Dustlooooooooop

I've got a lot to say and there won't be a TL;DR, so if you're not in for the lot of it I'd stop reading now.

My history with this site goes back to about 2006-2007ish(I don't remember exactly when, but it's around the time I originally picked up GG), I had good fun with the site, and met a lot of really cool people. It was a great place to chill and hang about and talk about the games, but it had its fair share of problems, of which those problems I'd still say haven't exactly been ironed out. However, the attempts to iron them out has seriously hurt the website and the potential growth of the website and the community it represents.

A little bit of history before I continue: I got banned here on Dustloop just before or just after BlazBlue had originally came out. I got into an argument with a mod, a civil argument at that and I stand by the fact that the ban was unjust, I merely questioned a mods opinion and found myself unable to come back to the site to post a day later. It's in the past now and I have long since forgotten about it, and with the websites shift to BlazBlue, my reason to come back slowly faded. Now I've never hated Blazblue as a game. I've had serious distaste for it from a playing perspective but I stayed in touch and watched a lot of the game during the CT-CS era, even though I never played. Come CS2 and EX I kind of fell out of watching it as I had less free time and wanted to focus on some other games that I do play. About November 2012 I decided to get back into the Blazblue series, Chrono Phantasma along with a few other things lit a spark for me to try it out. I'm not the biggest fan of Extend but I've been playing ever since. In November I came here to Dustloop to see what I could find regarding my character and such.

What I came to Dustloop to find was a general gameplay forum with warnings of bans, infractions and whatever else plastered all over it. This was seriously off-putting of the site and the community. I don't think the site whether it be the mods or the admins quite understand the adverse effects something like that could have when someone views the forums, especially someone new that is looking to get into the game. That is of course, not the only problem.

I'll include a time skip to make things a bit more relevant. I originally signed back up to Dustloop to post in the UK/EU thread, after playing a member of the community here on PSN. As per usual I asked for tips and improvements as I have been aiming to improve and he pointed me to Dustloop. Since then I've gotten to know the EU/UK guys, and over time I've pretty much not used my Dustloop account as I would use the skype group instead. Why did I not use the Dustloop account? Well, there was literally no reason to. I quickly found out from them and my own personal viewings of Dustloop as to what it had become. There was a severe lack of actual community from my viewing before going to the UK/EU thread, everybody here seems a stranger to one another unless you pry into their twitter accounts etc.

From my understanding, off-topic discussion, something that was pretty common before I left originally, was cracked down upon as it clutters up areas of the forum and makes it harder for new players to find information.

Let me tell you something, when I came here for information I couldn't find it. A lot of the character forums, and the wiki is extremely out of date, over a year into the games life span. I learned by watching videos and playing someone from the EU/UK thread that just so happened to play my character and for that I'm thankful because I was doing a lot of really stupid stuff before hand. This crack down on discussion from what I understand has NOT achieved its goal of making information easier to find for new players. Nothing has changed. This problem has existed since this forum was primarily GG, and it's not any different with BB. Some forums are up to date, and wiki's, and for that I applaud the community members willing to keep things rolling.

As I've said I've pretty much not used the account due to the lack of feeling of the community. Viewing here it's very hard to find information about ANYBODY in this community, even in the character forums. Before when I left there was off topic discussion and such, it was welcome so long as it didn't get too extreme in some cases(we all know what it can be like at times), it felt like you know, an actual community. People knew each other, and it wasn't difficult for somebody new to integrate themself into that, where as now it seems like there's a large wall in the way. The threats of bans and infractions is enough of a deterrent, nevermind somebody being unable to even find casual conversation between some people on the forum unless they look at threads from ways back. Everything is pretty much broken up into Q&A and I can honestly go to the Guilty Gear forums and it looks like they had more activity in short bursts on the character forums than the current BB ones do, despite there being more members/players in general. This doesn't look good to me as an outside observer.

