Talk:Elderscrolls forum censorship

Posted by Lingwei on 11:02, 12 March 2008

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"Consider the recent example of Morroblivion. Bethsoft's bored legal team decided they needed to do something to justify the obscene salary they no doubt get paid. So what do they do? "Well we can't stop pirates from pirating the game, but at least we can stop a website from hosting a tool that converts meshes. We are the warriors of justice and liberty!". So Morroblivion gets pulled from the internet."

Personally I think, after some 200 odd posts on TESNexus and some relatively ambiguous Bethsoft staff posts that gradually revealed exactly why the Morroblivion was not allowed, the community finally realised the reason. I agree that the situation can be handled better. Why say "We always said you can't take content from other games so you can't take it from Morrowind either" when the actual answer was much simpler to do and would have meant a lot less crap from everyone? We all know why you can't take content from other games due to copyright reasons, but many people didn't understand why exactly Morrowind fell under this as well. Simply put, if Pete or GStaff had said from the offset "the rule remains the same for Morrowind because of licensing issues, we don't own all the rights to all the work, etc. etc." then I'm sure the community would have been far more understanding from the offset. I know I would have been.

Perhaps with Fallout 3 Pete and Gstaff have better things to be doing that worrying about the ES community, that can often be quite outspoken (point taken with this article!) about some relatively minor things!

"The news hits the forums. Rather than allow the members to discuss the legality and purpoae of the tool amongest themselves what do the moderators (no doubt ordered by the administrators) do? They lock all threads discussing it and ban all discussion. What freaking purpose does this serve other than to show how out of touch with the community Bethesda is."

Indeed. Allow one thread for discussion and keep everything to one thread. Moderate it as necessary to reduce hate mail, etc.. I can understand not wanting an entire forum of "OMGWTF!!!111 Bethesda haet us!!11", but having an open discussion thread for mature discussion on the matter would not have hurt.

"but to ban all discussion of it is just dumb and censorship to the point of nazism."

I'd recommend never using "nazi" in your blogs, it's eccentric and unnecessary. You'll find every government censors things (hello America, hello Britain, hello France, etc.), but perhaps some are better at it than others. It shows a lack of understanding from you if you call people nazi's just for keeping a firm grip on their forums.

"Moving onto other topics, apparently discussion of banned members is banned. Why? Who knows."

Bethesda staff definately have better things to be doing than talking about people who have been banned for good reason. With one or two exceptions I don't leave strikes and bans open to discussion here; it's a waste of time.

"For example the modder qarl, I recently found out from another site that he was banned for making a post with nothing but the word 'spears' in it."

If I told someone not to write "spears" in a post and they did it they'd get a strike. If they did it twice more they'd be banned. Rules of the forum and my perogative. Don't believe that that is all that happened.

Just a few thoughts from a popular forum and site admin :)

Dark0ne 06:02, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

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"I'd recommend never using nazi in your blogs, it's eccentric and unnecessary. You'll find every government censors things (hello America, hello Britain, hello France, etc.), but perhaps some are better at it than others. It shows a lack of understanding from you if you call people

nazi's just for keeping a firm grip on their forums."

The nazism thing was a joke about how that guy who said that the longer internet discussions went on the higher the chance of comparing someone to hitler. The part where I mentioned that I waited until the fourth paragraph was meant to tip the reader off to that.

"Bethesda staff definately have better things to be doing than talking about people who have been banned for good reason. With one or two exceptions I don't leave strikes and bans open to discussion here; it's a waste of time."

But you can always allow people to ask why or demand for them to be unbanned even if it isn't going to happen. All you have to do is say How about no. Discussing banned members is fun anyway, I'm sure you like to hear a bit of the gossip at your university eh Darkone?

At least I'm allowed to mention talking about banned members on this site. Talking about talking about banned members is also banned on the ESF :rolleyes:.

Lingwei 06:37, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

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