Because @CoS__Gab endorsed the idea, here’s his character riding a giant peach.
I’m … not quite sure how this idea spawned, but I’ve been up since 2:30 AM so it seems funny to me.
TL;DR: Apologies all around from the people who count (and me, too!), those who needed a stern word have received it, let the healing begin as soon as the Channeler balance issues are worked out and we can have healers in the game.
Last night I posted that I was banned from the CoS forums, and I vented a bit about it. Levest (one of the other mods, and someone who I still respected) offered to look into things for me, for which I was grateful.
This morning I woke up to see this tweet from Gab, the Communications Manager at Mechanist Games (and whom the wife and I also got to meet at PAX East):
The rest of this gets a little long, so I’m going to try one of those fancy “Read More” links here. Bear with me, I’m not quite sure how this works.
Anonymous asked: are you upset because he's a mod and stated his opinion, or the fact that no one seemed to mind that he stated his "opinion" That having been there myself, I noticed the OP did not site anything apart from the fact that getting to level six, she flipped out and took to the forums to rant, nor did she want to continue the thread in an appropriate manner. Her responses were "pat pat nice troll."
“no one seemed to mind”
Tell me more about how no one seems to mind. I could post pictures of the other people complaining in that thread who you also conveniently ignored, but I think this is sufficient.
I will no longer respond to asks like this. You want to spew this tripe, do it on your own blog. There’s plenty of free providers out there.
A more detailed post about what happened this morning will follow soon.
(The last chapter in this ongoing tale can be found here.)
(And don’t forget this delightful ask from someone who may or may not be one of the forum members involved.)
So here’s the deal - The mod who encouraged all those comments? Mechanist Games (the company that makes City of Steam) didn’t make him a mod. R2 (the company that is publishing City of Steam) made him a mod, and I’ve been told that they weren’t happy about his comments either … not enough to remove his mod status, though.
Am I appeased? Not quite yet. He’s still a mod and there’s still no formal apology from him or R2, but my anger was partially misplaced. In this case it was not City of Steam but rather R2 that decided to make a chauvinistic child one of their mods, and didn’t think his comments were bad enough to remove his status.
I’m left with the uncomfortable situation of joining all the other CoS players (former or otherwise) who strongly dislike R2, albeit for entirely different reasons.
Edit: And just like that, I’ve been banned. No one else who was involved seems to have been, just me. Thought we were making some headway. Turns out I was wrong.
Anonymous asked: Why are you so seriously so mad about something so small? -Ryuusei
Because people like you still think sexist comments are “something small.”
The people who act in an offensive manner don’t get to decide whether or not (and to what degree) others will be offended.
I think what made me angry more than anything else was not all the ignorant children (mentally and physically - the ages in their profiles averaged in the late teens) coming out on the City of Steam forums and laughing at me and others for saying we were feminists. There will always be people like that in the world, to one extent or another.
It was … well, it was a perfect storm of reasons.
So here I am, thinking “Well this game is beta but hey I’m in on the ground floor and I don’t need to install gigs of files while at the same time this thing seems to run better than WoW ever did” and then POW, A bunch of jerks, including several people with badges showing they’ve given LOTS of money to City of Steam and at least one forum moderator (maybe two, though it could have been a fake account) come out and show me what the community is really like.
I felt horribly betrayed.
I won’t go so far as to say I felt like I was owed anything (the forum’s full of enough people like that as it is), but up until that point most of them had put on a show of being decent, respectable human beings.
When I (and others as well) complained that maybe a moderator should behave better, everything got deleted. No apology, just a wave of the hand and it was like it never happened. First the moderator’s posts vanished, then when I showed I was willing to post screen caps of what he’d said the whole thing went poof.
One forum member, just one, apologized for his behavior before that happened. I retain hope that maybe he’s learning. He’s young, he can do that. (I’m old, and I’m STILL learning.) The rest of them? They’ve seen evidence that forum mods support and share their sexist views. The thread is gone, but there’s no official statement and the mod is still a mod, so it must mean the devs are on their side, too.
…
I don’t think I can play a game like that. I am sick to my stomach that I supported their development financially, no matter how small my donation was in comparison to the fedora wearers who all had a good laugh at me saying “Real men are feminists.”
I guess I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up.
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“Fun for all ages!”