obnoxious. One can be happy they have a high res texture pack, but if you’re upset that they didn’t (making something up) including proper FSAA, that’s just threadshitting?

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I think you guys are misinterpreting the entire point of my post anyway.

The reason Bosstrain interpreted Kinthalis’ post as he did was because he thought Kinthalis had the same mentality that he did. That this was a contentious partisan fight over trivial differences like the aforementioned ford vs chevy argument - that it doesn’t really matter, but that people get really into it and really nasty about it. Because that’s the way he thinks, when Kinthalis pointed out that the devs took the time to at least put in some pc features, he assumed Kinthalis was taking a swipe. So he took a pathetic counterswipe.

But my entire point was to say that his entire mentality, his entire understanding of the PC side of the argument is wrong. PC gamers aren’t trying to engage in a pissing match. We’re not saying CHEVY RULZZZZ FORD SUXXXXXX. (Or ironically the extremely contentious and extremely ridiculous xbox 360 vs ps3 debates you see places other than these boards).

We only care about consoles in so far as it has hurt our gaming experience.

Let’s use the Wii as a counter-example. Do you see PC advocates saying “lol the Wii is so pathetic, it has like 256mbs of ram and like a pentium 2 processor or whatever the hell it has”? No. Because the Wii is not encroaching upon our hobby and lowering the quality of it. The Wii isn’t trying to take over genres that have been the domain of PCs and ruining them in the process. Development studios aren’t crippling PC games so that the same game with minimal effort will also run on the Wii. As a result, we don’t care about it, even though we could laugh at its technical merits.

We only care about the other consoles insofar as they do share games with us, and targetting the least capable system is making the quality of those games much worse. If every game was like Battlefield 3, where they developed a proper technically advanced PC version, and then crippled it down to be able to work on consoles, we probably wouldn’t care terribly much. But that’s the exception. Most games now are just half-assed ports of games designed for 2004 hardware, a different set of controls, and a different target audience.

So - and I know it probably won’t seem this way - but I was actually attempting to defuse the debate by trying to make him (and anyone else with the misconception) understand that to PC gamers, it’s not a pissing match. It’s about an existential threat to our hobby. We don’t generally care about gloating over console users so much as we just want to stop the quality of our hobby from getting worse.

So when Kinthalis is happy that Bethesda didn’t just port the game over to PC but took the time to add some features, he’s happy that the quality of his gaming experience here won’t be as crippled as it otherwise would’ve been. That they still have the uniquness of the PC platform in mind and aren’t just throwing a second-hand crappy bone at us. It wasn’t an attempt to gloat. And if Bosstrain understood that, he might not have attempted to instigate a fight about it. I was actually attempting to defuse the argument through understanding.

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Continuing to explain in this thread is not helping your case.

I understand your point about your original intent. I agree with you that Bosstrain was making a bad assumption about Kinthalis’s post, for whatever reason. I agree that he deserves a comment for essentially trying to start a fight, and waving it under the mods noses.

I don’t think your continued expounding on the problem with game developers in either thread is on topic or useful.

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My continued explanation in this thread is to address this:

I’m trying to explain why it wasn’t out of place, but that it explains why Bosstrain’s fundamental misunderstanding is what lead him to instigate in the way that he did.

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And yet, you took over 700 words to say what could have been said in a couple dozen. And this paragraph:

is just pure derision and doesn’t even serve the point you were trying to make. Um, yeah, that’s an off topic rant.

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I don’t think it’s derisive at all, unless you are of the persuasion that pointing out how someone is using an inferior product is “derisive” in some way, and like I said it doesn’t read that way to me.

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Senorbeef, I find your posts on PC games invaluable. I don’t play console games, for reasons it’s really not worth going into, so I don’t read those threads for the most part. But you helped me build my computer, and you helped me get it running when I screwed up its build, and you keep me apprised of Steam specials, and I really appreciate all that. You’re my favorite posters on games.

Bosstrain? He’s Bosstrain, and I can’t say much more outside of the pit, and I don’t care enough about him to say any more in the pit.

The whole Console vs. PC thing is ridiculous. if somebody like Bosstrain instigates, it’d be great if you could rise above their triflinosity. Responding really doesn’t serve anyone; we already know somebody’s wrong on the Internet. Let it go, the same way that I let it go in a political thread when Der Trihs says something inflammatory.

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Don’t worry. My last game was Pong.