Lots of people are saying I should respond and facilitate more. I’ve got to apologize for that, this is my first time really posting anything. I had only planned to respond once after I gave all the flamers a full day to ***on me. Also, it’s really hard to have a response to everything that everyone was saying but I’ll try to do it without keeping us here for another 10 pages.
There are a few different things I’m seeing. Don’t think I’m picking on anyone in particular though; these are just the best examples of what’s been said:
"Pandemonium.Nususu
You are the person you are demonizing. You call people who you don't agree with retards. Seems like a pretty elitist thing to do to me. Sure, there are people who have posted less than intelligent replies, but that's to be expected. It's the internet. There are those, however that have posted intelligent replies to your post. If these replies disagree with you, you call them retards or trolls. You are the problem you are crusading against. Prove me wrong."
I only even posted 1 reply, where I called people retards that are crying that it’s too long, saying that it’s someone complaining about their experience with the game or posting the same old trite “QQ” and “butthurt”. Also that if they read the entire article and still posted something like that, it completely went over their heads. If you understood what was happening you wouldn’t post a response that was so completely off the mark.
I’ve not responded to any other posts at all. If I had I’d just have been repeating the things that were said in the article. There was never really anything I felt compelled to talk more about because I pretty much covered everything I wanted to say in the first 12 pages. There was one good one on allakhazam concerning the relationship between age and player, but I already touched on it, and it died out after 2 posts. I’ve not said anything good, bad or indifferent about people disagreeing with me. Other than at the start of the article where it clearly says:
“People will disagree with the things I say here, that’s not bad, it’s good…”
People are supposed to disagree with it. If you write something and everyone agrees with you, what exactly have you accomplished? All you’ve done is say what everyone already knows. What would be the point?
I think the proper response to reading it looks a lot like this:
“I didn’t agree with everything he said but he makes some good points too.”
Which I was happy to see happen with a lot more people than I anticipated.
A few people are asking “Well, what did you expect to happen?” My 2nd post covers this but I’ll elaborate.
I honestly expected about 50 people would read the first 1-2 pages and stop there to play the I can rip on this guy hardest game (which happened), only 10 people would read the whole thing (more like 25-30 actually did), 2 of them would understand what’s happening, and the other 8 wouldn’t. (15-20 really understood it)
So this actually went over a lot better than I had hoped. And many people are saying things like “No one will even read this and if they do they won’t care 2 shits about it” and “it’s pointless to try to change someone’s mind.” This is completely wrong. Why have forums at all if this is the case? I know I’ve changed my mind about the level of apathy in the community. There’s much more people willing to debate these things than I thought.
A few people are saying things like this:
“Pawkeshup the Ludicrous
Oh, I thought you wanted a discussion. Why not discuss then? Oh wait, that's right, you wanted to attention *** then run off into the sunset to be forgotten. Seems to be the new cool trend to ask for your own thread to be locked I guess.”
Other than already discussing in 10+ pages and wanting to hear what others thought, the article has other purposes. A lot more is going on there than at first glance. I thought I covered this in the 2nd post but again I’ll elaborate. The objective of this thread (and a lot of the article) was to point out that
given the choice between doing something productive to benefit us or self destructive pettiness; we will choose self destructive pettiness. We suck for doing that, and don’t you think we should change this about ourselves? Again, not everyone did this, but the majority did. If productive things happened, great! But I didn’t expect them to start right here and now.
If you look at the avatar I used, the pretentious *** level being pushed past maximum, the way I attacked Samurai and HNMs. These things were all bait which hooked a lot of people. Someone described it as a social experiment, that’s not a bad way to put it.
We can spend our time working at our problems or we can call each other “noob” back and forth for 5 pages and keep buying gil. The online gaming culture in general has chosen the latter but I couldn’t care less about what other games are doing. I only care about the games I’m playing, which means the FFXI/FFXIV community. We can’t ignore that these things are worth talking about. The thread on Allakhazam has 19,000+ views (is that accurate?) within just a couple of days, which sounds like a lot to me but then again I know next to nothing about forums. I’ve more or less put XI behind me but if someone more experienced with forums wants to really start talking about this stuff I’d chime in from time to time. Beyond that I’m done until XIV.