This is not goodbye.

[Mitoe]

This is not goodbye. I don't think I could ever leave AoE3, not truly.

But while this is not goodbye, I don't see myself participating in the forum very much from now on. I expect I will mostly post in scheduling threads, and that's it. I don't see myself reading threads, initiating discussions, or generally interacting with the community in the near future.

Something is different. Perhaps it is I that is different. Perhaps the people I called my friends are no longer here, or less active. Perhaps the game doesn't hold the same appeal to me as it did before.

Perhaps it is all these things and more—but I suspect it has less to do with these things than it does with something else. Something far more important than my love for the collection of bits and bytes that make AoE3 possible: our community culture.

When I first moved from the Mac AoE3 community to ESO in 2013, I could not have said the community was perfect, but it was different from today. Less hostile. More understanding. Friendlier. Some people might flame you when you beat them, and there were certainly some players who clearly had some history and knew how to hold a grudge. But generally it wasn't hard to find a friendly face in the community. I remember the infrequent Twitch streams, and the way the community always seemed happy to watch and praise the players whenever Veni or Zutazuta would cast some random games on their streams or Saturday Smackdown. When it first started, ESOC was the same, for a time.

Fast forward 7 years, and I feel I often struggle to find a positive comment among the community. It doesn't matter what the subject matter is. Twitch chat rarely has anything good to say about the players. Fine, ignore it--and instead hear casters insulting players. Log onto ESOC, check out the memes thread: all made to insult another player (seriously, when did this become ok?). Open a thread about a game someone played. Turns out the game had devolved into flaming and for some reason made its way to ESOC, where the bickering continues and drags in more players. You can't even say one positive thing to someone who dedicates their time to making maps or other content for the community. I'm not even going to talk about Off Topic.

You know things are bad when I think YouTube comments are the most positive place in the community.

What happened to the positivity? Where has it gone? We're all here for the same thing, can't we get along? If you don't have something good to say, don't say anything at all. Have all of the good, polite, and kindhearted people left the community because of how all of this negativity is seemingly so easily tolerated on this forum?

What of the new players we expect to come along with AoE3:DE? What will we show them? A cesspit of people who don't like each other but somehow linger in the community anyway?


This is not goodbye, but this is not the same community I fell in love with.

[TNT333]

"Only when the night is darkest do we truly see the stars...."

[giveuanxiety]

You know we have some issues and some work to do collectively when you have Mitoe feeling like he needs to make this topic.

[Warno]

Mitoe, you have been our ambassador.
Don't you leave us now!

[deleted_user]

.

[somp]

It all comes down to the terrible management of ESOC.
Hate of maps is a consequence of not listening to the community before adding them to the map pool. I agree, I have been very wrong telling Riki negatively about maps, when the real problem has been approving them straight.
Hate of EP changes is a consequence of a system where a very low level player, not many wanted to, made them without community approval.
Straightforward insults are not moderated, instead its one admin creating them and other one posting edgy stuff ignoring the problems.

Where did the community culture dissapear? It dissappeared at the moment people realized ESOC is a monarchy where community had never much say in anything. It's not a true community.

In the perfect world, community would have decided who's calling the shots, which would probably be you mitoe. You would have been an example of positivity.

Toxicity doesn't just appear out of nowhere . It's a consequence.

[Sergeant_Recker]

Funny thing for me to say is, I deleted my first ESOC account like a month ago (I'm _RDX_ btw, but you wouldn't probably remember me anyway). This happened because i didn't feel happy about the community going into the wrong direction of being not what it used to be. It appeared to me that the moderators have done very little work with some of the recent unnecessary threads. This is a community created to the people who play a video game and i hope all of them just realize that. I just wanted to get rid of ESOC in some way and i really couldn't. Since i started playing this game, this community has helped me so much to improve my gameplay in every aspects and i miss being able to discuss more of the stuff because i fear somebody might pull out something about racism in my thread too. I really don't want that. I had to stick to the forums for any updates till now because i had so much love for this community whenever i think about. They ruined my favourite ESOC Memes thread, that really did piss me off.

