^Well-said. I'm inclined to revise my vote to openness; this discussion does seem quite premature.

I would also prefer an "innocent until proven otherwise" approach, but i dont think that it could work.

You cant keep trolls from coming to a public party without any fences.


Also: i'd keep the "closed" forums readable for everyone, information shall be free!

Well, there's no harm in initially being open - if the system becomes toxic we can flush out the bad eggs.

Question is: who defines what a bad egg is? I think the answer should be only the moderators and Josh - no one else. Certainly not the "old community".

Scytale wrote:Well, there's no harm in initially being open - if the system becomes toxic we can flush out the bad eggs.

Agreed, provided that that works

Scytale wrote: Question is: who defines what a bad egg is? I think the answer should be only the moderators and Josh - no one else. Certainly not the "old community".

The last word would have the mods/josh, yeah.

But we could (and should i think, more eyes see more) take on an assisting role

Cornflakes_91 wrote:

Scytale wrote:Well, there's no harm in initially being open - if the system becomes toxic we can flush out the bad eggs.

Agreed, provided that that works

Scytale wrote: Question is: who defines what a bad egg is? I think the answer should be only the moderators and Josh - no one else. Certainly not the "old community".

The last word would have the mods/josh, yeah.

But we could (and should i think, more eyes see more) take on an assisting role

Oh sure, I think it makes sense that the old community could provide insight to Josh and moderators, but making the rules and enforcing them is not our job.

light487 wrote:My position would be to leave it as is and welcome all people. If there does come a time when a new forum structure is needed, then it can be done.

Limiting access to a discussion board "after release" seems ridiculous.. I could understand limiting beta discussion areas to those with beta access.. no point having people who haven't even played the beta discussing it.

As much as I loathe what Mechwarrior Online ended up being, the way they did it was to have the main forums for everyone regardless of who they are. Most people stayed in those forums, even long-term members and people playing the closed alpha and beta etc. Then they had a hidden forum on there for the beta testing. It would be no different really..

I just can't see any justification for treating people as trolls/bad until they prove otherwise... you're essentially saying they are guilty until proven innocent.

I also was a member of the MechWarrior Online community. I personally don't mind the forums being split if we happen to have a closed beta here. If not, keeping it open through release sounds good. But if we start getting a lot of negativity, complaints and trolling I'd like to either have the offending people removed from the forum or separate the good from the untrusted with a legacy forum. High quality posts are hard to find among spam topics. Go to the MWO forums and try looking up "how to balance sniping" to get the idea.

Oh dear. :\ My stance remains the same as it was in IRC. Keep things as they are.

For the love of God keep things as they are.

We are not EA we are not Ubisoft and we (hopefully) dont need to make a special forum part where we exclude new members.

(i mean if there would be a special tread where all red, orange, green people could post secretly ok, i would understand that, but excluding a major part from a forum is overkill.)

(Maybe you could explain the newbie forum option a bit more? Will they have to wait a couple of days? Make 15 somewhat posts without trolling? Who will watch maybe a few hundred new members on release? The more i think about it the more it sounds like something big publishers would do ...)

6) Old timers get their own forum section.
Sort of a gentlebeings club.

It may even be publicly readable but no write access for new users.


Locking large parts of the forum "against" new users is not very healthy. =P

Cornflakes_91 wrote:I would also prefer an "innocent until proven otherwise" approach...

Going to put my $0.02 in here, but before anything, the above statement is pretty much the way it's going to be.

We all know that there will be those people coming to the forums after purchasing the game that may either not have the best of spelling or grammar. We know there will be people who will come to the forum to cause havoc (at some point).

But you forget, there are ALREADY forum rules to prevent this sort of behavior. It's not as though the moderators are going to give newbies a free pass. If they break the rules, we will take action, but this doesn't mean we need to take preventative measures. We may end up having a few more moderators, but that's about it.

If there are extreme situations, yeah, we may lock down the forums but only temporarily and if that happens we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

It just sounds to me like people are afraid that every new person to ignore the forum rules and that the mods won't do anything about it. These types of ideas are ones that make a forum closed-minded in the first place.

Besides, Gazz has his iron fist, and I have my iron fish.

Yep, pretty sure that'd hurt to get hammered with.

pardon, i dont get the iron fish reverence. Is there a story?

HappyGhecko wrote:pardon, i dont get the iron fish reverence. Is there a story?

We revere iron fish around here, just generally. Someone did a study on the forum demographics a while ago and found that, by some freak of probability, we all share a bizarre interest in treating iron fish with the utmost respect. It's... a little hard to explain.

Scytale wrote:We revere iron fish around here, just generally. Someone did a study on the forum demographics a while ago and found that, by some freak of probability, we all share a bizarre interest in treating iron fish with the utmost respect. It's... a little hard to explain.

I have an iron statue of a fish in my hallway. Most ducks do.

Case in point.