The Official Forums is an EXTREMELY poor example of a "Good Community"

[Hurlstone]

This forum is very… passionate to say the least. We cannot judge a community based on one place alone, but across the board I would not pick any forum to be a bastion of fan civility.

When I started playing back in 2014 these forums where relatively like every other MMO forum. As in, mostly a smal minority of players complaining about things from game breaking bugs to the change of a tooltips font. I did not interact much with it when I started playing again in late 2020 until Endwalker was released, when I wanted to find more lore discussions about this world that had helped me a lot over the last few years. As someone who really enjoyed EW and loved the character of Venat, you can guess my surprise when I entered the debates and saw that many here… are not fans of either. Which was fine, at first I enjoyed reading other peoples opinion on the matter. Whilst it did not change my mind, it did open my eyes to some things I had not considered and I am a staunch believer in the idea that storytelling, like all art, is subjective with no right or wrong way to enjoy it. What wore me more down eventually was just how with some people, that level of passion leads to hate (hehe Star Wars) which feeds into other areas of the lore and even gameplay. Some add a level of spitefulness to it that I just do not understand. It made debating things and digging into lore a chore when you may be casually called a genocide supporter or mummy simp for topics that barley involve the character/issues.*

* Disclaimer, I know many people on the opposite side of the debate have received similar opposition and drawbacks when commenting their views elsewhere, and that sucks, but I am talking mostly about this forum in its current/recent state over the wider community.

I did have to use the ignore feature a while back, which is somthing I try and avoid doing. Not because of said lore debates though. You can disagree with everything I love about the game but in the end its just a story made up of pixels. Getting angry at people for lore differences is just plain silly. No, a few months back someone posted a thread regarding LGBTQ+ opinions (I think they where just a troll trying to stire trouble) and lets just say I HAD to ignore some people, otherwise I would likely have been banned for the things I wanted to say haha. Like I said, when it comes to lore or gameplay opinions thats all fine and dandy… attacking people in real life is just plain stupid.

Anyway, despite what I said there are some great people here and I have really enjoyed many of the discussions about topics I have seen/been part of. I am also likely a hypocrite who has probably also let their emotions guide them too much in said issues, and the fact is I do still keep posting and coming here so… take that whichever way you want!