Things That You Like About Being Broken

Unless posts have been deleted and I am missing something, it looks sadly and tediously as if someone who primarily posts in the Let Us Play subforum ventured onto one of the other subfora and got slapped down for so doing, which is becoming an ugly trend around here.

That's certainly one interpretation, Meserach. I'd wager it isn't the correct one.

*shrug* Care to enlighten us, then?

Meserach: Not especially, but since you went all CHILLING EFFECTS with your theory I might as well posit my own. (Edit: This reads a lot more dismissively than I want it to. More Brass Eye than Private Eye.)

Perhaps it has more to do with the post, and many others like it, being near-indistinguishable from spam, and the reaction that garners, and Lum wanting to shut that whole process down before it starts? The solution could be for people to write better OP content or for people to not respond in kind, but theorizing that Lum is or even the vast majority of posters here are attempting to shut down any migration from LP forum to main forum is ludicrous. There are plenty of people who came here for the LPs originally who have integrated just fine. There obviously exists a decent contingent of anti-weeabooers here, but, again, I'd wager we're all enlightened enough here to give anyone a chance; therefore, anyone who can't or won't integrate has only themselves to blame.

Hmm.

It's far from the most compelling OP in the world, but I don't think it was deserving of the vitriol it appears to have received. It's certainly not something I'd describe as near-indistinguishable from spam, unless spammers have started saying "nobirdie".

And I don't think Lum was trying to shut down migration (I mean, obviously not!), so much as he was trying to shut down anti-migration rhetoric. It was clear the thread was going nowhere good.

Yo I get that JUMP 2 CONCLUSIONS is an awesome game, but until Lum lets us know what he's thinking we don't know.

Also I'm just gonna say that after like FOUR FUCKING TOPICS about not hassling the LP people when they come to the rest of the forum I'm kinda peeved that that was the initial response from a couple people.

Vitriol? Wow.

Yeah, this is true. Really just wanted to vent a little about what I see as, effectively, excessive newbie bullying, but there's no sense in speculating on Lum's motivations. So, my bad. After all, we're fortunate here to have a moderator who actually does tell us what he's thinking when he makes decisions :).

Not that it matters, but my response had nothing to do with LPers or weeaboo or whatever and everything to do with the OP being intensely dumb and me being in an intensely bad mood. It could have been "hai gaiz zelda vs mario" or "yo who roolz tupac vs biggie smalls" or "dneeeep Buñuel vs. Tarkovsky dneeeeeep" and my response would have been the same because VS threads are fucking dumb.

I'd be in favor of mods locking posts that are tediously dull or boring, but then I would hardly be able to make new threads. :(

Also it was in the wrong subforum.

You forgot the use of "anybirdie".

I thought it was a kinda interesting compare and contrast, so I'd have taken a shot at it. It didn't blow my mind with the exciting nature of the topic, but it also didn't cause me to hate so hard I pissed blood.

So if an inveterate hater couldn't find a legitimate hate, did the forum really need to shut that shit down?

I suggest not. I think this forum could have survived taking that thread to term.

I'm honestly curious about where all the Let's Play people came from. I mean, everyone loved Angie's bird dating thread back on Quarter to Three, which looks like the inception of the practice. But how did it turn into the subforum with the most messages, and its own dedicated user population?

I'm sure I'm not the first person to ask, so I tried a few searches for past threads, but I just ended up finding a ton of Let's Plays and anime-faces.

They migrated here on the Bering land bridge.

They get here through google, I'm guessing. I don't think it's some sort of mass-migration as a result of someone linking to Brokenforum. A lot of people are here because of Angie's LPs, or because of LPs that others have done. The main things that the people in the LP forum seem to have in common are a) being female (not always true, but the vast majority of people in the LP forum are) b) liking dating sims. Female-focused dating sims are a bit of a niche product, so people looking for information about them are only going to find a handful of places on the internet. This has become one of them, apparently.