The next thing I'd like to tackle in this post is the attitude of the staff in general. Of course, I was around for the incidents that happened yesterday, I saw the whole thing. To be quite honest, the most shocking thing is the mod backlash. Contributive members of the past, no matter how little being told to "use other websites" and such. This in itself is a joke, and should not be the goal of a website trying to create a community. I then saw tweets of users talking about how these people are not "serious about games" and lurk and whatever else. I've played for years and attended tournaments for KoFXIII, I'll be at WGC next year in France(hopefully, as long as the dates work out when they are announced) and visiting Japan in December to hook up and play games with some friends I know that moved there, and some friends I've made online. I was going to go to arcfest at the start of October but was told by the organiser and members of the French community to put it off for a bit, and wait for CP to come out, thus the decision to hit up WGC where I will hopefully get to play all the games I love to play, and meet up with some of the people I've only talked with online, and some people I haven't seen in a long time. I'm dedicated as a player, I've done what I can for my communities locally and online, but as far as Dustloop and the Blazblue community go, I wouldn't touch it with a long pole outside of the UK community I've already involved myself with. This community screams arrogance to me with the comments they make, and how they treat people who aren't "clued in" with their community is disgusting, and not encouraging for any kind of new player to come into.

No matter what happened yesterday, the mods putting it off, ignoring the fact that there was clear backlash towards the way this site is going is hard to miss. The mods cuss and act unprofessional in threads. "Breaking these rules will either result in an infraction, tempban, or permanent ban, depending on how bad the offense is, past offenses, or the mood that the mods feel. Seriously, don't fuck with us on this." As a quote from the Q&A thread, this is not any encouragement to post a question, in fact it's quite the opposite, and this is not the only example of this, it's pretty much everywhere on the site. You then have a 1200-1300 page thread for discussion, and all these rules and warnings all over the site and "use the search function" when forum search functions generally suck. The mods even in their infraction messages have said things to users that is unwaranted, which is unreal. The mods are being unfriendly unless everything goes exactly as planned and this seriously causes a communication problem between the users and the staff.

Now, regarding the Chubaki enigma, let me break it down, as I said I was around for yesterday. The thread got brought up in the skype group, a member of that skype group posted in it, as an attempt at revival. From what I could gather of the conversation it was going to happen. The post soon after got deleted and the thread locked. Of course the thread vanishing from the front page meant people freaked out thinking it was deleted and got very upset and annoyed. There was no reason in particular for the thread to be deleted, the user who's post was deleted wasn't told in any way(from what I could gather), that the post being deleted was the only thing that happened. However, the locking of the thread itself is unwaranted, whether it was necro'd with no new content or not. Furthermore, insulting the thread as no great contribution is actually what struck home to me. I had a good giggle at some of the stuff in there, it evoked an emotion of some sort and was related to the game. Like it or not, it is art. I draw a lot myself as a hobby, albeit I rarely publish what I do out of my OCD-Perfectionistlike nature when it comes down to it. I envy the ability to throw something like that together in parody, because I'd never be able to do it, there'd always be a line I wanted to fix, or a colour I felt didn't fit and by the end I'd drop it and like a lot of my art projects it would fall to the side. If you can't understand why there's upset over this then I have no idea what to tell you, as the thread itself doesn't break any rules of Zepp as far as I can tell.

What I've really got to say after all of this is I think the site should try and make the forum more community based, and less factual. There's a wiki and a front page for every piece of news and whatever else, I feel threads themself should be more organised and less general, something that would look nice and encouraging for people viewing the website and forum for the first time. I understand that a new game is now due to come out next month and the focus is making everything up to date for that, but don't let it fall the way of extend where merely a year later all of the information was out of date on the wiki and character forums, with broken video links scattered throughout and a severe lack of community feel. I'd be more than happy to help stuff like this myself but not as it stands now, as it is now I'd rather drag players off the UK/EU thread into a skype group or such to actually make them feel a part of our community and involve themself in the discussion without fear of a mod saying that's not what x/y/z thread is for, without giving them some sort of alternative thread they could do such in.

With that I've got nothing more to say, thanks for reading I guess.