Wednesday, December 12, 2007

A community gone wrong...

I have been a part of the Smackdown vs Raw online community since it's addition to the series. Throughout the years I have seen some of the worst and best days of online. Sadly though, the worst days happen almost all the time.


Cheapers, Cheaters, Liars, Deniers, Lamers, Claimers.

These words describe Smackdown vs. Raw Online.

Cheapers

You know who they are and it isn't for a good reason. These are the users that make online a joke to play. These are the guys who utilize a few little unblockables every now and then in order to gain an unfair advantage. These are the users who just do some amazingly desperate things to get the e-victory.

Cheaters

These are the users that make online pointless to play. These are the users who generally suck at playing and abuse game enhancing devices. You'll see cheaters utilizing finisher only moves in place as normal moves in attempt to cause more damage to you. Sometimes these users will have stats higher than the cap the game allows you to have. These lowlives will even stoop as low as to completely render your character useless by freezing your character on screen.


Liars

These are the people you never want to know. These are the people who you hope you never meet. These are the people who will trying to make themselves look better by attempting to make up crap. These guys will distort the truth to the point where they actually believe what they are saying. Some of these users do it in messageboards, and some of them do it in game. Made up situations. Made up victories. You name it, they've lied about it.


Deniers

These are the people who you can never beat. These individuals usually fall neatly into one or more categories previously mentioned. Hell, they'll fall into the ones mentioned after this too. Call them cheap? Them? No way, they aren't cheap... you are cheap! Great logic on that one right? These are the users who will quit a game, use a hacked move, spam unblockables, or even freeze you, and still have the nerve to say that they didn't do anything cheap.

These are the people in the messageboards that magically were never cheap. These are the people who will even deny video proof shown to them. Of course all of their denying fits in with all of their lying. It's a very symbiotic relationship and has never ceased to exist online and it still fools people somehow.

Lamers

These are the people who aren't cheap. They aren't cheaters. They just flat out are lame. You know a lame person when you play them. Ever get beat with a random ass shoulder block? Yeah, it's that sort of stuff. These are the users who are completely desperate enough to do the most amazingly stupid things to get a win.

Claimers

Ah, the claimers...what would online be without you? The claimers are the individuals who have absolutely no backing in what they are saying but speak as if it is truth. Despite facts showing them that what they are saying is wrong or even sometimes the complete opposite of what they claim, they still mind numbingly make their claims. These people are just like the deniers in the sense that you can never win against them. No matter what you do to prevent claimers from succeeding, they never stop. These people like the liars end up actually creating false memories and end up thinking their claims were right all along! They also travel in herds of dumbasses.


The backwards evolving community has taken a toll for the worst. An example of this is evident in the message boards. Currently one of the items for discussion is how the "community" should make "guidelines for fair play" as if it never existed before. Three years of online with tons of clans creating guidelines and this is the most significant thing being discussed about online at that moment. Two years of having a well known website dedicated to letting people know an opinion of how fair play should come about is completely disregarded. All the individuals who created their own versions of these guidelines are completely disregarded.

What's even worse is that the community doesn't know how to make guidelines that work. Pointless limits that are just completely unreasonable to ask for. "No possum pins"? How the hell are people going to agree with that? "I don't like how you play because you change your style during the match". This is what the community has come up with as ways to avoid people online now. However, of course they can do these things as long as nobody knows who they are or complains about it. It's a nice double standard that has plagued this community to hell.

What's sad is that these people don't realize how lenient AVOID lists were. You couldn't get onto it for just doing some little insignificant glitch. You couldn't get onto it by doing something once or twice. It had to be something consistent. It had to be something that is undeniably just sad. The majority of the people on the list were not even nominated by me. Why else do you think there were over Twenty One topics containing the words "Players to AVOID online: Insert sexy subtitle"?

In order to counter the misconception that I was just adding people for the hell of it, I made it very clear that the guidelines for nominating people had specific things that needed to be mentioned. This included the persons username. I decided to log every single topic for future reference just in case claimers had something to say.

In 07, I gathered all the data that i've collected from the previous year to create an idiot proof PTA list. This list contained all the information needed and more. The new upgraded listing contained the cheapers user name, their messageboard name(if it existed), their clan, the reason why they were nominated, who nominated them, how many times they were nominated, how many times they were nominated off, a picture or video link to the match they cheaped in. It was even color coded by severity of avoidness.

This idea was fool proof yet to the eyes of the dumbasses, it didn't work. Even with everything given to them in the most detailed and concise way possible, they failed to read it or something. It makes no sense really. You have claimers still to this day making up situations about how Delriach was completely biased and all this other junk. This makes me question whether or not they actually read the damn thing at all. Remember, I wasn't the one simply adding people, and also remember all the controversy that came from certain individuals being nominated out by their little buddies. It sort of defeats the purpose of the listing if your clan is just going to bail you out. What's even more sad is that I had a fix for that issue as well.

It's amazing to see how wrong certain people can be. It's like they completely forgot about two years of community buildup that were done on a day to day basis. This ranged from instant messaging, multiple messageboards, even phonecalls for some people.

All the past people on the list completely forgot about the fact that they were cheap and the only reason now that they pretend to be fair is because of one thing. That one thing was the community listing that I pushed that had a strong following. Why? Because it made sense. There is a reason why people have failed to create another meaningful PTA list. There are multiple reasons, actually. One of them is because nobody bother to formulate a sensible set of guidelines that the general population could use. When you see a "PTA.save.us.222" topic that just says "post cheaparz hee!" without anything else afterwards, then you know something is wrong. You know something is wrong when people start getting added to wannabe lists for doing things that aren't even wrong. Possum pins? Toe kicks? Get real people.

The PTA was never set in stone. It always evolved as each new topic was made. People in the community were the ones that helped form the rules. I just formulated them together and distributed it on a website with the help of many people. They were suggestions. They were to help you improve the way you play the game. The list wasn't there for you to try to sabotage people's online identity, as if it mattered. The list wasn't there for you to nitpick on every little detail that isn't even cheap but claim it is cheap. There is one thing that certain people did well, and that was analyze gameplay. There is one thing that almost everyone did wrong, and that was analyze gameplay. The users who did it well were in such a few number compared those dumbasses who just make crap up.

Let's remember something people. I didn't have to fight people while laming them in order to make them cheap me. I didn't have to do anything shady in order to get a reaction from fair players that showed them retaliating to lameness. I didn't have to do that. You guys did. You guys were the ones who started playing fair players with the intention to set them to the limit of annoyance. You guys were the corrupt ones. You guys were the problem of online. You guys are still the problem of online.

I still find it cute how most of the dumbasses of online are the ones with nacicisstic names. Egocentric individuals that need to refer to themselves as something they are not in order to please their e-ego. They have spent day in and day out talking about the game, playing the game, finding new ways to cheap in the game, creating hate in the game, you name it, they've done it.

Luckily though, I don't need to spend any more of my spare time with the smackdown vs raw community. Sure, sometimes I will pop my head into the messageboard to correct the claimers comments, but me being involved with the community is practically gone now. The reason isn't even community. It's the game. I could go off on an even longer post about the game if I wished, but I'll keep this short. If the game was good and actually played well, I would be just as strong in the community as I once was. What I know how to do is make myself clear in many situations and I can explain my logic well. I know not to assume crap from newbies about the "norms" of online play. It could have been a great thing. Thankfully this isn't the case and I've been able to enjoy more games now than i've ever been able to.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

sigh, so many communities go wrong.