Saturday, September 14, 2013

Needless Bashing

Okay, back from a hiatus that was not totally caused by depression. Now, let's make my time visiting multiple forums/cfv communities actually productive.

In my over 2 weeks of exploring, I've noticed a rather universal trend among the Cardfight Vanguard community. Everybody hates each other. There's no right or wrong to be shared amongst eachother, rather, there is only what a community believes and if another doesn't agree, they're obviously not worth the former's time.

What do I mean by this? Well, let's think of the Perfect Guard Article I made quite a while back. Now, I'm going to assume the best of my readers for a moment and think that if you've been reading my articles for a while, you already should know about Perfect Guards. It's why I took so long to even begin to write about them in the first place. Nobody came to challenge me when basically all of my decklists auto-included 4 Perfect Guards and I breezed through them like I expected you already knew why they were there. So why did I even make this article in the first place? The thing is, I didn't make this article for my readers, at least not for them to learn from. It was aimed at those who held onto beliefs otherwise. It wasn't my standard article of simply listing facts as they were and reiterating them, but directly countering subjects brought up by others and writing against them. It was built as a reminder to those that already knew that there needs to be logic to support their argument, something that I was glad to provide for them within the article as a fallback. It was built for those who didn't understand what's the deal with 4 Perfect Guards, I offered evidence against many of the more common claims about Perfect Guards to easily reconcile for any drawbacks they may or may not have. And what did this article bring to this community? Absolutely nothing. At best, I received a "Good job Nacho, but we already knew this," from a few Pojo and Vmundi members, and at the time, I was content with that. I thought that those who already knew would take that 'well duh, this is obvious, why would you even write about it' reactions that I had gained for the article would become a little more enforcing of these ideals. And, it had some impact, at least on Pojo, as more people began to use 4 Perfect Guards as a standard instead of otherwise.

The problem is that it didn't spread. Even as I entered, say, the CFVWiki just last week to check out their own blogs and comments, there were still the exact same poorly made arguments as far as the eye could see, and then some. Nobody was willing to back up their arguments or, even worst, created multiple cop outs and straw mans to avoid being the 'bad guy'. It became very clear that those who did disagree with those who adamantly hated the idea of running 4 Perfect Guards had absolutely no power, as they'd be left to bully tactics by multiple members berating them or forcing down their own ideals with little to no evidence until all opposition either ceased to exist or used a cop out/straw man to get out of their bind. Now, I am not saying all of the wiki community is like this, but it's very apparent to me that a large enough faction(s) of it exists that do happen to act like that. And in fact, I was willing to ignore it. I realized that the wiki page is probably far too large of a community with so few moderators to keep everyone in check that the constant stream of visitors and members would never be able to come to a consensus on something.

Except that it wasn't just the Wiki community.

From the larger communities of Pojo and Youtube, to smaller forums like VMundi and such, there would always be cliques that absent-mindedly accepted anything that one another would feed to each other, but vapidly attacked others that did not agree. From Perfect Guards to deck ratios and advice to just bashing for the sake of bashing, if you were different and/or spoke out against these people, you would be bullied by a swarm of unsupported yet unanimous arguments until you backed out of the argument.

Honestly, I don't even understand why this is the case, or why it would even happen in the first place. And once again, I'm not saying everyone is like this, but these cliques exist. From the Wiki's toxicity to naysayers to VMundi and Pojo unnecessarily bringing each other up at the most random of times only to bash each other, when there is no point to any of this bashing of each other.

Well, this has just been observations. I would like others to comment on this, why people would be so ignorant to opposing ideals while at the same time doing barely anything to support their own, and then in extreme examples, creating stereotypes of other communities. I...can't fathom any reason at all, and no single explanation can really describe the hows and whys about this.

4 comments:

  1. cuz internetz...

    you should be used to it by now, not your fault and don't expect it to change anytime soon...

    just keep posting good cfv material
    play good cfv games
    win a few notable tourneys
    the rest will take care of itself...

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  2. The Greater Internet F_ckwad Theory explains it in part...

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  3. I would have to agree. People are pretty disrespectful, its dumb.

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  4. The Bandwagon Fallacy, how people fall for this amuse me much. A better community is what I want, but I guess I've been expecting too much.

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