Think gaming message boards are bad?

[hanselthecaretaker]

Movie boards are far worse. Probably a big part of the reason why IMDB closed theirs. Nearly every movie board I visited for a film made in the last few years consisted primarily of degenerate diatribe topics over why x movie sucks or is over-rated, with an occasional small group of fans trying to defend it. You'd have to go back to decade-old movies to find a decent amount of threads just wanting to discuss the film, or posting something legitimately informative.

It's sad that it closed, but if that's what things were coming to, then it just paints a very sick and pathetic picture for modern day online social interaction for the film medium and was probably justified. It really started to make all film buffs look even more snobbish and arrogant than the stereotypes would have them.

Having said that, these boards for example may show some signs of childishness and eye-rolling what-have-you, but are still nowhere near the level of hell the IMDB boards descended to in their twilight.

So...cheers to us, good gaming people!

 

[MrCalavera_v1legacy]

I don't visit many movie message boards, but the one that i know, yep, it's a shithole. Can rarely have a movie forum without inserting politics on a scale that'd make good days of GG blush, or everyone calling each other's movie taste shitty.

 

[Skatalite]

A gaming message board as popular as IMDb wouldn't be any different. I still feel like IMDb closing theirs was a bad idea. Yeah it had tons of shit on there, but it was the only site with a forum for every single movie out there, no matter how old or unknown.

 

[votemarvel]

Every forum can turn to a hellhole, that's why you need good a moderation team. I've been a member of a few forums that went to hell.

The Xbox.com forum has moderators that only care about taking care of people who upset them. Now please don't get me wrong, I absolutely deserved to be banned from there as I was a horrible person, but they can often take DAYS to deal with reported issues. After informing Xbox Support on Twitter that a simple case of naming and shaming (one of the few black and white rules there) had been left for 13 days, the only response I got was "they need time to investigate it".

There is no investigation. You can't report people on the forum, end of.

Yet I try and come back to the forum with a new username and I am banned near instantly. I've had friends banned from the forum there because they dared to post while they were at my house (thereby sharing an IP with me).

So keeping me off the forum is far more important than actual moderation.

Bioware's forum became a nightmare. They outsourced it to a company called the ModSquad. This company didn't give a damn, the ModSquad rarely seemed to want to take control. Occasionally doing a BLITZ.


The Bioware forum ended up being considered 'toxic.' Oddly when the closure was announced the ModSquad (the paid third party company), suddenly started clamping down on the rules they should have been following from the start. It's sad because if they'd done the job they were paid to do from the beginning, the Bioware forum would still be up and running.

 

[Saelune]

People are just naturally terrible, and the internet lets terrible people unite. People act like any specific thing is specifically bad, and maybe some are, but honestly, it is just that the internet gives voice to jerks.

 

[WhiteFangofWhoa]

Yep, the day I go out of my way to baselessly slam a creative work in a board dedicated entirely to expressing creativity or sharing trivia about it is the day I need to reexamine my priorities in life.

That being said, if a gaming board was subdivided into thousands of individual boards for every single game like IMBD was, you can safely bet everything you own that there would be several trolls (or just one with multiple accounts) on each board dedicated to aggravating that game's fanbase with crass negativity... even the Portal board.

I remember seeing several such occurrences on the Godfather discussion board. Good riddance.

 

[WeepingAngels]

People who are unhappy are more likely to speak out.

 

[Saelune]

Yep, the day I go out of my way to baselessly slam a creative work in a board dedicated entirely to expressing creativity or sharing trivia about it is the day I need to reexamine my priorities in life.

That being said, if a gaming board was subdivided into thousands of individual boards for every single game like IMBD was, you can safely bet everything you own that there would be several trolls (or just one with multiple accounts) on each board dedicated to aggravating that game's fanbase with crass negativity... even the Portal board.

I remember seeing several such occurrences on the Godfather discussion board. Good riddance.

I think games being interactive keeps that from being true, since topics need not be just opinions on the content. I mean...isnt Steam basically that? Every game has its own board, but most of it is well, about playing the game. Trolls pop up, sure, but they rarely dominate any board. Plus Gamefaqs exists...and again, its mostly about playing the game than just opinions on its quality.

 

[Bilious Green_v1legacy]

Bioware's forum became a nightmare. They outsourced it to a company called the ModSquad. This company didn't give a damn, the ModSquad rarely seemed to want to take control. Occasionally doing a BLITZ.

The Bioware forum ended up being considered 'toxic.' Oddly when the closure was announced the ModSquad (the paid third party company), suddenly started clamping down on the rules they should have been following from the start. It's sad because if they'd done the job they were paid to do from the beginning, the Bioware forum would still be up and running.

