Off Topic Discussion Megathread

[Vyrerus]

My GF got me the Shadowbringers one last Christmas, but other than that, nah. I wouldn't mind getting the others, but I've never been big on outside merch anyway.

[Theodric]

The art books are nice and from what I recall, there isn't too much 'repeating' of art across the volumes. Aside from being pleasant to look at, there's also some interesting scraps of lore to be found within.

I pre-ordered the latest one mostly for the Ascian/Ancient/Garlean/Bozja/Eulmore stuff.

Which is pretty much where my interest with this game resides.

[Vyrerus]

There's a lot of stuff that interests me in the game, but not very much of it gets a lot of flesh.

Like the Sky Pirates from Void Ark questline. Or the rest of all the Auspices. Or all of the named Xaela tribes that we never really see.

Ascian/Ancient stuff is a top lister for me as well, but I know we're getting more of that in 6.0 due to Mare Lamentorum.

[SturmChurro]

My younger brothers one who I haven't talked to or seen in over four years, just happened to message me on Facebook (I barely check it, but have been doing it periodically since my sister had her daughters), and the other who I haven't even seen or talked to since he was ten (yes we all had a messed up childhood, especially them since they are quite a bit younger than me, long story not for here,) got into contact with me as well. We've been talking for literally three or four hours straight, and they want to keep in touch through gaming. I actually recommended FFXIV to one of them (the other is a shooter fan), and he might even try it. Apparently even word has gotten around to him about FFXIV being pretty good. It's crazy how much traction this game has been getting lately.

[Vyrerus]

Rock on! The family that slays together, stays together! Errr... plays!

[SturmChurro]

In retrospect, the male viera thread was a much better chat thread than.. certain thread(s), that should have been deleted a long time ago. I'd really like to know what happened to our mods as well.

[Theodric]

I just keep waiting for one of them to notice that some pretty major lines in the sand have been crossed in certain threads.

[Vyrerus]

Idk, I never really much bothered entering the male viera thread, so I wouldn't know. Pretty sure mods here don't really check much outside of reports, and even those they kind of ignore, likely because there's so many. It was likely one mod doing a lot of the moderating back whenever they did do it, and then life got the better of them and moved them away from moderating. People say they get paid to mod this site, but I am not so sure.

I mod the FFXIah site, and like... reports there are always people trying to just have authority ban or otherwise get opposition to shut up. It's silly, mostly, so I wind up not actually doing very much in the way of punishing people. Of course, that situation is rather different. I also had no access to the site, a year or so after becoming a mod, for like a year and a half. It was due to some error in the site code that wouldn't allow me to login. By the time I was able to get it fixed, I hadn't moderated anything in so long, that I kinda forgot the ruleset. Now people don't take my moderation very seriously, so I only really get the worst offenders. Of course, I don't get paid to moderate at all, so I only do it when I can manage to, anyway.

[SturmChurro]

I just keep waiting for one of them to notice that some pretty major lines in the sand have been crossed in certain threads.

You'd think they would have already noticed. It's as if it's completely hands off right now. Like it's not even specifically just moderation that I'd want to see, but community reps actually participating in the community here more.

Idk, I never really much bothered entering the male viera thread, so I wouldn't know. Pretty sure mods here don't really check much outside of reports, and even those they kind of ignore, likely because there's so many. It was likely one mod doing a lot of the moderating back whenever they did do it, and then life got the better of them and moved them away from moderating. People say they get paid to mod this site, but I am not so sure.

I mod the FFXIah site, and like... reports there are always people trying to just have authority ban or otherwise get opposition to shut up. It's silly, mostly, so I wind up not actually doing very much in the way of punishing people. Of course, that situation is rather different. I also had no access to the site, a year or so after becoming a mod, for like a year and a half. It was due to some error in the site code that wouldn't allow me to login. By the time I was able to get it fixed, I hadn't moderated anything in so long, that I kinda forgot the ruleset. Now people don't take my moderation very seriously, so I only really get the worst offenders. Of course, I don't get paid to moderate at all, so I only do it when I can manage to, anyway.

I've been a forum moderator on a fansite with, frankly, a much larger active userbase than this one at the time - with wide variety of topics (including politics), so there was a lot more room for controversial topics to show up... and our mod team was doing it for free. I'd assume the community reps are being paid. I guess the forums have really just been completely abandoned at this point. The English ones at least.

[Kolsykol]

The thing that bothers me the most about political shenanigans online is that it's pretty much exclusively US-centric.
It'd maybe bother me a bit less if it wasn't just the one pov and lens of looking at things through ( strangely enough even from a lot of non-Americans ).
Like when it comes to gaming websites the last straw for me was when DoA6 was coming out and freaking reviews became about the last president and it became some '' left vs right '' culture war whether you liked the game or not...

Imo it should just be shutdown immediately and be isolated to where it belongs in sub-sections or something.
Gaming is a global market...
Just create a trashfire politics section and then let it burn itself to the ground, don't even moderate it just let people go nuts but keep them away from everywhere else.