Flaming bashng and general nastiness on forums

Hello wonder what everyones opinions on what seems to be the big trend of game forums lately. Seems like people are out of control and unmoterated in the way they deal with eachother in forums. Currently forum trolling on game forums and flaming seems to be some kind of new sport with no referees in sight. Should this be allowed? should it be stopped? can it be stopped? I for one thinks it erodes the community and should be throttled down severly. Look at wows forums as an example disgusting.

Well what it really boils down to imo is this. The flame bashing comes from a few distinct types of people.

-The Elitest of the Gaming Community
-Overly Zealous Fanboi/girlz
-Ignorant Game Forum goers
-People who do not understand
-Multiple accounts of all of the above who want to spam and not ruin there reputations among there forum browsing peers.

All these people do is just bash on each others games until they utterly hate them for no reason other than that they bashed on X game so much. Thats why other than for the possibility of beta acess I do not even attempt to post on a site called MMORPG.com. It just becomes worthless after so many rehashed post. However, I will not blame this on just one side. Developers fuel this problem as well. By releasing information in an information race to bring more people to there product. Its the blur of information coming from developers that makes this bashing become a common and trivial matter to most gamers.

However, the only place I have seen this is where many gamers come to meet under one roof, such as MMORPG.com. These gaming hubs only draw in the crowd because it has the trolls, bashers, elitest, and casuals from all the different games under one roof. However( yes there is another however.) the game fan sites such as can be seen with EQ2 are not immune to this either. That however is a whole beast of its own topic which just gets down to an argument of ethics, moderation, and greed. I feel this fan site should not be plaqued by such a ugly thread as it is above that. So, to the point. My view is that if you are willing to argue over a game you should at least A. Make sure you know your information, if it is released have played it to at least know of its crimes, and be able to effectively back up your argument. Aside from that I really don't care if people argue, because A. Its a game and you obviously are not playing it if you are arguing and B. Life isn't fair grow up or get out because your meaningless gibbering is giving me a headache.

The Sphere group (and Fans is part of that) have firm and fast rules about the conduct on our sites. You can go check out VanguardSpheres if you'd like and read thru our forums. I think you'll see that it's a comfortable and "civilized" (if you will) place to discuss things and find out info. Our Acceptable Use announcement leaves few questions, I believe. Piro did a good job on it.

Hopefully, when things get rolling and if 38 Studios thinks we're ok to be part of their fan site base, you'll see that posted again somewhere!

Thanks for the comments. We'll do our best to keep a lid on things, but room to wiggle, too.

What's sad about this entire thing is it just scares off the new people that are truely interested in the game. They take 1 look at the forums for most games and run off screaming. I don't blame them, I wouldn't want to play a game that has 50 of the top posts telling every other forum poster how much of an idiot they are.

Sphere's was a good site, as soon as someone tried to stir up something it was stopped at the beginning.

Also as sites get bigger and bigger it gets much harder to control the forums.

This problem is just about gaming sites through, this problem is rampant across the internet. any type of forums you visit usually have this problem whether it's gaming, sports, or under water basket weaving.

The only way to stop it is to make sure you have control of the forums. (which causes people to scream that you are being unfair in censoring them). There is a difference between censoring and controlling forums just the people that need to be controlled don't know the difference.

I'll not have this type of behaviour on Bob's forums. I won't put up with it, and thankfully, neither will any of the regulars. They report this kind of thing to me almost immediately. Swift action!

Exactly, Laethyn!

Well, lets be honest, sometimes a good zinger can be great fun and entertaining, but when you are flaming to flame and are being a general 'tard, than yeah it's not a good thing.

Like for instance, this is something done in good fun and without harm:

ZOMGZ I WILL NOT BUY THIS GAME UNLESS YOU BECOME A YANKEE CURT!

Well, lets be honest, sometimes a good zinger can be great fun and entertaining,

There is a large difference between a good heated discusson/debate and a flame war.

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This one always gets me

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