I was under the impression that EA made the decision to close the forums because they wanted all communication to go through Facebook and Twitter and didn't want to pay for mods when there was little to no financial value in it for them. It wasn't a decision specific to Bioware, they had already closed all the forums for their other studios, Bioware's was just the last (and most infamous) to go.

 

[Smithnikov_v1legacy]

Still not to the level of Youtube comment sections or Chans. It's got a ways to go to get notorious.

 

[RaikuFA]

Yep, the day I go out of my way to baselessly slam a creative work in a board dedicated entirely to expressing creativity or sharing trivia about it is the day I need to reexamine my priorities in life.

That being said, if a gaming board was subdivided into thousands of individual boards for every single game like IMBD was, you can safely bet everything you own that there would be several trolls (or just one with multiple accounts) on each board dedicated to aggravating that game's fanbase with crass negativity... even the Portal board.

I remember seeing several such occurrences on the Godfather discussion board. Good riddance.

I think games being interactive keeps that from being true, since topics need not be just opinions on the content. I mean...isnt Steam basically that? Every game has its own board, but most of it is well, about playing the game. Trolls pop up, sure, but they rarely dominate any board. Plus Gamefaqs exists...and again, its mostly about playing the game than just opinions on its quality.

Gamefaqs is nothing but a circlejerk of hypocrisy.

 

[bartholen_v1legacy]

I made this thread before it was cool [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.839176-The-horror-of-IMDB-message-boards-or-How-I-stopped-worrying-and-learned-to-love-the-banhammer#20605270]

But yes, IMDB's message boards were absolute cancer. I would in fact go one step further and remove user reviews as well, or at least have some sort of vetting process so that every random twat who sees 2 movies a year can't fuck up the ratings by giving full 10/10s to every Adam Sandler movie or Suicide Squad. An average moviegoer simply has no fucking clue how to properly rate movies, that's just a fact. I've seen this firsthand, and I only see movies in theaters like once a month. Granted, I follow multiple reviewers online, and have watched a lot of film analysis on both the technical and artistic aspects of filmmaking, so I'm perhaps more knowledgeable about movies than average that way.

Film is a medium that hits the sweet spot of shittiness of simultaneously having enough history to lend itself to snobbery, and also having a large enough presence online to enable the asscunts to reach critical percentage of the population. Books or theater plays don't really have mainstream online coverage much.

 

[shrekfan246]

Just because Steam/GameFAQs/NeoGAF/IGN still have forums doesn't mean they're better than IMDb.

 

[PhoenixMaster]

Yep, the day I go out of my way to baselessly slam a creative work in a board dedicated entirely to expressing creativity or sharing trivia about it is the day I need to reexamine my priorities in life.

That being said, if a gaming board was subdivided into thousands of individual boards for every single game like IMBD was, you can safely bet everything you own that there would be several trolls (or just one with multiple accounts) on each board dedicated to aggravating that game's fanbase with crass negativity... even the Portal board.

I remember seeing several such occurrences on the Godfather discussion board. Good riddance.

I think games being interactive keeps that from being true, since topics need not be just opinions on the content. I mean...isnt Steam basically that? Every game has its own board, but most of it is well, about playing the game. Trolls pop up, sure, but they rarely dominate any board. Plus Gamefaqs exists...and again, its mostly about playing the game than just opinions on its quality.

Gamefaqs is nothing but a circlejerk of hypocrisy.

Gamefaqs is just pure cancer. You rarely ever get some kind of good discussion going on without it going into fanboy wars.

 

[Imre Csete]

Bioware's forum became a nightmare. They outsourced it to a company called the ModSquad. This company didn't give a damn, the ModSquad rarely seemed to want to take control. Occasionally doing a BLITZ.

Those were good times.

BioWareMod03 is my waifu.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

Just because Steam/GameFAQs/NeoGAF/IGN still have forums doesn't mean they're better than IMDb.

Did you ever frequent or even visit a recent movie board on IMDB? The sites you referenced are collectively not half as depressing as what the bulk of IMDB boards were for movies released in the last few years.

I really think it's like Saelune said, in that with movies being so passive there's not much left for people to do but spout off their opinions, whereas with gaming boards at least half of the people want to wax the interactive/technical/design/gameplay/etc. points of the medium.

 

[RaikuFA]

Yep, the day I go out of my way to baselessly slam a creative work in a board dedicated entirely to expressing creativity or sharing trivia about it is the day I need to reexamine my priorities in life.

