...let me try and explain: The Escapist used to be a great site where the staff and mod--they used to have only one, and people still miss him--would treat users with respect, would argue with us, would let us disagree with them. They also put out a really great web magazine committed to exploring the more intellectual ways of appreciating video games.
So they're riding on a lot of built-up goodwill from a period that does not exist anymore. Something like this never could have happened on The Escapist a few years ago. Things have been changing, and they seem to have changed a WHOLE lot: I know they've been acting like spoiled children lately, but this seemed too crazy even for them.
A while back, I made a post defending software piracy as the equivalent of Ragnar Danneskjold's piracy in Atlas Shrugged because the video game industry keeps asking for tax breaks, which is what the 'looters' are doing in that book: the CEO is a big fan of Objectivism, and the whole forum community used to have great, civil discussions about all kinds of political topics. Well, my thread was locked for no reason at all. I didn't complain because I liked the site and the people running it so much.
That's why people are thanking the mods for taking the boot off their throat: like me back then, they don't realize just how much the place has changed, that the website that used to invite their users into a discussion of everything now bans first, asks questions later, and wants people to think they're the good guys for lifting the bans of people who discussed a topic no sane mod would ban people for discussing in the first place.
This mod Kuliani is the one who dealt with my permaban a few months ago. He gave me a garbage explanation back then, and never responded to my reply. I thought maybe it was just me: I'd run afoul of the 'new' (now the old) moderators back when they first replaced their original mod. I see now that it's more about this guy being a complete jerk who thinks because he was lucky enough to become the 'community manager' or whatever on a site that had the smarts to hire Yahtzee, that somehow he's the Yahtzee of Mods; I mean, really, what was with that little 'dialog' he wrote? Talk about getting high on you own power!
Here's my "browsing preference advice": read it with all the ads blocked. After my treatment by The Escapist, where a few mods with a grudge finally got their wish in banning me and staff members I'd had frequent conversations with for years did nothing, not even give me an explanation, I stopped reading.
Now that I know they are this irrational about people reading their site with the ads blocked, I'll be there for Yahtzee everytime he comes out. Maybe I'll even check out some of their other stuff and enjoy the free bandwith.