The purpose of ESOC is pretty much over since the DE is coming out. I miss being able to post more memes and i feel really sad for what this community has gone through the past few weeks. This is going to be a goodbye message from me. Thank you ESOC, for letting me to be a part of this community, i really enjoyed it while it lasted.

[dansil92]

and instead hear casters insulting players

This^
This has been absolutely the single most offputting thing for me lately. I cannot even watch a stream anymore. Top 15 players in the world and they're still not good enough :(
I love watching top players play, its amazing to see what they make look so easy, but rather than focus on and cheer on the triumphs it simply seems edgy to just insult or degrade the person who loses to a brilliant play. The last time i genuinely remember a caster who made me laugh out loud was... I believe Harrison?.. doing the taunt31 trumpet thing with the hussar charge.
In any case, I get it Mitoe, i cant say i blame you for feeling this way. I hate to see you fade back into the background but know that I'll miss your comments and strategy posts, alongside many others, especially the lurkers who don't post much or at all.

[CuCkO0]

Such a shame. We’re killing off our own community willingly and don’t seem to care. Very sad.

[Papist]

Imo the biggest contributor to the negative culture on these forums has been the refusal of staff to permaban toxic people. I cannot count the number of times that I, as a staff member, saw other staff insist that we give people "another chance" no matter what terrible things they had done or how often they'd stepped out of line.

The most notable example of this was a certain user who called another user a nigger multiple times, stalked him online, created hundreds of new accounts to dodge his ban on this forum (I'm not exaggerating - I personally deleted dozens of them), attacked staff members on Discord, tried to smurf a tournament, spread moesbar hacks in a deliberate attempt to destroy AoE3, and never apologized for any of it. And in spite of all that, his "permanent" ban was revoked in less than a year because he was a high-ranked player and people wanted him to play in an upcoming tournament.

Meanwhile, Off Topic has been overrun by an army of spammers and alt-right trolls, which has been shrugged off because "free speech, bro". It's gotten to the point where you can literally praise the Nazi Party and not get banned for it. And that toxicity frequently spills over into other parts of the forum, as we saw recently with the mining thread.

The solution to all of this is simple. If someone's sole contribution to this forum is insulting other people, advocating for fascism, or spamming, permaban them (and make sure it's actually permanent). Until you get rid of the toxic people, ESOC will be toxic. It really is that simple.

[voigt1240]

The thing is when we antagonize one ''side'' it only adds fuel to the fire. We need to realise we are all flawed people here.

[deleted_user]

.

[Papist]

The thing is when we antagonize one ''side'' it only adds fuel to the fire. We need to realise we are all flawed people here.

Can you elaborate?

[voigt1240]

The thing is when we antagonize one ''side'' it only adds fuel to the fire. We need to realise we are all flawed people here.

Can you elaborate?

When one side puts the blame on the other side. It only splits the community further.
Both side ought to be more respectful of eachother and openminded.
Ideally there should be no ''sides''
There are more things we agree on than disagree on, lets focus more on that.

[giveuanxiety]

There is always the fine line of just good old competitive smack talk and not taking it too far and being disrespectful. Regarding the memes topic, I dont think there is really an issue there. It can just be funny and fun to be competitive and fight over who is better. And generally in that type of topic it would be expected to see more bashing on players, which I think is fine. However we dont want to ever take it too far, and if someone is offended or its no longer fun to them and their the ones being posted about then we shouldn't allow that. In general I think that topic is fine tho, and this is coming from perhaps the one player that is shit talked the most and have people call me "bad". Even though I'm in a very high % of top players in the world playing the game.

As far as the casting, when we are casting on esoctv we should be very mindful to our casting style and I completely agree we should not be insulting the players in any way there. It is a little different when it comes to someone casting on their personal channel, maybe they want to "brand" their casting style on their channel as funny and shit talking style, which I think its perfectly fine. However is this person one of the main casters on esoctv, then maybe they shouldn't be "allowed" to cast that style on their own channel? I'm not really sure how I feel about this. I think this is something for us to consider going forward.

