MMORPG.com is not a great board. It’s a little too mainstream, flooded with tweenage free game players, and the moderators lack of objectivity is generally overlooked in favor of the excessive amounts of garbage duty there is to do. Consequently, anyone who can come off as half-eloquent can probably secure moderator access over there.

I was a moderator at MMORPG.com for 2008, left at the begining of 2009 (not because I hated them of course, just because I felt there wasn’t much more I could learn from the experience) and I fear you’ve got a fair bit of misdirected bile towards the moderators there.

For one thing, in the time I was there, moderators didn’t invent policy, they simply followed it. I don’t know if things have changed drastically in the last half a year or so, but when I was there, it was (and from the sounds of it, still is) always policy not to discuss moderation openly. The reason the moderators didn’t discuss who they banned and why wasn’t out of fear of wrongdoing, it’s because they weren’t allowed to. It was the CM’s job to come up with and manage policy, not the moderators. And as for certain people getting away with more than others: From what I recall, you were allowed to say harsh things, just not about other people. A person was allowed say that a game is ass usually pretty freely, but if they were to make even a slightly off-hand comment towards another person, that got them a warning for flaming. But like I said, things may have changed.

Also, keep in mind that the system relied primarily on users reporting posts. If a post didn’t get deleted, then it’s entirely possible that a moderator simply never saw it. And as for the general subject of moderator abuse, you were always supposed to go to the CM for such things.

I can tell you that the moderators I worked with whilst there were smart, competent, and all older than me. And I was 21 at the time.

Where do I sign up?

That said, i dont think that a forum moderator need to have a legal training aka fix the loopholes that players will find in the rules. Hence the vague rules.

But vague rules should not be an excuse to play favoritism or closing everything that is a complaint (aka being a douche).

Back to the subject, that guy thought that he was going to be loved for everybody in the forums (retard) or what?? Cause this isnt a gradual slip in a emo-rage explosion (Tseric), this is an all out assault since the beggining. And i think that he was already told to lower the caffeine.

And I have seen cases where certain players would know exactly how to game the moderation to get rid of threads they didn’t want to see around. And it was astonishingly simple: Just start flaming, just enough to get the thread locked or deleted, but not enough to get into trouble yourself.

Vetarnias :
A classic example I’ll never forget is Age of Conan, where the board moderators maintained arbitrary standards based on guidelines so vague that they could get rid of anything negative by a more or less convoluted stretch of logic.

Psst. Super secret here.
Most boards have intentionally nebulous guidelines, so they reserve the right to do whatever they think is best, when they feel like it. It’s to prevent deterministic fucktards from playing the boards like it was part of the game.

Vetarnias :
Compare that to the MMORPG.com forums (does it show I have a beef against them these days?). Right now I’m serving a three-day ban, for posting rather mild stuff.

Oh, so you’re a deterministic fucktard. Be less of a board warrior jerk. Go ride your bike.

A classic example I’ll never forget is Age of Conan, where the board moderators maintained arbitrary standards based on guidelines so vague that they could get rid of anything negative by a more or less convoluted stretch of logic. One moderator back when I played AoC actually closed a thread with this justification: “Thread locked for encouraging to cancelling your accounts, and violating the Terms of Agreement, the EULA, and the Rules of Conduct.” Encouraging to cancelling your accounts? So what does that include? Goodbye threads? Saying the game was incomplete? Exposing bugs? The thread where that lockup excuse was used was actually about comparing the launch of AoC to that of Anarchy Online.

Adding insult to injury, it was verboten to discuss the forum moderation itself. Here was my contribution to that discussion at the time: http://forums.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?t=99201 . I did not get a warning, let alone a ban, but the thread was locked within half an hour. However, you read the CM’s message at the end, and you can see that the guy is a professional, unlike those hall-monitor fanboys that they appoint from the community to patrol the forums.

Compare that to the MMORPG.com forums (does it show I have a beef against them these days?). Right now I’m serving a three-day ban, for posting rather mild stuff. Meanwhile, some prolific posters can seemingly get away with anything, so I don’t hang around there much nowadays, and I can picture myself putting together an account of my dealings with that site one of these days.