Quoth said:
Samurai Goomba said:
---->8-----
Gamefaqs, for all it's faults, is probably more fun for me to post on at this point. If for no other reason than it is actually useful.
I never heard anyone say that about Gamefaqs before. Although it was what brought me here, here is whats keeping me off Gamefaqs.
What I mean is that if you have QUESTIONS, you can go there and get useful ANSWERS. If you have specific questions and the board is not dead, you can get specific answers. You might encounter some stupidity, but you'll also find a wealth of knowledge there on pretty much any game you're likely to play in your life.
The Escapist has (in order) a few smart members, a lot of members who think they're smart, a bunch of arrogant jerks, some overly verbose people, trolls, and stupids. Pretty much what you'd get in any forum, but Gfaqs has the added benefit of having its forums stapled to a massive user-based Q and A/walkthrough website.
miracleofsound said:
Unfortunately, the member in question also popularised the notion that it's fun to be incredibly rude and abusive to anyone who makes any kind of grammatical error or expresses a different opinion, and get away with it.
I had someone call me a 'dick', and 'gay' the other day, reported it and I see they haven't even been put on probation.
The reason they did was I asked them to be less hyperbolic and aggressive when they posted the following contribution:
'SHIT REVIEW UR WRONG DIE A LOT'
If people get away with this kind of crap, no wonder it becomes less fun for the people who just want to come here to get along.
Here, see for yourself:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/326.160205
Yeah, I've seen people banned for things that didn't seem like bannable offenses, and other times left unpunished for posting what basically amounted to YouTube comments ("your mum does *needlessly graphic description* to me" or "your face is stupid," etc) But that's another matter. Regarding the community, there's definitely an elitist attitude here you don't get at a lot of other places (well, not in such amounts). It used to be
kinda defensible, seeing as we had intelligent posters who would post 3-page OPs across a great number of subjects, and the length would be justified (Iron Ninja was a great poster, I miss him).
Nowadays, though, the idea of really anyone on the forums thinking The Escapist is a "better" quality forum than anywhere else is kind of laughable. It's a different kind of stupid is all. It's not any better or worse than what you'd find on YouTube, it's just that on this site the dummies write slightly longer posts. And even that's not as true as it once was.
For good or ill, the "I'm so evil and cool" Escapist posting cliche seems to be the wave of the future.