[Papist]

When one side puts the blame on the other side. It only splits the community further.
Both side ought to be more respectful of eachother and openminded.
Ideally there should be no ''sides''
There are more things we agree on than disagree on, lets focus more on that.

If you're talking about politics, I disagree. I have no respect for the guys who post Nazi stuff. Furthermore, this forum is not the appropriate place for those kinds of conversations to take place -- there are thousands of sites that are specifically designed for it but this site isn't one of them.

[harcha]

The thing is when we antagonize one ''side'' it only adds fuel to the fire. We need to realise we are all flawed people here.

Can you elaborate?

read some of pauls posts. while i agree with most of his opinions, the way he put them forward was veiled in insults, misrepresentations and baiting

[voigt1240]

Out of respect for Mitoe i Will not discuss this further. I have said My piece, Chrissy

[Cocaine]

Bro I agree.. When I posted a research topic about a possible new hack being out there, I was ridiculed because I used trucks to counter their hack. Point of my post was to investigate a new hack thats undetectable compared to moesbar but instead I was flammed. This community is toxic af. MyToe is right to leave.

[aaryngend]

Imo the biggest contributor to the negative culture on these forums has been the refusal of staff to permaban toxic people. I cannot count the number of times that I, as a staff member, saw other staff insist that we give people "another chance" no matter what terrible things they had done or how often they'd stepped out of line.
[...]
Meanwhile, Off Topic has been overrun by an army of spammers and alt-right trolls, which has been shrugged off because "free speech, bro". It's gotten to the point where you can literally praise the Nazi Party and not get banned for it. And that toxicity frequently spills over into other parts of the forum, as we saw recently with the mining thread.

The solution to all of this is simple. If someone's sole contribution to this forum is insulting other people, advocating for fascism, or spamming, permaban them (and make sure it's actually permanent). Until you get rid of the toxic people, ESOC will be toxic. It really is that simple.

Wasn't this also due to Goodspeed's laissez-faire policy? Granted that was only for Off Topic, but I hope people realize that having basically no rules (or having rules, but not enforcing them) is a flawed idea.

You also can't favour certain people based on whatever criterias you set arbitrarily.
It shouldn't matter who misbehaves in what way, a slap on the fingers should be given to anyone who deserves that.

Rules need to have clear guidelines and purpose and most importantly, they need to make sense.
No picking favourites or nonsensical exemptions, the rules should apply to everybody to the same degree.
Else you get people complaining that person X was punished much harder than person Y basically doing the same thing. Or why content X is frowned upon and potentially banworthy while content Y gets a pass all the time.

[Papist]

@aaryngend Yes, GS is absolutely the reason Off Topic is a mess. The first step towards restoring order on this forum should be to put it back under the control of the Community Team. And I agree with everything else you said.

[Gear_Head]

I'm still collecting my thoughts... This is tough to read and I agree in so many ways. I'll try to drop in later and add more.

Much appreciation for all those past and present who have made the community the positive things it is today too. There are so many who have sacrificed, contributed, encouraged, and been present in the best ways. Please remember these things and these people when responding this week, folks.

[harcha]

I think that the lack of moderation in twitch chat has also devolved the daily discourse of our community into memes about how bad one or the other player is. I see that other small streamers do a much stricter job at policing their twitch chats and end up with more uplifting communities.

[Gendarme]

@aaryngend Yes, GS is absolutely the reason Off Topic is a mess. The first step towards restoring order on this forum should be to put it back under the control of the Community Team. And I agree with everything else you said.

How come you remain unbanned despite years of continuous desynchronization abuse?

[aaryngend]

@aaryngend Yes, GS is absolutely the reason Off Topic is a mess. The first step towards restoring order on this forum should be to put it back under the control of the Community Team. And I agree with everything else you said.

How come you remain unbanned despite years of continuous desynchronization abuse?

A wild Gendarme appears
Things are truly in a dire state when even the uberfail0r chimes in... and someone positive like Mitoe makes a thread about the concurrent downward spiral.