Forum trolls
They are not mythical creatures. They roam among us. It could be your best friend. It could be your spouse. They are mean, green, spam machines. They are the Forum Trolls.
For a game like SWTOR, that has such a huge following, official forums are a perfect playing ground for these creatures. Like on every other forum on the internet they share their ideas and defend them with utmost dedication. Reason is not something you can face them with. They will repeat their requests like mindless drones until you give up. Being the vocal minority they constantly apply pressure to the community managers and game developers. Some less resilient game devs might even cave in to their demands. Some game devs might choose to take the easy way out (like in the comic above).
Still, Twi’lek strippers that are dual wielding Jedi assassins with smuggler blasters does sound appealing. Not sure about the big frame travesty though.
The official TOR boards are awful. That place is a troll’s paradise. Mainly because the moderation staff doesn’t know their own ass, from a hole in the ground. For every troll they might shut down for a day or two, they ignore a half a dozen threads meant only to incite arguments. It’s amazing how much shit they choose to let through.
From the losers with the CE key signatures* (who have their own sad Facebook group where they publicly plan their obvious trolling, and cry about suspensions), and their unbelievably lame forced memes – to the GW2/WoW fanboys insulting anything and everything about the game/demanding typical WoW shit – to the doomsaying idiots.
The forum is already an awful place to be.
It’s like this game decided to fully embrace the classically stupid “WoW clone” accusations, by copying WoW’s inept community management staff, right off the bat.
Like “Hey Blizzard, it took a few years for your community to become a social train wreck”? “Well check this out!”
“Zero to crap before the game’s even out.”
It’s like WoW lipo’ed some of it’s nastier player fat out, and it all slouched into GW2 and SWTOR’s boards.
I had high hopes, that Bioware would take community seriously, but the more I read the boards, the more I lose faith in humanity, as it becomes more likely, that I’ll be playing my next mmorpg with all public chat channels closed…again.
*I mean how much more obvious can you be to moderator when you readily admit that you’re including a signature meant to piss people off?
I agree with Jason here. I have been steadily feeding my ignore list monster for months now and I have noticed some common ground with most of those posters with the CE VIP sig. Even if they have been on the forums since 2008, they have made less than 100 posts and only started to post because they feel important now.
Oh well, less time on the official forums and more time checking out good fan-sites.
You guys just hang out here with us we are not a bunch of elitist jerks we are cool! 🙂
I like to cruise the forums because despite all the obvious trolls there are some legitimate concerns/ideas brought forth by some of the players base. Also I like catching the newbies who are just getting into the game and are not prepared for the trolls who constantly flame someone for asking a question. Sometimes I juest want to tell people that in the same amount of time they used to berate someone for not using the seach button and trying to find their answer amongst hundreds of threads they could have just answered the player’s question. The forums are bad though, real bad. Despite the fact that I love their site I have noticed that the Darth Hater forums are pretty bad in their own right.
Sometimes it is hard to tell if people are being trolls or just elitest jerks. Unfortunatly trolls are going to exist in any MMO and Star Wars just happens to be about the easiest subject to troll in the world, at least in my opinion.