Cracked did an article about crazy games that linked to one of Angie's games here. This was in May, I believe. I'm sure a lot of the traffic and population increases are from that and from the continuing level of exposure that a Cracked article generates elsewhere.

I don't think the LPers are bad at all. I don't even like referring to them as if they are a separate-but-equal group of gamers (but I guess we have to identify groups of people somehow) - it wasn't too long ago that the lot of frothing neckbeards who rail against them every chance they get were whining about being persecuted by a non-gaming public, so there is every bit as much irony in the current situation as there is hypocrisy. What I do find bad is the fact that the LPers, for the most part, don't seem to want to integrate, not that I blame them given the reception they largely get. Of course, when they do succeed, their success isn't acknowledged as being an LPer integrating, and when they fail, it's readily identified as another weeaboo clusterfuck, so what are they going to do?

I sent a vastly expanded message to Meserach saying basically the same thing, but I was too cowardly to say the same publicly because, well, for the second time today, isn't it obvious?

Eh, it's not necessarily bad that they don't want to integrate, maybe most of them are simply interested in that specific subforum, in which case there is no need to send in black ships to force the issue. Though if they do want to integrate, but we are scaring them away with our foreign devil ways, that would be a pity.

I dunno, Elyscape seems like he's part of the forum infrastructure by now. Can't get much more integrated than that.

Elyscape was an LPer?

There was also a Kotaku article a while back, though that one linked to Qt3.

Yeah, I was having that problem as well. By some definitions I would be classified as an LPer (I spend a lot of time in the LP forum and I generally fit the LPer "mould" I suppose) but it's weird to self-identify as an LPer when in other subforums because it seems that part of the definition of being an LPer is never leaving the LP forum.

Elyscape is lawnmower man?

He's the likemower man.

I think it [the lack or refusal of integration] is an issue and the reasons are obvious, though I certainly don't think nor have I advocated that we force them to either integrate or to go into a virtual apartheid state. Lum, who seems to be the pinnacle of patience and understanding, seems to have the issue under complete control, but I don't think that precludes us from discussing what you so aptly describe as a pity and I would describe as a lost opportunity.

I'm sure that most of the QT3 refugees understand that for the forum's population to stay at healthy levels, and for the community to remain in a healthy state, there needs to be an influx of new members every now and again. I'm sure that most people expected that to come in the form of a reinvigored blog or a frontpage for the forum, but, well, it apparently came in the form of a bunch of overwhelmingly dating-sim-playing girlgamers, and to that I say, they're here, so who gives a shit who they are, where they came from, what they do (within reason) or what they say (within reason)? Blowing the opportunity to have one of the most diverse gaming forums in our little section of the internet would be one of the most hypocritical, narrow-minded and elitist things we could possibly do. Blowing it because we're doing to people online that which we claim to hate offline (right-wing bigotry of shit we don't understand) would be icing on the jerk-off cake.

If the LPers don't want to help their case because their most public 'spokesman' (edit: removed pointless, counterintuitive, inflammatory namecalling) (was)is more concerned (at the time) with the way people perceive(d) them than with the way they interact(ed) with the community at large (edit: and you know what, this is largely understandable, and I'm way too hard on this person for sticking up for them in the face of overwhelming opposition, so for being so snide about that, I apologize), and because the opportunity has apparently long since passed where the more grognard-friendly (see: "normal") LPers felt comfortable crossing the barrier and self-identifying, then I'm not really sure what to do to fix the two seeming incongruous ideals or how to bring together the two seemingly incompatible communities. But I sure as fuck know what doesn't help: spam-like OP threads in the main gaming forum that no other LPers ever post in that always, _always_ end up with a half-dozen or more people shouting down the LPer for having the temerity to try and hang with the neckbeards.

