DISCUSSION ISN'T DRAMA.

I think the main problem we have with criticism is that much of it is posed in a very direct way, which is different than other RM sites because there is a tighter group here who feel more comfortable with expressing their real gripes with one another in a constructive manner. Newbies to this place take it as being hostile, and seriously, it's no wonder since they aren't used to that kind of atmosphere. I certainly saw it this way before joining, and seeing as how I'm still not even close to being a veteran of the community, some of the comments still astound me with how direct they are.

When posting criticism, the goal should not JUST be to provide feedback in a constructive way, but to also not sound like an all-knowing douche when you do it. If there's no mix of "I like this, AND I like that", many people are bound to construe the comment as "this sucks and I can do better, here's a tip from a pro". There are some people in the community that take their games WAY too seriously, and they assume everyone else has the same mindset.

The game pages are a godsend, we should treat each and every post with respect and be mindful of what it is we are actually trying to say. Miscommunication is a tragic thing.



Anyway, in terms of Soli's review I thought it was fair, and the drama that followed was better than going to the movies. The only thing that breaks my heart is to see comments like "I was gonna play this, thanks for preventing me from wasting my valuable time". I see those everywhere, and I don't particularly perceive these people as having very strong individualistic minds. We shouldn't just be critical of a work, but we should be critical of the opinions of others as well.

If your hard drive space and 10 mins of your time to find out if you'd like the game are so goddamn valuable to you, then by all means, choose your favorite reviewer and believe every word they say blindly. By announcing that to everyone you're only making yourself look bad. (Yay, my first rant in months!)

For the record, I tried to keep my responses fairly calm and measured. It got a little heated in places but I do not think it can really be accurately labeled as "lol drama". More of a disagreement than anything else.

If anyone is picturing me crying my eyes out a 2.5 Star review, well go on doing that if it makes you happy, but really all I've been doing is trying internally to come to a good compromise between things I can change to make the game more accessible, and things I like about the game and want to keep.

Disagreement about design choices and stylistic decisions is part of what this site is for--drama would be anything getting in the WAY of what the site is for.

Pardon me, but I'd like to back up a little here and address something...

from WIP
I take offense to the claim that game profiles PREVENT discussion. The problem is that people just keep going to the forum index, don't see anything, and then refresh and see what comes up after that. Games on RMN are more than just a forum topic, unlike other, prefabbed sites.

The reason gamepages don't get as much attention is because, as said before, they aren't forum threads and they aren't checked as frequently.

But what if they were linked through the forums?

The site already bumps games up the unsorted game page list when they're updated with a blog/screenshot/whatever, so what if there was a section of the forums that listed these games like threads? People would be able to see when something was changed, click the link to the gamepage and check out what's new. Plus, if it were listed among the other forum groups, it'd be in an area many users look more often. We could turn the problem into the solution that way.

I know you're trying to keep the forums and game stuff apart, WIP, but I think this could really work.

post=149618
People would be able to see when something was changed, click the link to the gamepage and check out what's new.

Isn't this what subscriptions are for.

If someone gets offended by someone else, there's roughly a 99.9% chance that the person who feels offended is in the wrong.

Okay. Call me an n-word jiggaboo coon and see what happens.

Just to get you to think about your comment above.

post=149622
Isn't this what subscriptions are for.

Is there a way to subscribe to every page on the site at once? And then automatically subscribe to every future page that's added, as soon as it's added? That would be kind of nice. Then I could see, "Oh, hey, these four games are the most recently updated, and I've never heard of any of them. Maybe I'll look at the page for one or two of them and see what's up." Not sure how spammy that would end up being, though. Would need some sort of auto-delete after one week.

A lot of us just want to see what people are talking about lately. Replacing the list of recently updated files on the front page with a list of recently posted comments would be a nice change. Seeing the first half-line of the latest ten comments would be way more interesting than seeing a list of "THETITLE.png" and "wip_battle2.png" and "S4.JPG". Which is basically useless. It doesn't even tell you what game it's for.

OK, that's the same thing that's on the front page that I just complained about, but the version you linked does at least say which game each thing is from. But it still shows new files and blog posts, not comments.

post=149628

If someone gets offended by someone else, there's roughly a 99.9% chance that the person who feels offended is in the wrong.

Okay. Call me an n-word jiggaboo coon and see what happens.

Just to get you to think about your comment above.

you... you... n-word jiggaboo....!

If someone gets offended by someone else, there's roughly a 99.9% chance that the person who feels offended is in the wrong.

Yeah, now go try it out in a bar.