My completely transparent moderator application

[VDZ]

And speaking of Zentetsuken i still feel like you are biased towards him just because of the controversial opinions.

How can you possibly think the person who has posted the following things within the last two months can be trusted to have good intentions in moderating the official forums of the game?

Harsh truth -

this game is actually really, really objectively bad. The community makes it worse still, the devs make it worse still.

Comforting lies -

There is enough content in this game that is enjoyable that it really feels like it is possible to turn it in to something good

this is the lie we all tell ourselves, every year


Harsher truth -

The toxic vets who have found ways to get enjoyment out of this game, no matter how toxic their gameplay is and how bad it is for the longevity of the playerbase and the game itself - kudos to them.

If you're nibbling at scraps of autistic grinding that are left that hook new players and hermits long enough to ride the retard train for a few years - kudos to you

Any amount of enjoyment you can get out of this absolute 13 year long trainwreck requires a special kind of mental state or a very unique situation

The harshest truth -

Every single post made of this forum, every single login to this game and every passing moment spent discussing it, good or bad, is only positive reinforcement for the devs. If somebody or something is shit for a decade it's not going to magically get better out of nowhere. There are 10s of 1000s of games out there that can scratch atleast part of the itch that keeps you in this sordid nightmare.

If you play this game you absolutely deserve to be miserable about it.

You have personally spent a lot of time moderating this forum yourself over the years, to the point of publicly complaining about how much time you spent answering DMs and reading shit. You've been known to do incredibly silly, arduous and menial things like moving threads and individual comments around, shadow deleting and even editing individual replies for incredibly silly and reasons while leaving massive threads that are in much more obvious need of moderation. Both you and your past moderation team are guilty of blatant bias and laziness when it comes to moderating these forums, and the truth is that I think absolutely nobody honestly blames you.

This website hasn't been used unironically for years, it's a platform for trolling, baiting, arguing, shitposting and attempting to manipulate you.

I don't think there is a single person in this entire community (that actually wants to moderate) that would do an honest job of it.

Have you not just considered scrapping it? The things you use it for are incredibly trivial, you could be receiving the tiny amount of bug reports, ideas and feedback that you actually use and care about on literally any other platform.

You have a discord chat with 100s of active users that you could pop updates in to at any time and spend the same amount of time afterwards skimming replies and pretending to care about the feedback. You already use it to receive bug reports and dms.

Why are we still using this ancient slice of early 2000s shithole internet nostalgia????

It is doing nothing for you, nothing for the game, and nothing for the community,

Make a landing page for the client and some screenshots and basic info like every other game and pick a more modern platform to use.

You have spent so much more time accomplishing so much less, I think you can safely add this to the top of your priority list.

There was a time when the devs would join in, comment on are atleast feign the the idea that our ideas and criticisms are being heard, but we are years and years past this point. They don't even pretend to read 90% of the comments on the actual update threads anymore.

Complete bullshit. Jorb posted in the most recent update thread just over a week ago. They still read our feedback and respond to it. The biggest value this forum has to me, aside from being the place where news gets posted, is that it's the best way of contacting the developers.

pick a more modern platform to use.

You mean 'pick a platform you and your users have no control over to use', right? I sure love it when the only way to provide and comment on feedback is to install some garbage proprietary client that barely works on some systems and has mediocre usability and poor searching capabilities, to use a platform that will straight up ban you for even trying to use a custom client (because they really need the telemetry, okay?). As an added bonus, you're at the mercy of the platform owner; if you happen to do anything wrong (like, say, living in the wrong geographic region) they could pull the rug from under you out of nowhere, and if the platform owner considers your views 'wrong' you can just get shut down for wrongthink. That's what you want, right?

it would be a modern platform where people would actually get banned from the global moderators for making disgusting posts likening pedophilia to homosexuality and stuff like that.

...oh. It really is what you want. Well, enjoy the game's primary communication medium getting shut down in a couple years due to the devs' refusal to add black skin colors African-American skin colors skins of color to the game, then.

this is the perfect example of us using the forum dishonestly

there is no way that this is a serious post, and this is the kind of shit we do every day here

there is no solid argument for having an ancient forum when there are so many more modern tools available for communities to use and achieve the same levels of free discussion and the same platform for the devs to post important update information like what buttons are now available in 4k once per month

Even in the very best case that he only has the best of intentions, his view on the forums is that they're completely worthless and must be drastically overhauled at the very least, preferably shut down entirely. This is not what most users of the forums want. He's super-enthusiastic about the Discord and wants everyone to move there, and that enthusiasm could work well for a moderation role on the Discord, but someone who has near-zero commitment and many gripes about the forums is unlikely to moderate it in a way that aligns with current forum users' interests. Yes, maybe he'll radically change the forums and change them into something completely new, attracting a whole new userbase! But that's not what I nor most of the existing users want. This is about moderating the forums we have today, not 'creating something better' as - in the most optimistic interpretation - he seems to want to do.

