The Tavern

duvessa wrote:

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Vine Stalker - VS
Formicid - Why the fuck are you playing this

duvessa wrote:

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Vine Stalker - VS
Formicid - Why the fuck are you playing this

netkitten wrote:formicids are fo

so you can play foam

dpeg wrote:

duvessa wrote:

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Vine Stalker - VS
Formicid - Why the fuck are you playing this

You exude an air of negativity that, in my opinion, is harmful to this community. If you don't like it, then don't play it -- species and gods are metagame choices! This goes for the species, and for the game itself. There's so many other things to do! At the very least, please stop your constant barrage of reviling one-liners. I am pretty sick of them.

There are people who have fun playing Mummies, or Formicids, or Cheibriados, or Crawl. Get over it.

duvessa wrote:

dpeg wrote:

duvessa wrote:

  Code:

Vine Stalker - VS
Formicid - Why the fuck are you playing this

You exude an air of negativity that, in my opinion, is harmful to this community. If you don't like it, then don't play it -- species and gods are metagame choices! This goes for the species, and for the game itself. There's so many other things to do! At the very least, please stop your constant barrage of reviling one-liners. I am pretty sick of them.

There are people who have fun playing Mummies, or Formicids, or Cheibriados, or Crawl. Get over it.

Please stop assuming that everything I say is a personal attack on your ideals. I was making a joke, and it's a joke that's fairly popular in the crawl community already. Are you bothered by the learndb's "felid reasons" entry?

and into wrote:Well this thread took a bit of an unexpected turn...

I'd be careful of assigning too much weight to someone as a "bad role model." The "bandwagon effect" certainly is real and makes itself known, especially on the Internet, but most of the time when people are possibly, arguably being jerks I don't think it is because they are intentionally looking up to other people who act in this or that way. Not saying that we aren't influenced by such things, but honestly in my experience it is more common for people to use how others are acting as a pretext for doing what they actually wanted to do in the first place, anyway.

As for the positive side, I don't mind confessing that duvessa's deep knowledge of the game and willingness to call out what he thinks is BS means that there absolutely have been moments where I was more diligent about thinking through the advice I was giving and articulating it more carefully. Make of that what you will.

I understand dpeg's frustration due to how closely he identifies with the game; once you've spent enough time doing something you care about, that level of identification happens inevitably. (It is a collaborative project obviously but, if DCSS is any one person's "baby," it is his, clearly.)

On the other hand I think we need to be careful about calling people "a bad influence" and the like. Individual posts are absolutely subject to scrutiny and if someone thinks one of them goes too far, is derailing a thread, is degenerating into pointless bickering, is mean-spirited, etc., etc, that's what the report button is for.

But I'm reluctant to allow discussions about a user's "effect on the community" or any such similar sweeping and grand statements. Those discussions often lead to scapegoating and breed far more negativity and pettiness than they resolve. Incidentally, this principle also applies to posters whose viewpoints are not widely shared; they nevertheless have the right to argue their case, even if it isn't popular, just as others have the right to disagree with them, so long as they stay within the bounds of reasonable (if sometimes very heated) argumentative discourse.

and into wrote:Hopeless: No, I don't think you stepped on any toes.

I think I am being fair in my assessment—otherwise I would have assessed differently—but then of course it is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to be unbiased in one's judgments and observations of oneself. At any rate, I agree strongly with your last two paragraphs. As for the first two, I don't think any of the posters who have been mentioned in the course of this discussion are "trolls," in the real sense of that term. True trolls would/should be handled differently.

(I guess to clarify: A troll is someone who intentionally pretends to believe strongly and sincerely in <foo> in order to bait some group of people or some particular taste community, usually in terms of their common sense perspectives. In malicious cases, this is done spitefully simply in order to make fun of people who care about <bar>, but as with any sort of pranking there is a huge spectrum ranging from "all in good fun" to "actually evil" (as in cases of people trolling Facebook memorial pages to recently deceased people). However, oftentimes in Internet Arguments (TM) people who actually just disagree or perhaps don't even necessarily disagree all that much, but simply misunderstand each other, accuse each other of trolling.)

mikee wrote:Does aggression serve a social function?

duvessa wrote:Seeing my name attached to this thread title is going to confuse some people

TehDruid wrote:In all honesty, I stopped caring about Duvessa's snide comments after the first few times he said things that back then I'd consider "hurtful" in response to my posts. He's always been like that ever since I joined these forums about 2 + 1/2 years ago. Sometimes he goes a bit soft and is not particularly obnoxious, tbh. And I'll admit I love his ms paint work. All in all I don't think he's a negative asset to our little community, at least whenever he bothers to explain the useful advice he has to offer.

An easy solution if you don't like someone's post is to just put them on your foes list. Seriously. Why does that feature even exist, I wonder? People want to change other people's characters without even trying to see the solutions available to them...

Now, when it comes to dpeg's concern about community management, I'm not qualified to assess that, I'll admit. But giving people the ability to filter who they get to deal with is enough, imo.

Sandman25 wrote:When I was young I was joking too much until I realized that most jokes is an aggressive act, making fun of other people to demonstrate superiority and alike.
I don't think one should apologize for suggesting to stop joking when it can hurt feelings of other people.

Sandman25 wrote:Tiktacy,
I don't understand how you can suggest to use private messages when you are using forum for similar things. Why didn't you PM whoever you wrote the above post for?

damiac wrote:It doesn't seem fair at all that this thread has Duvessa's name on it, when it was actually moved here by a mod.

duvessa wrote:

damiac wrote:It doesn't seem fair at all that this thread has Duvessa's name on it, when it was actually moved here by a mod.

Does phpBB even have a "merge topic" or "insert post" feature? Because if not it's kind of impossible to avoid this, and even if so, I don't think I'd describe it as unfair.