@oriskany I tend not to participate in the radio shows (mainly because it’s not really my thing), so I’m not really up on goings on in that forum and I was mainly discussing the community as a whole. That being said, I can understand the frustration of being talked out of a conversation (aggressively or passively) as it happens to me a lot in my general life. As I tend to communicate through text within this community I don’t see that problem myself here, but I sympathise with your stance.

While I can’t speak for anyone else in terms of intent I would say that in general conversations around the hobby do have a tendency to coalesce to the consensus of the majority which would easily result in ignoring a given point of view or pressuring for change. I’d say that’s a human fault rather than a fault specific to any given person. To take the GW topic (as it is one of the topics I see a lot due to personal interest) I think it’s fair to say that regardless of whether or not you like the games/settings/rules/ect., the majority of people within the community see more faults with GW than virtues. That means that conversations will tend to gravitate towards that consensus of ‘more bad than good’ even if the reality is much more grey than that statement suggests. In that way, you are definitely correct that conversations will gravitate towards a perceived truth and that is not a welcoming environment for anyone with a difference of opinion. I’d also agree that as a community, we should be looking out for that kind of thing happening and try our best to counter it or alleviate the effects it has.

I would also agree that certain games and systems are more popular within the community than others, and I think that will always be the case, and much of the time it will be those games with the larger market presence like GW or Warlord, to give a few examples. I find it a little frustrating as well sometimes that certain things aren’t talked about as much, or that when something is discussed more commonly than other things, but when something is popular that is inevitable. In that sense, we might not be as ‘broad’ as we might want to believe we are, though the idea of the ‘broad church’ is more likely seen in terms of the make up of the community rather than the percentage of interest a given system may have within the community. I admit that it’s a strange way to state it, but when you think of the community in terms of total games/systems played by the community it is a very large spread from the hexagonal boards of the larger scale games such as we see on the Sitrep Podcast stuff all the way to 52mm games of Harry Potter wizards yelling bad Latin at each other. ‘Broad church’ is a very relative term, in that sense.

While there are so many commonalities I share with your statements and I completely understand your frustrations in this matter, I would argue that there are levels to which certain points can be seen in so many ways. We’re a community after all, and we are not going to agree on everything. In many ways it’s more fun that we don’t all agree. I’d find life very boring if I made a statement and 15-20 people suddenly replied with ‘Yes I completely agree, bravo sir!’ With that in mind, I think the most important point you have made is that we should look at ourselves as community. We should take this opportunity to look at it and say ‘do we need to change?’ At the end of the day, I think that is what @panzerkaput was trying to get to. He realised that what he was perceiving bothered him, and he wanted to look at the bigger picture as a self reflection of his perception to challenge it and see if it held up.

I stand by my argument that The Event is most certainly making it more difficult for all of us. The affect it has had is massive on so many levels and we should recognise it’s role in what has lead to this conversation. On the other hand, I would also argue that Discord as a medium for conversation here may also have caused some issues. I’ve found even with small groups of people getting points across is difficult with so many technical things just proving that, in the end, nothing beats a face to face conversation. We can’t see each others body language, we can’t see when someone wants to speak up, we can’t see if someone is being quiet because they have nothing to say or if they can’t seem to get a word in. It’s not the best platform for debates. That is not said to excuse or explain any personal behaviours, but it is something to consider.

Perhaps we waited too long to have this conversation, but I think it’s important that we do and I think it’s important that we do voice concerns that we are having within our community. Sometimes it’s difficult to do so without becoming upset or angry, but sometimes when you listen to someone getting angry or upset about something you can see something you were blind to before.