This is why I think this issue is overblown. People cross over all the time without issue, and all that's required to do so successfully is to post about things other than Let's Plays. When someone does that, they aren't shouted down; the most anyone does is silently notice that they don't know the poster, check their profile/avatar, find out they're from the LP subforum, and... that's it. No conflict. It's only a problem when someone can't manage that much, which is what happened here; the poster made a thread that was ostensibly about Let's Plays and assumed some level of Let's Play subforum inside knowledge including familiarity with some blogger who apparently does Let's Plays sometimes, which I only know from looking it up. It was a bad thread and it got locked; no great tragedy and no cause for concern.

Ha, it occurs to me that as someone who dabbled in a Let's Play that I may also be considered an LP'er, and that maintaining a presence both here and at Qt3 makes me what, a bridge to everywhere? I'm available for diplomatic purposes, reasonable rates!

Hm. Do I count as an LPer? I mean, I've made LPs too! And have disappointed at least one person by making a thread that wasn't a meta-LP about LPs.

You're also the curator of the big list o' LPs. I think you count.

I like to think that everyone has a little bit of LP inside of them. They just don't know it yet.

When people migrate out and can carry on normal conversations, nobody notices. Nobody cares that new people are new. New people are great. Anyone, new or not, who posted a wonky thread like the Hatoful Fractions one would get harassed because it's stupid. People post dumb things all the time, myself included, so it's not just that. It's more than just casual dumb, reading it actually makes you dumber. That's the difference.

Springboarding off this, I'd like to suggest something to people who aren't happy with the LP forums (or more precisely, the content)... make an LP of your own, if you have the capability. Seriously, nab some free recording software and/or a free image host and a game you like, and LP it. It's fun, and you'll get to know the LP subforum regulars; the whole "integration" thing goes both ways, after all!

Hell, the only reason I'm not doing anything with LP's myself is my crappy laptop... I just can't play and record the things I want to... with the possible exception of roguelikes.

Hello, I am a BrokenForumer and my people are here. That is to say, I like that there's quite a lot of lovely little bits I can look forward to reading about. <subtle implication that any links to particularly humorous/must read threads would be much beloved here></very much obliged to ye>

Just throwing it out there as a member of the LP sub-forum who recently ventured "outside": It's not so much that other forums are scaring us off, but several people are trying to contain their weirdness to the LP threads and simply have no other place on this forum to put it. They read other threads but just don't know what to post in them. I don't think there's really any way to force them out into other sub-forums.

You're back! We missed you.

SOLI! We missed you! Where did you go?

If I was going to use a person as an example of someone who recently "crossed over" then it was going to be you. I'm so glad you did as you are a valuable addition to the rest of the forum, as would anyone who originally joined for the LPs but who makes an effort to participate elsewhere. I can see wanting to "contain" the "weirdness" - which reads like code to me for "keeping our interests contained in our subforum or in our threads, even if they aren't offensive, because it's easier to find other people with similar interests that way (and there runs less risk of gear grinding, too)" - but I can also see there being a lot of crossover interest between these two seemingly disparate groups contained within our small community.

What I'm about to suggest will probably get me shot, but: Did someone read a particularly good manga? Make a thread in the Entertaining Diversions subforum. Listen to a really great OST? Post a YouTube video to the Listening To thread. Watched an absolutely psychotic Japanese flick? Post about it in the movies thread. Your group appears to be predominantly made up of young women and as such were in a unique position to comment on the past election. How many of you are from countries outside of North America? In many ways, the populace of your subforum is wholly unique in that you are all not old, white, grody males near-exclusively interested in culture of Anglo-Saxon descent.

I guess what I'm getting at is that I don't want to force anyone to post anywhere they don't want to, but I would like to make the forum as inviting as possible since, as you yourself prove, people are willing to branch out over time. To be anything less than our most accepting would be to do a disservice to (people who more closely resemble younger versions of) ourselves (than any of us would ever like to admit).

SOLI YOU'RE BACK YAAAAAAAYYYYY