The Shrine

Recently at the Marvel Puzzle Quest official board I noticed they stickied a thread that's basically "THIS GAME SUCKS YOU SHOULD QUIT", and another thread was stickied making baseless accusation on cheating that named several individuals.

Now I realize such threads are pretty common and would normally not be noteworthy, but this is stickied in the game's official board. We're not talking about a bunch of guys keep on bumping "WoW sucks" in Battle.net. This would be a moderator stickied "WoW sucks" in Battle.net. I know that board has volunteer mods, and it isn't even someone going rogue. I don't think the developer even had anyone monitoring the board. I have seen all kinds of garbage message boards and games, but even the worst games don't let people get away with openly naming other players to be cheaters (that's stuff you should report to support and 99% of the time it's just someone being a sore loser anyway), and having a thread telling people to quit the game stickied is... um... bad.

You could at least link to said cesspool thread, sheesh.

It's nothing unusual for gaming message board standards other than that it's stickied, and they did take down the stickied thread that's telling people to quit the game after about 3 days.

The closest example I ever recall was that on EQ1, there was a stickied thread by a guy starting a census project, and it was stickied by SOE because they figure it'd be some kind of community building project and quell the notion that the game is dying. Instead when the census numbers came in showing less than 1000 people still play the game (and the methodology was quite sound), but since it wasn't meant to be inflammatory it lasted a few days before the mods realized that the numbers came in and put the game in an extremely unfavorable light. That was a rather epic thread while it lasted and SOE denied the fact that they ever supported this census effort.

So according to the volunteer mods he hit sticky instead of lock thread on accident. If it's true, this is probably why you shouldn't rely on the Internet to keep an official board running.

One of the volunteer mod vandalized a developer post over a significant nerf and wasn't even IP banned.

I really have never seen any company that's so cheap on board moderation. How hard can it possibly be to pay someone minimum wage to do this?

On a more funny note, the #2 and the #3 guild was posting on board how they're clearly more respected than the #1 guild because you don't find posts alleging they're cheaters when they win #1. Of course, those are the guys who consistently post stuff about how the guys in #1 is cheater, and further, neither of those guilds have ever won #1 until last week when the reigning #1 probably fell asleep due to a lack of competition. In fact, I don't think anyone from the top guild even posts on the board, because they're probably playing the game as that has a much bigger impact on your performance in game compared to posting on a message board.