A request for all Silent Hunter 4 Forum posters

[StandingCow]

John, I know how you feel, but that often comes with the title of moderator. Over at one of the HL2 mod sites I help super mod I even have my own Hate club. LOL.

As a mod you are going to be disliked by the members that just cannot seem to behave, you gotta learn to let it roll off and not bother you. Continue to make unbias correct actions and you will be just fine. The negative oftem seems to outweigh the positive because the positive response to your action is no response, but negative is somebody bitching.

[Onkel Neal]

Originally Posted by Fer32

If my join date is correct Im not what you would call a new guy in this forum, I just dont post much ,but I check this forum everyday. You are right, not all newbie are bad persons, my apologise for that. What I was trying to say is that in the last couple of days, several people has joined the forum and many of them ( not all of course) post only insults here.

You're correct, and it is common for guys new to the Subsim forums to bring old forum habits--ranting and personal attacks, negativity, etc. The moderator and indeed, many of the members try to help them adjust to our tone and fit in. In the end, most people like having a forum with hundreds of members helping each other, instead of trying to get attention by topping the last insult

thanks
Neal

[Audie]

Beautifully written Mr. Channing.

Subsim.com has been a wonderful resource for the simulation community
I am very proud to be a very small part of it.

Cheers,

[highkoo]

Glad to be here.....give it a few days and hopefully all of the negative energy will be turned towards getting everyone sailing safely or unsafely for that matter on the pacific.

I think that Neal and the moderators here have shown a great amount of restraint about this whole situation. They are not telling anyone to not criticize SH4 or talk about the bugs or other problems. They are just trying to keep this forum fairly civil. It wouldn't take much for everyone to get into a huge flame war with a bunch of personal attacks. People here doing some complaining or criticizing should be tolerated as long as it makes for constructive discussion and hopefully gets the developer's attention. If no one said anything about SH4's problems, it would hurt all of us. But it is hard to remain positive when this is the third time in a row that UBI has released a very buggy, half finished Silent Hunter game. Hopefully a lot of the negativity here will eventally blow over once UBI releases a few patches to fix SH4. Let's hope for the best.

[Capt.LoneRanger]

I came here, because this forum is a great source of information and discussion.

Since the release it seems like the good old IL2-Forum. People ranting and complaining, feeling cheated and robbed of their precious money and if you say a good word about SH4 or UBI, you get flamed or worse. Even if I repeat myself, if you don't like it at all, give it back or sell it on ebay and that's it. Anybody else, let's sit together and see what can be done to fix things. This pre-teen ranting leads to nothing but a fanwar and this is what helps SH4 the least.

[TDK1044]

One of the main reasons I agreed to become a Moderator here is because of Neal's integrity and the respect that I have for this Forum, its members and Moderators like JC and Gizz.

'Release Week' is always going to bring out a whole range of emotions from old and new forum members and I think that's healthy, but this forum has never been allowed to degenerate into a nasty, accusatorial shouting match between its members and it won't on my watch either.

There are forums that tolerate and even encourage that kind of behaviour, this is not one of them. Spirited discussion and disagreement between members is welcome, petulent accusatorial nonsense is not.

[ACSoft]

Originally Posted by Subsim

A quick reminder: as we did when SH2 and SH3 were released, I would like to request your cooperation in keeping Subsim a positive and productive discussion forum for Silent Hunter 4.
...
Feel free to criticise and complain but please, do so with some respect, and courtesy. Even though this is the Internet, we should try to be professional.

This is perfectly OK for me, althrough it is probably really difficult to always speak about something fundamentally negative (like the state of the initial release of SH4) in a positive way. What is more easy, it is to be respectful and keep courtesy.

Now take this example:

Originally Posted by hyperion2206

As usual people start whining before they even have the game.

Why one of the moderators do no intervene in this case ? Because here, "hyperion2206" obviously broke the rules "respect" and "courtesy". I don't care about what "hyperion2206" said and I was big enough to answer, but speaking of your policy... ?!?

And I could have taken other more harch exemples where moderator do not intervene either.

Instead of that, I see moderators saying to unhappy peoples things like that:

Originally Posted by TDK1044

...
The only person you're punishing by not buying the game is yourself. Ubisoft are not going to worry at all if a handfull of people in the subsim forums (and that's all it would be) choose not to purchase the game on a point of principle. That's your choice and I respect it, but it's also your loss. You don't improve a game by not buying it, nor does a handful of people not buying Silent Hunter 4 in any way influence Ubisoft's decision regarding Silent Hunter 5. The game either meets its projected sales target or it doesn't.

Why a moderator feel necessary in this case, to give such a "personnal lesson" to peoples who decided to cancel their orders ? I mean, is this action "respectful" and "professional", to retake the terms of your policy ?

So, I am not very surprised of all what happened.

But, like somebody else already said, all will probably calm down soon, especially now, with the very good news that a patch (a giant one apparently) will be published soon !

ACS

[SteamWake]

Yall need to check up on the attitude a bit lest Neal decide hes had enough and pull the plug. I know I wouldent blame him.

Moderators are entitled to their opinions this is NOT a democracy.

[Fat Bhoy Tim]

I can understand the frustration vented by people who've had very similar problems with SH3, but the incredible hysteria shown by some people is fairly ridiculous.

[Spaxspore]

Originally Posted by audie

Beautifully written Mr. Channing.

Subsim.com has been a wonderful resource for the simulation community
I am very proud to be a very small part of it.

Cheers,

BTW nice SIG!

I love bf109s

[Rickenbacker]

Originally Posted by Schunken

..my playstation 3 outdate any PC on the todays market.... make it looks like a Commodore C64....

I just spent about $2000 on a new PC, and I can confidently say that no, no it really doesn't. Nothing I've thrown at this thing so far has slown it down the slightest, and you should see Oblivion with everything maxed out :-).

But, returning to the subject at hand, I can understand people who are pissed about buying a game that was released even though they KNEW it wasn't in full working order. But that's no reason to start abusing the mods or other users, let's keep this forum the great informational resource and discussion forum it's always been (I may have lurked in the past, but I found tons of useful information here, given freely by people I've never met, thank you all).

[John Channing]

Oh dear!

I fear that people have misinterperted my intent here.

I was not looking for sympathy (although I genuinely appreciate it). This sort of stuff, while aggravating, does not bother me too much. I usually consider the source of the insult.

What bothered me was seeing this tremendous resource, this gathering place of like-minded people, this home-away-from-home for so many of us turned into a pit of vipers by an unusually large amount of immature posts and rants.

My only objective with this thread was to try to elevate the level of discourse, nothing else.

JCC

[Rykaird]

Whatever the cause, this forum is much, much different in tone right now than the SHIII forum. Over there, new folks are welcome, and even folks who haven't read the stickies aren't pounced on, but merely reminded. The SHIII forum is in fact the best game community I've ever experienced by a wide margin.

I'm sure this one will live up to that standard eventually. In the interim, we can only do what always works - don't feed the trolls, don't flame, don't return fire even if provoked.

[SteamWake]

Originally Posted by Rykaird

Whatever the cause, this forum is much, much different in tone right now than the SHIII forum.

Its simple really I call it the new release syndrome. Its like this for virtually all games now.

Game gets released and noise level explodes for several weeks. After a period of time the noise level diminishes.

There are probably some folks in here raising a lot of ruckus whom dont even own the game. In fact the only reason there here is to raise a ruckus.

The SH3 forums were quite noisy at release if I recall.