That being said, if a gaming board was subdivided into thousands of individual boards for every single game like IMBD was, you can safely bet everything you own that there would be several trolls (or just one with multiple accounts) on each board dedicated to aggravating that game's fanbase with crass negativity... even the Portal board.

I remember seeing several such occurrences on the Godfather discussion board. Good riddance.

I think games being interactive keeps that from being true, since topics need not be just opinions on the content. I mean...isnt Steam basically that? Every game has its own board, but most of it is well, about playing the game. Trolls pop up, sure, but they rarely dominate any board. Plus Gamefaqs exists...and again, its mostly about playing the game than just opinions on its quality.

Gamefaqs is nothing but a circlejerk of hypocrisy.

Gamefaqs is just pure cancer. You rarely ever get some kind of good discussion going on without it going into fanboy wars.

Or dishing out death threats for not knowing how to get past a certain part and not getting into trouble or banning people for discussing opening cinematics to games.

 

[PhoenixMaster]

Yep, the day I go out of my way to baselessly slam a creative work in a board dedicated entirely to expressing creativity or sharing trivia about it is the day I need to reexamine my priorities in life.

That being said, if a gaming board was subdivided into thousands of individual boards for every single game like IMBD was, you can safely bet everything you own that there would be several trolls (or just one with multiple accounts) on each board dedicated to aggravating that game's fanbase with crass negativity... even the Portal board.

I remember seeing several such occurrences on the Godfather discussion board. Good riddance.

I think games being interactive keeps that from being true, since topics need not be just opinions on the content. I mean...isnt Steam basically that? Every game has its own board, but most of it is well, about playing the game. Trolls pop up, sure, but they rarely dominate any board. Plus Gamefaqs exists...and again, its mostly about playing the game than just opinions on its quality.

Gamefaqs is nothing but a circlejerk of hypocrisy.

Gamefaqs is just pure cancer. You rarely ever get some kind of good discussion going on without it going into fanboy wars.

Or dishing out death threats for not knowing how to get past a certain part and not getting into trouble or banning people for discussing opening cinematics to games.

Plus the mods are pretty bad at their jobs when people are really out of line.

 

[RaikuFA]

I made this thread before it was cool [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.839176-The-horror-of-IMDB-message-boards-or-How-I-stopped-worrying-and-learned-to-love-the-banhammer#20605270]

But yes, IMDB's message boards were absolute cancer. I would in fact go one step further and remove user reviews as well, or at least have some sort of vetting process so that every random twat who sees 2 movies a year can't fuck up the ratings by giving full 10/10s to every Adam Sandler movie or Suicide Squad. An average moviegoer simply has no fucking clue how to properly rate movies, that's just a fact. I've seen this firsthand, and I only see movies in theaters like once a month. Granted, I follow multiple reviewers online, and have watched a lot of film analysis on both the technical and artistic aspects of filmmaking, so I'm perhaps more knowledgeable about movies than average that way.

Film is a medium that hits the sweet spot of shittiness of simultaneously having enough history to lend itself to snobbery, and also having a large enough presence online to enable the asscunts to reach critical percentage of the population. Books or theater plays don't really have mainstream online coverage much.

Or giving a shit ton to 10/10's to Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure.

 

[King Billi]

I made this thread before it was cool [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.839176-The-horror-of-IMDB-message-boards-or-How-I-stopped-worrying-and-learned-to-love-the-banhammer#20605270]

But yes, IMDB's message boards were absolute cancer. I would in fact go one step further and remove user reviews as well, or at least have some sort of vetting process so that every random twat who sees 2 movies a year can't fuck up the ratings by giving full 10/10s to every Adam Sandler movie or Suicide Squad. An average moviegoer simply has no fucking clue how to properly rate movies, that's just a fact. I've seen this firsthand, and I only see movies in theaters like once a month. Granted, I follow multiple reviewers online, and have watched a lot of film analysis on both the technical and artistic aspects of filmmaking, so I'm perhaps more knowledgeable about movies than average that way.

Film is a medium that hits the sweet spot of shittiness of simultaneously having enough history to lend itself to snobbery, and also having a large enough presence online to enable the asscunts to reach critical percentage of the population. Books or theater plays don't really have mainstream online coverage much.

User reviews aren't always worthless, their are several film's for which I enjoy reading in-depth analysis and hearing a more critical opinion on but there are just as many where I feel I would have missed out on having a good time if I'd ignored the thousands of user reviews asking me to ignore the critics and just go in with an open mind.

Isn't the whole point of user reviews to offer an alternate opinion to critical reviews?

Unless you're referring more to review bombing?