The death of the "best community in all gamerdom"

I'm going to start this off by saying, I make fun of people....a lot. Sarcasm and I are good close friends and we like to browse internet forums together. Odds are good if you've interacted with me, I've made fun of you. It's a failing of mine, one I can freely admit to. Over the past few years I've found that the tone of it has moved from gently poking fun, to an exasperated and bitter one, and I started some soul searching to find out why, and what changed.

Well, I got a good deep look at the underbelly of our wonderful community and it turns out what I see there is pretty disgusting. We are by and large all adults, but over the past few years here are a few of the events and interactions that helped to shape me into the troll some of you hate, some of you love, but none of you are very good at ignoring. Cheating, defending cheating, asking for in story rewards for irl bribery, histronics, fist fights, dozens of "leaving for evar" posts, AEG has it out for clan X EVERY SINGLE ARC. The moderaters are too strict, the moderaters arent strict enough. I know i broke the rules but how dare they be sarcastic in a warning to me. I'm back from leaving forever did you miss me? Oh god pay attention to me pay attention to me. YOU ARENT PAYING ENOUGH ATTENTION TO ME, LEAVING 4 EVAR!!

And so on and so forth til the recent debacle. The simple fact is, Cody smallwood, and the two douchebags who got into a screaming fit at Kolb's tournament are just that...douchebags. Cody had an opportunity to air his problems with moderation in a productive tone. What he did was get pissed off that he ate a 30 day ban for dropping an n-bomb and conveniently realize that NOW was the time to strike. He had an opportunity to present his case logically, and with sound reasoning, but instead opted to attack the three moderators he had a problem with on a personal level, including what amount to unfounded rumors about one of them. When presented with testimony from people who were actually involved pointing out what he said was false, he decided to stand by his false accusations. Classy. Then much like the Roku-mart people, completely failing to grasp that once you make it personal..it becomes personal he posts an apology whose subtext shows his only understanding is "well crap more people are pissed at me about this than i thought, id better make an apology" and in prime politician fashion, apologizes without accepting any responsibility for it at all. "I apologize if you were offended". The best part of this in my humble opinion is that it's outright public slander, not for cheating, or stealing, or punching a fellow gamer, or acting like a douche and representing the community poorly or any of those things...its public slander for doing an unpaid volunteer position poorly. The fact that a barrage of people followed saying that he had no need to apologize really makes me wonder at the ethical character of our playerbase as a whole after all the prior crap. So here goes....

I have a challenge for you l5r community, and I suspect since i have all of 4 followers that it will go unheeded. For one season...december to febuary, lets act like adults. Let's not have incidents of people screaming at each other over pieces of cardboard. Let's not have a rash of internet drama because someone trash talked someone else. Let's take a deep breath, and realize it's just a game, that we're going to encounter sarcastic and condescending people in our lives and if we let them ruin everything for us our lives are going to be filled with anger and frustration. Lets realize that frankly, the rhetoric about the main forum is exaggerated in the extreme, and lets also realize that yes, ling and lee and colsons moderating style waffles between condescending, bitter, sarcastic, and frustrated. Frankly, I can get past that, it seems a not insignificant handful can't and honestly, were I one of those three, I'd probably just step down. Doing that work for aeg, however much I like the company and game isn't worth the amount of shit they take, some deserved, some undeserved on a near daily basis. I have it in personal experience that some of the loudest critics of the aeg moderation staff cannot take a fraction of the level of shit the mod staff recieves, since apparently two to three weeks of light trolling killed a relatively well known forum. *eyeroll smiley here*



That said, it felt good to get all that off my chest. See you all in another 2 to 3 months when I masochistically get the urge to involve myself in the l5r community again.