The forums for many games are where innovations sprout. Games that police their forums grow and prosper. Games that let their forums turn into sewers of personal invective die. You can not have healthy forums that provide impetus and inspiration to the players if you allow them to be patrolled and controlled by people who do not care about the future of your game.

My exact proposal is this:
zero tolerance for ad hominem arguments.
zero tolerance for the f word, racial slurs and references to sexual acts, private parts or excrement.
Your current vague "be kind to each other" rules are not working to protect the future of the game. You need concrete precise penalties for specific misdeeds and you moderators who feel empowered to enforce the rules.
1) two day ban for insulting another player
2) one week ban for insulting a moderator or inventor or other volunteer
3) one day ban for use of f word or references to sex or excrement.

Require each forum moderator to post a finding indicating which post violated which rule and what remedy was taken.
Tell the moderators that you expect them to have to hand out a large number of bans in the beginning.
Once a reset, have someone read every post and discuss with moderator why certain posts went unpunished.
This will be a dramatic change from the current system and players will take a while to adapt their behaviors but they will.

The catalyst for this suggestion is the current fiasco in the team forum where insults, rampant racism, in game violations, and just general depravity have run amok while the moderator does nothing.

Please read Celphi's moderator thread with mrford's manifesto on why he routinely cheats and hijacks threads to see why action must be taken.
mrford states that he does not care what anyone thinks and implies that he will keep on misbehaving indefinitely. He mocks the moderator.
This is not about mrford though, it is about the ability of the forums to act as laboratories for improvements of the game. He has infected others now who routinely swear, mock the moderators and hurl invective. The moderator apparently feels powerless to act.

No one dares or cares to suggest improvements in such a hostile environment. Please step in.

You need to remember that this is a game, and not a masters thesis.

not to mention the fact that we are unpaid volunteers.

hitting a delete/edit button and warning through various ways is much more time efficient.

Dude, you have misread the dynamics of these forum posts pretty effectively. There are a lot of practical reasons why your methods won't work. Get to know people a little better before you start making suggestions like that. :P

I know where I will be saying fluff and posting pictures of my monsters fluffs from now on...

Express is a game. The forums should not be.
The forums should be fun exciting and challenging. The forums should not be a game of insults and thread hijacking where suggestions go to die.

[quote poster=elvesrus; 39000; 711659]
As I said in the other thread, I appreciate the volunteer efforts of anyone. You can not run any organization such as this without volunteers.

I am not certain what you mean Elves. If you mean that volunteers can not be expected to enforce rules and run healthy forums then the game has stagnated and will not improve. The original forum was where the ancient Romans went to debate and exchange ideas not hurl insults. The team forum currently is not a forum at all rather it should be called the jr high locker room. The admins should expect volunteers to enforce rules. Period.
If you as the moderator believe that the forum should be a place where the moderators are mocked and insulted, where the founders are to be held up for ridicule and where personal insults are part of the fun, then that is how it will be. Do not expect any viable new ideas to come out of such a forum however.



Is this what you want your forums to be? Inane profane insults from thoughtless critics who will never do anything to help the game? If so, keep doing what you are doing now.

[quote poster=clintonista; 39000; 711734]

Express is a game. The forums should not be.
The forums should be fun exciting and challenging. The forums should not be a game of insults and thread hijacking where suggestions go to die.



Knock it off with the holier than though bullfluff. Is your favorite flavor lead?

clintonista
Member

86


enough said. Unless you wish to tell us who you really are...

all of the nooby remarks aside, I think you have misinterpreted what the forums are actually designed to do and what purpose they have to the Earth community.

The first thing you must realize is that this is a war game where people are aggressive sometimes, funny other times, and disagreeable most of the time.

The forums are:
-a place to post war declarations
-a place to post team/alliance policies
-a place to blow of steam via trolling or calling your opponents idiots.

There is a different place for "game innovation"... that is a place where only moderators and developers can see. If they want our input, they ask (and they have). All moderators have a lot of experience with this game and know where it has been compared to now. They also have no illusions as to how big this game can/will be. On the one hand I'm sure they would love to see growth in player base but on the other hand they don't expect it because THIS IS A TEXT BASED WAR GAME in a video game world. The only reason most people play this game is because of the people they play it alongside... the communities make this game what it is.

IMO, these forums are a microcosm of the internet at large... not a beacon of civility and polite discussion. If you want that, you can find a forum where that's the goal. There is so much tripe posted on these forums that the mods would have to actually read everything. Instead, they usually only address something if a complaint has been made.

