The Daily Grind: Do you engage in forum PvP?

Back in the early days I used to write pages long diatribes and argue and debated heatedly on the forums of the MMORPGs that I played. This was back around the early days of Ultima Online and up through the early 2000's. The community on the internet however has gotten progressively less capable of intelligent, civil discourse to the point where it is completely pointless to bother. These days I rarely post on forums and I normally don't post those walls of well thought out text I used to write... Now it's all incessant whining, trolling, hatred and negativity, and I choose to ignore the vast majority of it...

I forum PVP but I don't grief. I make my point, and only stay on a thread so long as to make sure there's no confusion as to what I said. There's no point in sticking with a thread when:

1) It's a matter of opinion (turnip greens vs. mustard greens... discuss)

2) The only opposition you have is completely or functionally ignorant and you've made a good faith attempt to clear it up; or

3) Your opposition is intellectually dishonest (misrepresenting what you said or lying about facts even wikipedia doesn't argue about) and you've already demonstrated the correct fact set--

and you know anyone who comes along the thread later will see your posts and realize that some combination of the above happened.


If you stick around beating a dead horse, IMHO that's just griefing. You kill the fool and move on in-game, it should be no different on a forum.

Be prepared though: In game you can kill someone 15 straight times and leave because it's boring, and that person can claim you ran in fear. In forum PVP it's no different, as once you leave a thread you're handing ti over to the loser to spin/lie/whatever. In each case, all you can do is trust the facts to speak for themselves and not care what anyone who can't figure it our thinks.

Really depends on what is considered "forum PvP".

I read the forums when:

- I'm dissatisfied with some aspect of the game.
- I want more information about upcoming features.
- For some reason, I can read the forums but not play. Usually because I'm on my netbook/android.

If I'm reading the forum and finds something that interests me, and I think I have something constructive to say - or if there is something there that is just begging to be refuted - I will post. But I follow a few rules, mainly to be always polite to a fault - which, I believe, serves to deeply irritate anyone who is attempting to get into a flame war with me :)

BTW, I post to refute bad arguments used to prop up a point of view even if I share that point of view. Better to have it refuted in a polite way, and perhaps with alternative arguments provided to take it's place, than to have it attract rabid opposition.

Back in the day I use to, but I've gotten tired of it. I think it was the GuildWars2Guru forums and the constant self-entitled bickering about how it's an insult to them personally that the game is taking so long to come out that made me finally realize there really is NO use attempting to having a rational discussion with some people. I use to always tell myself I knew that, but I'd still argue anyway because I'd tell myself that one well constructed argument is all it should take for someone to realize they're acting like a 4 year old. Worse actually, because a 4 year old would at least get bored and find something else to do. Silly me.

It's not worth my time anymore.

From 1992 until around 2004-ish I was big on using forums. As the forums got larger and larger and harder and harder to keep track of the various threads, I ended up breaking my addiction to them. I probably do less then a dozen posts total in a year on any forum and don't really follow them.

The most posting I do now a days in at places like here. Under articles written at Massively. As to the actual concept of "forum pvp" yeah I'd do long winded diatribe style posts off an on back in those days, like Feydakin mentioned doing.

The feel and tone of the forums are very different then they were back in the 1990s and at the start 2000s. I could speculate as to the whys of that but that would probably start a forum pvp war here and honestly I've not had the passion for that sort of mass melee foray in a long long time.

I used to post a lot of concise deconstructions of the flaws in the rants and grandstanding of others all the bloody time. Now I limit it a lot more, to concentrate on actually spending my leisure time in leisure.

I find it best to simply avoid most game forums entirely... Wiki's are better sources of information so there's little reason to wade through the swirling morass of spew and bile to get to what tiny scrap of info there may be on the "official" forum pages.

When a game starts to list to one side and subs start leaving, forum PvP is probably better than playing the actual game and it's usually free as long as you don't personally insult people.

I like heated discussions about why something stinks or why something is great. I dislike people who can't rebut your points without calling you names like troll or fanboy because that's attacking the poster, not the post.

But overall forum PvP can be really good fun if you have excellent moderators who know how to read posts instead of nuking or removing whole parts that two normal people on the street would be saying to each other.

I'm learning to just ignore people who insult me or disagree with me starting replies with "No" or "Wrong" I'm also learning that most forum topics are not worth dscussing since you don't achieve anything and nobody on a forum is going to swap their opinion for yours anyway.

If you can discuss something without trying to change other ;peoples opinion, judge their opinion or resort to insults and exageration, you're probably not on a game forum.

I have found it very hard to forum PVP...at least on the Old republic forums, I think Bioware has hired an army of moderators who get bonuses for giving forum vacations. I know several people who's pre-order accounts are already prema Forum banned.

I asked about it at gamescom and was told that forums were a privileged not a right and when the game launched that a forum suspension or ban would equal an in game suspension or ban.

Seems like Bioware wants a very specific type of community. I wonder how that is going to play out.

I can get pulled into them now and again, but I will agree with most, anymore it really feels like the message boards are a different place than the used to be.

I tend to like hanging around in realm forums, and can occasionally find discussions worth getting involved in in RP and Lore involved forums. Certainly I enjoy the lengthy discussions where a developer has left large gaps in the lore and fans come together to debate how things should be. So long ofcourse as it is conducted decently which on such boards it usually is.

The same alas can not usually be said for the general board, and in the unlikely event somebody feels the desire to witness the most illiterate, self indulgent and bile spewing examples of humanity there is, a quick trip to the PVP forums of most games will provide the chance. I don't know what it is about PVP, but even on forums, where you can't kill anyone, it still seems to bring out the worst in people.