Literally anyone who disagreed here is either from the pedo/conspiracygang.

That's because you stretch your definition of 'pedo/conspiracygang' to everyone who disagrees with you. To the best of my knowledge the only remarks I've made about the rampant pedophilia accusations were about how severe an accusation that is and that it shouldn't be made lightly, and I don't think I've ever partaken in any conspiracy discussions (unless 'Putin told everyone in advance they'd retaliate militarily if Ukraine continues trying to join NATO' is a conspiracy theory nowadays, any discussion involving Russia is becoming a real minefield nowadays).

Another question: Aren't you in good terms with magicman by any chance?

What do you mean by 'in good terms'? I don't know MagicManICT outside of the forums, and I've only had two PM exchanges with him (one about in-game info, one about a forum post (not moderation-related)). If you mean whether he's ever taken action against my posts, the only moderation actions ever taken against my posts were some posts getting Hel'd when entire discussions got Hel'd and a single warning from Granger. I've been in good standing with every single moderator thus far. (That seems like it would definitely change if Zentetsuken becomes a mod, though, as he perceives my honest opinions as 'dishonest use of the forum'.)

However, I still have no clue who YOU are.

If you're referring to on the forums, you must be blind. I'm the 64th most active poster by post count, and while I'm not active year-round I have consistently had many long stretches of activity throughout the past couple years. If you mean in-game, then well, duh. I'm a hermit who uses a different name for every character and I don't tell anyone in-game my forum identity. You're not supposed to know who I am in-game.

[DDDsDD999]

I don't understand why someone would judge a player by their lower post count, especially when the forums are in the state they currently are.

Probably because your post count is pathetic, please get it up before making another post.

[DonVelD]

...

"If you absolutely refuse to scrap the forum and move on to a new platform, I will unironically throw my hat in the ring for moderator" its literally at the start of the post in case you've missed it, so saying shit as if he's gonna destroy the forums because he said he doesn't like them falls under the "conspiracy", you saying that the people agreeing with this are plotting something is conspiracy tier shit. This is why i placed you in that group.

I asked about Magicman because i don't know where your bias comes from - my money was on either being friends with Magicman OR just being hurt about that dishonesty post. Nightdawg brought up a good point about not knowing who you are btw, i don't want to be mean but for a regular forum user you are on the same tier as some random guy with 11 posts, even if you have 2k of those - nobody knows who you are so the numbers don't matter. But you still manage to gatekeep being a "true" forum user.

[Nightdawg]

However, I still have no clue who YOU are.

If you're referring to on the forums, you must be blind. I'm the 64th most active poster by post count, and while I'm not active year-round I have consistently had many long stretches of activity throughout the past couple years. If you mean in-game, then well, duh. I'm a hermit who uses a different name for every character and I don't tell anyone in-game my forum identity. You're not supposed to know who I am in-game.

Yes, but to me, you're some static on the background, like many others on this forum. Again, I can't stress this enough: nothing against you.
Yes, I have seen your avatar and name on the forums, but I've remembered Clemins' name because of probably 4 discord messages I've seen written by them and some meme hnh video on youtube, which was more meaningful to me than what you're doing, and let me explain why:
You do have the post count, but you're not present in this "community". I know forum degenerates, hedgehugs-faction-discord(the so called "official" hnh discord) degenerates, other more or less nice people in that same discord, and a lot of very cool people that do not associate with or engage in either the forums or that discord server.
You, on the other hand, appear to be in the same boat as most random hermits that haven't really reached any meaningful progress in the game, in terms of quality or mechanics engagement, and as a result, to me, your posts seem to be just trivial text on the forums.

It's just like how some people with 17k-18k posts act like they know the stuff that is being discussed about the game, such as some mechanics regarding pvp or pve, when in reality they haven't engaged in those mechanics. They literally shoot themselves in the foot in the middle of their argument, showing how little they know about what's being discussed, and it happens often, sadly. At some point, you just stop reading those people's messages, it's all background noise.

To me, this "background static noise" becomes an issue when C&I is filled with trash suggestions that don't get filtered by a moderator. "The moot" becomes literal static when all of the "drama" posts get HEL'd and only meaningless trash remains. You can't have a decent conversation in "The Inn" without some obsessed snowflake coming in to derail every single topic with unrelated caveman takes. How the fuck we went from "Ukraine is being invaded by putin" to "hello yes, homosexuals are lesser humans" and "oh look, the fucking pedophile is here"(x5) is beyond me. Even the moderator decided to prioritise defending pedophilia rather than MODERATING THE FORUM.

Most times the ones who criticize want to help, but they're being obnoxiously ignored. They turn to shitposting, trying to gain a tiny bit of attention for the constructive criticism, which gets shut down by some retard giving the stupidest arguments in the world. I argued with shubla in one of my topics for 4 pages just hoping that the extra random ass posts in that topic would draw the devs' attention to a good post. But as shubla previously proved to all of us, out of his 12000 posts on this forum, the only one jorb bothered to read was the one containing a link to a video of himself using 9 naked bots on a knarr to KO newbies.

