@faraday said in Hello MSBites! Grade your administrators.:
And frankly, if the community can't manage to have a forum without being awful to each other all the time? Then that says something about the community.
Which is why I wanted to pipe up with, you know, a rare note of positivism: I think we're fine with it. When Soapbox popped back up, people were so glad they could be in a place that wasn't Wora that the energy was very high. I think we're perfectly capable.
What I think happens is what I think happens to all games: The Downward Mediocrity Spiral.
The people you want around are the people who are well-balanced and thoughtful, and they probably have lives. These people have limited time in their day and when things start going south, they can see the direction the wind is blowing or just duck out because they could get a better return of their time somewhere else.
This leaves you with the next layer of helpful and well-balanced positive people. And the next. Eventually the game will balance out at the lowest level they're allowed to get away with by staff, either staff's own morality or staff's level of activity. (The nice thing about a larger game is that you can avoid the staff or the lower-quality players far more easily. This is why games with horribly corrupt staff can be insanely popular.)
So very quickly, a game's player quality and energy spirals down to the people who instead of playing to add to it, play because they can put up with it. Mediocrity reigns.
I say this out of love for the hobby, because I believe that it's true, because if we talk about things we can understand better and maybe, just maybe, we can get along better and have more fun without needing someone to "manage" us. We can absolutely manage ourselves.
