I dealt with you on the pioneer subforums and you insisted i was a desperate fan trying to earn a job at rare thru praising the game all because i happened to have a different opinion than you on an upcoming feature & refusing to just call it trash like you were, and in the OT on this forum you complained people were "slot machine addicts" because they didnt share your views, so forgive me if i dont buy the "im so innocent and its the mean community teams fault" bullshit
Not sure what specific comments you are citing, but I talked a lot about how the end-game was basically structured no differently than a f2p game or a game like WoW. They encourage a small subset of users to be as engaged as possible. Whatever, comment I made was likely not directed specifically at you, but rather making a larger point about how the most engaged SoT users are not very happy people. The SoT endgame is really no different from a game like WoW, where people are logging in every day and finding the most efficient way to grind out the most productivity through menial tasks. In that way, at least when I played the game, most PL Athena 10s (myself included) were not exactly enjoying the game, they were just playing it because the gameplay was designed to be addicting. In my view, the end game is totally antithetical to the mission statement expressed repeatedly in the alpha to make the game as accessible to all as possible. SoT was peak fun when new and diverse audiences were playing the game. I played with people from all over the world, parents who bought the game to play with their children, people with disabilities. Now the game is just sharks and angry people trying to grind commendations as quickly as possible.
Regarding what specifically I was banned for. I remember that it was the result of criticism I had for the volcano projectiles in Devils Roar. It was basically an uphill battle explaining to people how the mechanic actually worked, because a subset of the community couldn't suspend their disbelief/fantasy enough to recognize that it was a mechanic that functioned in a specific way with a very clear set of rules that just protracted gameplay sessions in a way that was entirely random and did not involve player skill.
Again, the post that I was banned for was like one word in a three paragraph thread that I started. In which I called the volcano projectiles a "sh**ty" mechanic and expounded on it, in a clear and concise way that was not trolling. In hindsight, yes I recognize that I shouldn't have written the word at all. The thread that I was banned for received a lot of upvotes, and clearly a lot of community members agreed with it. However, I was warned, and then subsequently banned the next day for the same post that I was warned for. For "circumventing" the language filter. Even though my self-edit was almost identical to the edit that would have taken place if picked up by the language filter.
I guess my larger point is that the official SoT forum was a great place and experiment by Microsoft and Rare in the alpha. Unfortunately now, it's super obvious that Rare designed that place through UI and flair incentives to be free unpaid labor promoting the positive aspects of the game. Obviously it's an official forum, and you wouldn't expect it to be full of negative feedback, but post-launch the developers basically abandoned the forum.