So in conclusion you're not really part of this community, you're just... there. You exist. And also, the forums being 99% bullshit and 1% shitposting is not helping this community.

So make this man a mod.

[shubla]

Moderator is useless if he does not use the forum. I think 5 digits is the lower bound for such person.

[mulamishne]

Moderator is useless if he does not use the forum. I think 5 digits is the lower bound for such person.

I would argue 3-4. Shows less time shitposting, more time listening.

[VDZ]

Nightdawg brought up a good point about not knowing who you are btw, i don't want to be mean but for a regular forum user you are on the same tier as some random guy with 11 posts, even if you have 2k of those - nobody knows who you are so the numbers don't matter. But you still manage to gatekeep being a "true" forum user.

Yes, but to me, you're some static on the background, like many others on this forum. Again, I can't stress this enough: nothing against you.
Yes, I have seen your avatar and name on the forums, but I've remembered Clemins' name because of probably 4 discord messages I've seen written by them and some meme hnh video on youtube, which was more meaningful to me than what you're doing, and let me explain why:
You do have the post count, but you're not present in this "community". I know forum degenerates, hedgehugs-faction-discord(the so called "official" hnh discord) degenerates, other more or less nice people in that same discord, and a lot of very cool people that do not associate with or engage in either the forums or that discord server.

You both seem to be ignoring the fact that this is about the forums. It doesn't matter whether someone is a forum/Discord personality or not (in fact, it kind of runs counter to proper usage of forums - circlejerking and personal drama are not beneficial to proper discussion). Someone who does not care about the forums should not be moderating the forums. Surely that can't be such a hot take?

How the fuck we went from "Ukraine is being invaded by putin" to "hello yes, homosexuals are lesser humans" and "oh look, the fucking pedophile is here"(x5) is beyond me.

I know how it got there. It's called feeding the troll. Somewhere throughout the evolution of the internet we've managed to lose the common sense that you should not feed the trolls. Those who feed the trolls are just as guilty, if not moreso, of shitting up the thread as the trolls themselves (often the trolls at least keep their trolling mostly on-topic). If you just ignore people like Jalpha they can't shit up the thread nearly as much. Every time you respond to them, you give them reason a reason to add another post to the thread.

which gets shut down by some retard giving the stupidest arguments in the world.

If the arguments are stupid:

• If the stupidity is self-evident, just ignore it. Anyone can see it's stupid.
• If the stupidity is not self-evident, if it's truly stupid, it should not take much effort to refute, and refuting counterarguments make your original position look stronger.
• If the stupidity is not self-evident, and refuting is not simple...consider that perhaps they actually have a point, even if you disagree with their position?

OR just being hurt about that dishonesty post.

I won't say it didn't irk me (insult my competence all you want, but implying I am deceitful is simply slander), but I let it slide in the thread itself and didn't intend to follow up on it. However, it does reveal a very problematic attitude when a genuine post that contributes to the thread is considered "dishonest" by a would-be moderator and should, according to his previously stated line of reasoning, be deleted to 'improve' the forum. Or to put it in other words: he has pretty clearly stated he wants to delete posts he personally does not like. That is a very bad trait in a moderator. As an active forum member, I do not want my posts to be deleted unless they are actually disruptive.

[WowGain]

As an active forum member, I do not want my posts to be deleted unless they are actually disruptive.

you disrupt my forum experience all the time with your armchair philosopher psuedointellectual drooling

anyone who types on the hafen forums like theyre in highschool debate class should be perma curfewed
forum experience would immediately improve i guarantee it

[DonVelD]

...

All i'm saying is that we should give Zentetsuken the benefit of the doubt. You and i cant guess his intentions. He said a bunch of stuff that may appear unacceptable to you but to me and a lot of people here changing a moderator truly seems like a good idea. Why shouldn't we try? I'm not even trolling by the way, i too see some reasons for forums to exist and if they'll turn out good because of him then we should go for it. I'm just curious about the change.

Speaking of trolls - if the thread has gone to shit then people may as well have fun with it - its the MODERATORS job to take care of it AND the troll/feeders. Why should it happen to begin with btw? Shouldn't the obvious, famous trolls be banned anyway?

And for the end - the "dishonest" post was highly opinionated. I don't want to mix the threads but for example... Why the hell did you even bring up the skin color?? I may be missing something but that was unexpected and from my perspective - completely unrelated. Feel free to explain though. At the end moderating still comes down first to the rules and then the moderators opinion so why would that matter? I don't know if that post would deserve deleting but it wasn't a completely innocent post either.

[DoctorCookie]

You're bias, you think the "official" discord is full of great content and a welcoming community. You are a part of the "your a retard" crew. Intent matters, past history matters. You should not be a mod.