Genuine Question for Frequent Negative Posters

[LittleImp]

Who are these white knight players anyway, that proclaim the game is 100% flawless and perfect in every way? I keep hearing about these posters who worship at the alter of Yoshi P and scream at anyone with the slightest criticism? Where are the posts? Who are these people? Im not saying there are zero people like this, im sure theres a post here and there somewhere but I dont think I have seen even the most devoted lovers of this game (and I love it a lot myself) come out and say the game was perfect in every way and was undeserving of any criticism ever and always?

Just because someone is overall positive about the game, or still generally loves it or god forbid, disagrees with "you" about something you dislike, doesn't make them white knight sycophants.

It's about emotional attachment foremost. For what it's worth, there is a negative phenomenon of the same nature; They're usually called Antis.

White-knights are people who are emotionally reliant on the perception of a product being 'good' or 'successful', to the degree that their opinions about aspects of the product are more informed by that emotional attachment than they are by actual reason or experience. This leads to a strong willingness to be disingenuous, and frequently a kind of aggressive drive to suppress or otherwise shut down the products 'dectractors'. It's most noticeable when it comes to things like long running franchises, development companies or live-service games; This game happens to check all 3 of those boxes, which I believe may be partially responsible for the abundance of white-knight types (and antis) in its community.

Essentially, people get called white-knights when other people start to suspect that their opinions and arguments are overly informed by their emotional reliance on the games perceived success, as opposed to being genuine assessments formed by reason/experience. A pretty common example would be a white-knight defending the design of a system in the game that they have never actually played or interacted with, which happens a mind boggling amount on these boards.

Where a suspiciously negative poster is a troll, a suspiciously positive poster is a white knight (or a shill, but it's pretty irrational to think SE would pay to AstroTurf forums when they can't even be bothered to read them).