Galehar Calls out player, bans him, then locks the thread

[damiac]

In response to the toxic feedback post on GDD

Volteccer_Jack wrote:The goal here is to come up with an idea that sounds terribly overpowered, like cleaving, but is in actual practice usually useless, like cleaving.

This is because anything that is actually useful becomes terribly overpowered as soon as monsters get a hold of it. Now since it can't be anything actually helpful but it is still expected to somehow change the tactics of the player, we have to be sensational. It has to be such a wild effect that a casual observer will think it powerful, so that the actual uselessness only becomes apparent with close inspection. This way players can still delude themselves with feelings of badassitude as they cleave away at the mobs of rats until any kind of actual threat walks into view (at which point go back to standard tactics of obsessively refusing to engage more than one target at a time).

Reaching by the way, fails at basically every criteria ever given for weapon effects, and only remains as-is because changing something would mean an admittance of failure, either in the design of reaching or the design of the aforementioned criteria.

Anyway I think merging Short Blades and Long Blades is a pretty obvious solution. Short/Long Blade apts are already very similar for most races, and even in the cases where they aren't, crosstraining MAKES them similar. They already have stabbing as their "special effect" so we wouldn't even need to make more of these pointless threads.

I wonder what's the point of posts like this one. It uses exaggeration and broken logic to imply that the devs are stupid and keep making the game worse with bad design decisions. It doesn't contain any actual analysis or even basic reasoning.
I am not saying that this should be moderated. It doesn't break any forum rule, and we don't want to forbid people from saying bad things about the game. My point is that the only effect it has is to drive devs away. Most of us have gained a thick skin and we usually just ignore it. But it's not the case for everyone, and I believe that this kind of attitude is why DracoOmega left.
So, what's the point? I guess the people posting it does so because it makes them feel good. It's quite obvious that it doesn't make anyone else feel good and that it's useless for the game, so they must be doing it for themselves. Probably, it amuses the other cynics and they can thank each others.
I really don't care what you guys think, I'm just asking that you don't litter this forum with your petty bitterness. Keep it to Yiuf, reddit, SA and ##crawl.
Thanks.

Galehar starts of quoting VJ's actually pretty reasonable and content-rich post, calling him out as a troublemaker, then essentially blaming him for a dev leaving. After VJ came to defend and explain this post, he gets banned, and the thread gets locked.

Galehar did exactly what he's accusing VJ of. His response? Orange names are more important than blue names, so if he drives off a few players with this, no biggie, but a dev cannot be bothered to use the ignore feature.

I'm sorry, this is ridiculous hypocrisy. And VJ is hardly the most caustic poster on this forum. DPEG and Galehar are actually pretty high on the caustic post lists, but we all know there's quite a few famous ones on this forum.

[TeshiAlair]

For preciseness sake, is he banned from the Tavern, or just GDD?

[dpeg]

DPEG and Galehar are actually pretty high on the caustic post lists

I note that my name was mentioned in capital letters, as it should be. However, I would appreciate it if mortals had the decency to drop the vowel.

[BlackSheep]

Galehar starts of quoting VJ's actually pretty reasonable and content-rich post, calling him out as a troublemaker, then essentially blaming him for a dev leaving. After VJ came to defend and explain this post, he gets banned, and the thread gets locked.

Galehar did exactly what he's accusing VJ of. His response? Orange names are more important than blue names, so if he drives off a few players with this, no biggie, but a dev cannot be bothered to use the ignore feature.

I'm sorry, this is ridiculous hypocrisy. And VJ is hardly the most caustic poster on this forum. DPEG and Galehar are actually pretty high on the caustic post lists, but we all know there's quite a few famous ones on this forum.

He did not blame Volteccer_Jack for scaring off DracoOmega, he blamed "this kind of attitude." His intention was not to make a VJ bashing thread, but to discuss extreme, consistent negativity. I agree that he kind of failed at that, but he did admit his mistake and apologize. He also discussed banning people from the Game Design Discussion forum, a place that already has special rules governing posts and responses, not the forum in general.

[twelwe]

Galehar settles it honorably I think with his apology. It is always a relief to see someone in authority who is clearly in the wrong man up and admit their mistakes. People should end up with more respect for him out of this situation, not less.

[moocowmoocow]

Enough already.

[damiac]

Yeah, an apology is good, but isn't he still banned?

And I'm not trying to make a "Bash the devs" thread, but this was kind of out of nowhere.

[Hirsch I]

anything that can make GDD a place where ideas can be discussed without witty comments and caustic affirmations, so we can focus on discussing game design in peace is a good thing. anyone wanting to bash other people so they can fell better about themselves can do so elsewhere.

[and into]

Yeah, an apology is good, but isn't he still banned?

And I'm not trying to make a "Bash the devs" thread, but this was kind of out of nowhere.

He's banned from GDD specifically, and that decision was made, I think, based on his history of posting and not a single instance. You might still disagree, of course, but that was the basis of the decision. Completely separate from the decision to ban v_jack from GDD I don't think it was wise of Galehar to post that thread but he ultimately apologized for it and given the heated nature of the thread and his position of authority, especially, that was big of him.

Also I think nearly any reasonable person would agree that developers' being active in GDD, and active in helping Crawl develop in general, is more important than the egos of a couple of people who post on Tavern. That doesn't mean developers should have carte blanche to behave however they want, but just from a basic pragmatic point of view, if GDD doesn't have at least a few developers actively reading it then the forum should simply be closed.

The point of GDD is to offer feedback to developers in a way that actually contributes to the game. Ipso facto, the developers should have a lot of say in what can fly there in terms of constructive feedback. They've generally given posters a very wide berth, actually. I don't think it is in the job description of being a volunteer developer of DCSS to lay down and take whatever abuse people want to throw at you for the latest change to the development version of Crawl which is advertised as a laboratory for testing out new stuff. (v_Jack was guilty of this on occasion, despite the legitimate points that are typically intermingled with his invective.)

[njvack]

Friends: I got a report on this thread, and I agree with it. Pretty much everything here has been litigated at great length in the previous thread, and I don't think this is doing anything but making people more angry. We've heard y'all loud and clear and have had conversations with some folks in private and have some updates for policies in the works, I think.

Again, remember: none of us are trained in this, or getting paid to moderate the forum or to build Crawl. We're doing our honest best, but we're going to make some mistakes. When we do, we're going to try and do better.

For now, I'ma lock this, and will probably lock more threads on this topic for a bit unless there's a super great reason not to. If you think this really needs to be reopened, send me a PM.