I can see it now...

"FEAR THROUGH BANS" in big bold text on a brick which has just smashed through the head of a green clone.

I still don't like this tyrannical approach. Are we going to ask members to first buy the game the post in the forums, now?



You mean if i get perma banned i'd have to pay $5 for Data to take 3 months to review my posts and then say no?

Hell naw, I bet a good portion of the active forum hasn't bought the game.


Well, you might or might not deserve it.
It doesn't have to be sent to Data. Maybe the forum can have a forum-wide poll?
Ex: You log in and see you have a new message. You see it is a ban poll. You cannot post until you cast your vote.

This is what I meant.

Fix'd, almighty bald messiah.

Warn before you ban like a mad man, please?

Someone should shoot Weasel with an Ion cannon, just to make sure he really is the Messiah.

Ions are for wusses, and any old giant retardedly armored or sparkle'd up thing can survive it. Ypsilons are what REAL men fire out of their cannons. Survive one of those, and you really ARE a Messiah.

Hop off.

Oooh ooh do I get to post in this thread?

I somehow think that I am, perhaps (indubitably) more qualified to do so than anyone here.

This forum does not, has not, and will never have a perfect "discipline" system. Nothing ever will. There's no way to get internet consequences to stick to a real-life persona, and while charging money might make someone reconsider their actions, the fact remains that no one, myself included, has ever approached that point of "you have never gotten better with your actions, and have been banned six times".

Even Daman doesn't post often enough to be worth banning, which is exactly the problem: charging people money after a ridiculous number of bans is going to be as useless as charging after one ban would be ridiculous. A tie-in to cancel registration would be, quite honestly to Senor Weasel, perfectly retarded.

While yes, this is not a democracy, I can hardly see how any user would be attracted to a user experience where they involuntarily agree to the possibility of remote key suspension. I thought the whole POINT behind buying keys while still in beta meant they would always be valid. Making them useless as a disciplinary action is as stupid, from a customer relations standpoint, as making them invalid on the release of the final version. On an only mildly related note, charging for the use of mods would be almost as dumb, at least until there's a MASSIVE improvement in the quality and quantity of vanilla content. A game is not sold for eighteen dollars on the delivery of five missions, a broad sweep of same-ey weaponry, with the "promise" of more to come.

I'm going to be absolutely, brutally honest here: the game is overpriced, currently, at eighteen dollars.
I am hard pressed to believe it will be worth anything more by the 1.0 version, let alone the (apparently) forty eight dollars Data hopes to charge. Perhaps the campaign will change things dramatically; but perhaps not. As it stands now, what most people "see" when they see CC is a bland, slow moving shooter where the characters can't even WALK without digging into the ground. The game concepts are ill-explained are hard to grasp, and many find it simply confusing to play. So many concepts are taken for granted that it's not fair to a new player to play an older one.

Now, I'm off on a rather odd tangent here, but it does relate. Charging ten dollars (apparently the estimated sum) to REJOIN the forums that you have full access to as a free user makes no sense. Charging ten dollars to gain access to the now paid-members-only forum makes even less sense; why should I pay half the cost of the original game to get access to a community that doesn't value whatever I input anyways? No one would be getting banned from a paid-access forum, at least not in any significant number, and the looming threat of "charging money" wouldn't have any real impact on the vast majority of people.

Some cynics might argue that I just don't want such a system because I'm worried that I'd get banned out and have to pay up. I'd just like to point something out to you: I've been a member for two years, eight months, and twenty nine days. I have been banned three times. I think you can figure it out.

(three is one half of six)

This is a stupid idea. Most of us already paied $18 or $36 for an incomplete game.

Now you're suggesting we pay more money for more things that we should get by virtue of having already paid for a beta opt-in copy?

And everything Weasel is suggesting just makes me more adamant that modifications and third-party content should be hosted separate from the forums. There is no reason that people who paid for a product (which is advertised as being a modifiable system) should be denied what they have paid for.

That's just bad marketing. Sure, you'll get to pocket some poor schmucks $18 dollars, but at the same time you will garner a negative industry attitude. And in indie gaming (since you are such an indie culture extraordinaire) is highly dependent upon word of mouth and reviews. If someone hears about how awfully the community (from which the developer "borrows" content) is managed and maintained by a "professional" manager, they aren't going to opt in and buy the game.

It's simple business marketing, guys. No one is going to buy the game if the develop has a bad rep for a shitty product (and yes, the community surrounding a game is part of the product, no matter how badly DT wants to pretend that is not the case).

Before I reply to this, just to make it clear:

I currently have no plans to change the punishment methods. I think the current warn/tempban system does the trick. In the context of this thread -- IF there were to be a change to the system, it would be registered-only access to the forum.

As stated, though - I don't think it'll fly because we don't have enough users. I am definitely not going to go with the "labelling people for shame" plan.

I also think that the payment system has only been demonstrated to work at SomethingAwful (or, in a bit more of a meta-sense, MMOs). I don't think that even if we started looking to alternatives, that Data would go for it. So really this whole post is a non-issue.



Yep, that's why I said everyone falls into Category "B" in my last post - most people here aren't complete knobs - most want to be a part of the community, and some just have some language/attitude/aggression issues that we can live with. Our remedial action might be a 1-4 day ban but I don't think any member of the forum deserves to go away forever.

I think these "alt punishments" discussions are kinda geared towards that hypothetical "what if we get a massive troll" in the future.



Agreed - at this time we don't have enough users in the forum, things don't move fast enough, and it can't stand well on it's own two legs. The game isn't big enough and doesn't have a large draw or a huge fan base. I don't think the payment system will work well because we rely so much on the non-paying community members.

*IF* we get to a point where the forum is so busy I have to make subforums just to keep you from going to page 3 to see what was posted recently, I'll reconsider this angle.



In the non-situation where we do the repay-after-ban thing, I wouldn't revoke the game key. I would just revoke that key's access to the forums - which I think would be fair in that case. It's not like you're abusing the game, you're just abusing your rights to the forum - and it's easy to tie your $10 bill to a real-life-person (or in this case, an avatar).

It's really easy to manage people when they have something to lose - where creating an alt doesn't give you all the same benefits. This is why people typically behave more in WoW than in GuildWars - especially at lower levels. In GW you can always just create a new free account.



I believe pricing strategies are going to change. I can't say if they are going to go up or down or change altogether, but I hear you there. In this day and age of $1 iPhone apps - or seeing World of Goo's birthday sale results (where the average purchase price was around $3), we as developers definitely know pricing strategy is key.

I think it hasn't gotten much attention earlier because - well - we be lazy.



Also: You aren't the type of guy I would permaban and force to pay again anyway. You have excellent points and are a value to this community. You just go a bit overboard sometimes, and need a slap on the wrist.

So now we're talking about preferential treatment?

Also, no one cares if they get banned from the WOW forums. Those things are a cesspool to begin with. Look what professional "community management" has done for them, LOL

Naw, I just think we don't have big enough jerks to start handing out these permabans we are talking about. You're getting there though.



Nah I was talking about being banned in-game, where you stand to lose months of grinding effort. They have a hands-off approach to their community (that's how they manage it). I disagree with the strategy and from the looks of things, you do too.