The racist stuff is usually knocked down pretty fast... ad hominem, not so much. But then again, if you are offended by micro aggressions, you're playing wrong game.

my 2 cents.

ok thx dissident

I came on tonight to outline how with the brand new apps Fuse and Mixamo along with C4D and 3DSMAX 20 volunteers working for five months could make this into a motion graphics game. I see now that was misdirected. I will just go away now.

If you think graphics will fix this game youre mistaken. Maybe if it was a fb app and i could use my credit card....

all those apps are free for our limited purposes, and easy to use, two minute youtube videos could explain all any player needed to know

each player could design their own uniforms, their own planes tanks jets missiles or watch the defaults or block out the graphics altogether, the skin color of soldiers could blue green red white black whatever

each clan could have a unifying theme

an I tank would look much more powerful than an R tank, AB battles would be #D motion graphics, women would scream as the guerillas invaded

there would be 3d models of research centers, residences, etc as your country went from 100 acres to 20k acres the aerial view would change, you could "go pro" fly through your country, you would see your industrial centers cranking out planes, if desired each player could easily customize their buildings as well as their military

when you logged in after being gone for four hours on Express your general would say uh oh we have incoming
then a video of an attack would run for ten seconds before the fog lifted while a basso sang "oh say does that star spangled banner yet wave?" rrruuhrhrh no we lost 1200 acres the banner flies no more.

all free, all created by our player base of volunteer nerds

the game has waited twenty years for this moment to arrive.
when free aps can create killer motion graphics to illustrate the text battles. It would still be a text driven game, same rules, same code, just augmented by 3d motion graphics which could be blocked if deired all free

people who love Farmville, people who love war games, people who love to press launch on the Schwarzenegger game
would all be potential new players

Pay for skins or unlock em?

sir, I have no idea what you mean, none.

The game would still be free and the apps our volunteers would use would also be free from Adobe, Maxon and 3DSMAX
as part of their outreach program. I daily use free versions of these apps. The youtube videos would of course be free and I suspect given the nerdy nature of our base that some players already have the paid versions of the creative cloud or C4D or Maya even and could generate some killer models that would be seen and easily modified by players for free.
If you want to know what I mean please google image C4D tank or soldier to see what our players could have at their disposal.

But again I do not understand the question at all. My fault for not knowing the words "skins" and "unlock".

actually to understand what we could really do

watch a google video of c4d dogfight remembering each player could design their own planes and number of planes
watch a google video of a tank fight remembering it can take place in a desert, a village, a jungle or a beach that would be up to each player with thousands of tanks
and finally watch a google video of city flyover remembering the buildings would be residences, research centers etc which are either our defaults or designed by the player and reflect how many of each they have. The countries could be mountainous, or on a beach or in a jungle and the player would be able to control a camera as it flies over their country and inside a building

the only changes to the game interface would be an icon on the build page that read view country
and an icon on the war page that read view attack
otherwise all is as it ever was.

I have an Xbox one for video games. I play this for it's old school character and I enjoy reading all the crazy posts in the forums. There are plenty of games already like you are proposing. There are only a few games like this. I am sure you mean well clintonista, I just don't see the point in turning this into a video game.

Neither do I. I do not propose turning this into a video game.
The only difference a player like you would see in the game is one small icon on the war page and one small icon on the main page. Everything else is exactly the same as right now.
The game would be controlled through the current controls not through the video which would only be a representation of decisions and actions a player took using the current controls.

These videos would be superfluous to gameplay. If yourat war and hit 50 times per day or whatever... the video would never even run for most players. Only the newest of the new players would care about that

Earth graphics are top notch you got white text and green text and red text its alot to take in already

You are both right.

Don't forget purple. Imp and Choas countries are known to be colored purple from time-to-time.

Its more of a lavender

Making EE into an APP for mobile use is not a horrible idea. But if they put the time into that they should get with all the 3rd party hosting site devs and design some integrated clan tools right within the game. It be sweet to have all the functions of 3rd party clan sites right within the EE game it self. One stop shop :-P

And back to the APP idea, it could bring a influx of new players, which shouldn't be looked at as a bad thing. Not denying it take lots of time and a fair share of work but it be cool :-P

I always enjoyed the functions of starkingdoms where they have public forums and alliance forums all right in game along with a global and alliance chat box at the bottom.

doubt whoever designed lks is still playing and same prolly applies to sof's site.

Still GHQ and Boxcar. I see your point though.

pang made boxcar and is quite absentee, qz made evo's site and same as pang.

deathrider made mch but he has troubles with its bugs.

Meh, if those devs at run down StarKingdoms can implement that kind of system I have no doubt the EE team could cook up something similar if not better ;-)

It's not like they made this game 20x better than e2025 was. B-) (sarcasm)

They do a lot all ready though, so I'm not going to dog anyone about it. The systems in place work efficiently.