Contentious forums

[dahemac]

I seldom participate in Hinterland/TLD forums anymore. The biggest part of this is particular active commenters who will contradict every suggestion at length and in as comprehensively condescending a way as possible. They know who they are.

But there is a bigger problem that discourages useful input or discourse. And that is particular players feeling entitled to police and restrict how others are allowed to play TLD.

This is a single-player game. There is no possible way for me to “cheat” you at it. Commenters object strenuously to features or options that other players want, even quite basic game functionality, because they contend that some aspect of that is “open to abuse.” As if Player B hypothetically taking advantage of an exploit, in some way negatively affects Player A’s game experience. But it can’t. If it could, this would be just as effective an argument against difficulty levels and custom game settings as it is against any other option or feature. Which it turns out is not an effective or reasonable argument at all.

And such threads become acrimonious because some commenters are extremely vocal about restricting how TLD can be played. Threads get closed and discussions ended, “We encourage everyone to read the Forum Rules and Guidelines, and approach every interaction with respect.” And that happens because people are understandably annoyed by other players sanctimonious assertion that they should get to dictate that everyone only be able to do things the way they decide is righteous for some arbitrary reasons.

Moreover the justification for this behaviour is usually something about, “TLD’s core design philosophy: that every choice you make will have consequences.” In particular, you will eventually end your savegame by permanently dying. There is a fanatical conceit that this idea of irremediable consequences needs to be enforced. But unless you are not a very conscientious computer user you have hourly, daily, weekly, monthly backups, right? You do, right‽ I could restore my game save from last night, or two days ago or all the way back to day one on March 6. And let’s say someone does that. How could anyone reverting to a previous save possibly affect any other player in any negative way that they need to object to?

As a basis for game development decisions, controlling behaviour is maybe not the way forward.

 

Edited May 5, 2023 by dahemac