General Discussion

Good day all. For obvious reasons, I am not using my primary account at these forums. What I am about to say will likely be quickly deleted and this username banned, so please consider this carefully. I do not mean to imply any wrongdoing on MMORPG.com's part, but recent history in the AoC forum has inclined me to bring this issue to the community's attention. So: here is what I have seen over the last few days.

Before beginning, I need to express how disappointed I am to be saying this. MMORPG.com has been, over the years, an excellent source of information and community contact for the MMORPG industry. Recently, however, my faith in the available opinions and information at this site has been destroyed. It seems the administration of this once-phenomenal operation have lost sight of this site's intent. MMORPG.com, wtf mates? Why?

That said, the community forums for Age of Conan--a game that has just recently been released, as most of you well know--were, a week ago, absolutely flooded with criticisms, bashes, and general "This game is crap" posts. The game's rating, as reported by MMORPG.com's number-based voting system, was somewhere around 7.6, and the combined reports of the rating and the posts agreed quite well with my own opinion of the game. In my opinion, AoC simply is not fun--but that opinion is not the focus of this post.

A few days ago, between 17-18 May 2008, all of the AoC criticism's in MMORPG.com's forum were deleted. Some of the authors of these posts were notified that the messages were deleted because they were off topic. Mods? Admins? Criticisms, off topic? All of them? I find that hard to believe. The game's praises were left in place. Coincidentally, the game's rating also jumped to a 9.0 literally overnight. Amazing, right? At the time this article is being written, the rating is at 8.9. I have not seen a game score that high on MMORPG.com EVER. Not even WoW, if I remember right, ranked that high. So are we seeing an instantaneous revolution among the MMORPG.com community? Something inside me tells me--probably not.

Today, visiting MMORPG.com's homepage, all I see are AoC ads. Everywhere. Lots of them. More than half of the slides in the front page slide show are representative of Age of Conan, with each other in-development game receiving maybe one--maybe two. The news clip right below the banner--also AoC--cleverly complements the slew of AoC news links in the pane directly to the right--a pane, I should mention, that is supposed to cover news for all MMORPGs equally. And if you somehow do manage to get by without seeing any of these things, the top banner is also dedicated to AoC, and in ridiculously huge fashion. Visiting MMORPG.com's main page, I could easily mistake it for an AoC fansite, and as far as I can tell, that is exactly what this site has become.

I don't know why MMORPG.com has deleted the critical AoC posts or why eight hundred million (hyperbole) ads have magically shown up. I do understand that it makes sense for AoC to be receiving better-than-normal coverage on account of its impending release. But seriously? Nothing else is being covered--or at least not with any substance. The lack of coverage, though, can be rationally justified. What seriously bothers me is MMORPG.com's censorship of the forums, seeming manipulation of the vote system (and I must emphasize "seeming"--with only observation of the final rating, it is -technically- possible that the rating legitimately increased by so much in so short a period), and blatant support for Age of Conan's advertising campaign.

As far as I can tell, MMORPG.com is no longer a neutral entity in terms of journalistic MMO reporting. That bothers me. It should bother you, too. If you don't care, please simply disregard this message. If you do care, speak up. Let them know you've noticed what's going on around here lately. I know I'm not the only one. As far as I'm concerned, I'm done with this site unless/until they change this policy of censorship.

And no, I'm not please to be posting this. I have relied on this site for a long time for excellent information and good reviews from fellow MMO players. Sad day when I can't trust that information anymore.

(Also, sorry for the wall of text. This is a pretty wtf move on the administrators' part. I felt compelled to elaborate.)

You know i did find something strange the other day i saw  a new topic in general. The title was something along the lines of AOC is a wow clone with better graphic's . I read it it's got about 7 posts in it none of them are vulgur or in anyway would have broke any rules of this site .

So anyway's  about an hour later i go to check that thread and its been deleted .  Yes i think you are right on the money friend and all use my real account because quite frankly am sick of this site and there biased moderators

The rating thing has happened before. I think it was with LotRO or Tabula Rasa. It's rating jumped really high and all the others fell quite substantially. I think it was a bug

It's easy...

MMORPG.com is paid by Funcom, Blizzard, SOE, and other developer/publishers to advertise on this site.  They moderate accordingly.  It happens all over these forums.  Their moderation is very erratic.

However, I would do the same thing.  If Funcom dishes out some cash to delete some negative threads, who wouldn't?

Originally posted by blue0nyx

Age of Conan was released today. That would explain why the site is "AoC themed" with ads and everything. Most (if not all) of those AoC bashing posts were troll posts, and deserved to be deleted. Not to mention the opinions were based on the open beta client which was a very bad client, not even close to as polished as the real client. The rating probably jumped to 9.0 "overnight" because people actually bought the game and are enjoying it. You need to take off your tinfoil hat and use some common sense.

Get real , yes i can understand them been " AOC themed " thats perfectly fine,but deleting  posts that dont break the rules of this site is bull

1. Are you certain all these AoC posts have been 'deleted'? Or were they buried by the 250+ AoC posts per day over the last couple days?

2. Looking on the main home page... as of a couple minutes ago... I see a top banner ad (scrolls for various games, including EVE)... I see an AoC banner ad just below it (Heads will roll).... a small AoC blog ad... news teasers (10, scrolling, the first of which is Stargate), another scrolling ad to the right, which was EVE but is some other game atm that I've never heard of.... and another ad on the right for PotCO....

Is that overdoing it for AoC? I think not.

3. Um... why not post this with your main account, eh?

its up at a 8.9 now because the fans of the game just rates it , but within a month it will be down and the other will be back up when the fanboys of other games rate aoc low  its the way the site works you can edit a review when ever you want. so if you like game X you can rate all at 10 then game Y comes out rate that at 10, and lower game X to 0 because you want game Y too look better.

All new games jump to astronomical ratings when they are first released.  There's a  technical reason for it which has been posted here in each case,  and over time you will see AOC's rating fall more in line with the other games.

There's no conspiracy. Some posts might appear benign, but they are just rehashing the same tired topics covered in previous threads. Since most folks would rather start a new thread than search for a previous one, the only real surprise is that the moderators don't lock down/delete more threads than they do.

If you don't like how they run things here, feel free to visit other sites. I think you'll find they tend to be more heavily moderated than this one, and I doubt you'll find any forum of credibility that has FFA forum discussions on any game, regardless of their advertising policies.

The ratings on this site really mean nothing, no one takes them seriously. 1 person and his alt accounts is all it takes for a rating to suddenly improve.

I have not noticed any messages being deleted and I have not been banned for saying negative things about age of conan, nor have others that I have seen posting negativly about the game. Age of Conans forums is very active to the point where posts disappear to the next couple of pages very quickly.

The adds on this site are most likely because Funcom, like Turbine, CCP, Blizzard, SOE, etc before it have payed for advertisments to be put on their site. Yet they contenue to do news, previews etc on other games even when there are advertisements for say LOTRO covering the entire site.

As someone suggested it is probably best to take off the tin foil hat.

This is indeed troubling. While some threads may have been trolling, most were just personal opinions. In fact, it was a number of the hardcore defenders of AoC that would accuse the slightest criticism of AoC as trolling.  Apparently you cannot dislike a new game.

Sad to see MMORPG.com succumbing to the all mighty dollar.  Hey, it's fine to make a buck, but when MMORPG loses its objectivity it will also lose its credibility. In turn, less people will visit this site. The ultimate result? Less visitors means less ads.  A vicious cycle.