Please Change my Mind and Point of View

[panzerkaput 33943xp 1]

@ninjily I am sure you are right and it is this flipping world we all live in and the events going on and yes ignoring it only goes so far.

 

 

[tobymagillMember 1414xp 2]

@ninjilly I have spent the last 12 months feeling exactly the same and have been around less and less as a result. I thought it was just me and it is quite nice to know I wasn’t just imagining  things.

[panzerkaput 33943xp 0]

@laughingboy I am not going to post up such behaviours and I am not point fingers at people and i am not saying that OTT Forums and Discord are Toxic, I was rather pointing out the behaviours of some and their intolerances of what they dont like and shouting about it. It is what I perceive and am I getting it wrong.

[panzerkaput 33943xp 0]

@tobymagill we are all feeling it in one way or another and I think it is the event that has caused this feeling

[tankkommanderParticipant 6421xp 4]

“He who establishes his argument by noise and command, shows that his reason is weak.”
― Michel de Montaigne

The internet is an imperfect medium to debate things. At the end of the day it is fine to point out the good and bad in the hobby, as long as we keep in mind that we are discussing toys and made up stories 🙂

And there are only 4 Star Wars films, the rest is just lies :p

 

[crazyredcoatParticipant 13642xp 1]

Honestly, it’s my feeling that ‘The Event’ is playing a part in this. As I said in a previous post relating to GW, I understand why people suddenly snap and just rant about perceived unfairness because I’ve been there myself. Regardless of where we are in the world, this giant mess has affected us all likely in ways we never really thought it could. Being stuck at home for so long means I spend more time on my computer reading things and I’m inevitably going to read things that I disagree with. I try my best to be reasonable and to know when is or isn’t a fair time to get involved, but that’s not always how it turns out.

We, as a community, are far from ‘toxic’, I’d say. We do quite well with friendly chats and keeping things civil. We have little spats of things here and there but they usually clean up well enough. As I think a couple of people have mentioned here, our hobby has been disrupted of late by global events. We didn’t ask for it, and it’s annoying, personally, to say the least, but it is what it is. I think there is a fair bit of anger in the world right now due to current circumstances and anger has a way of slipping into our everyday lives. It’s not a nice feeling, but it happens. Sometimes it just reaches a boiling point and over flows. I’ve been there before, and it usually doesn’t end up too well. I don’t think those lapses are indicative of a general shift in the nature of our community, merely a result of general increases in stress and uncertainty around the world.

It’s not easy to fight a sudden defensive urge when it comes to something you love, but I think the best thing to do at the moment is to recognise that sometimes someone loses their cool, and just try to remain calm ourselves. Retaliation for a lapse of control usually ends badly for everyone.

[panzerkaput 33943xp 0]

I think thats it about the event, I think it is this isolation and not gaming malarkey. The one thing about our community is it is really a social community and I think with people not being able to play for a long time, its the club and chatting more the games thats important, has made it feel worst. I have to say that the guys on OTT has done a sterling job with keeping this all sane and I am truly thankful for that.

[oriskany 60771xp 5]

Disclaimer:  This is just a response to the original post … NOT THE OTT TEAM IN ANY WAY.  And I’ll try not to make this personal.

1)  Intolerance vs. Topics and People?  Hmm, I was literally shouted out of a live conversation yesterday (as we all saw and heard) – ironically while I was actually trying to participate in the Star Wars discussion.

Intolerant, we say?  Interesting position, when members of the community don’t “tolerate” me enough to allow the completion of a sentence.

2) Letting People Have the Conversation: Well, again … I’m the one who’s been bulldozed out of conversations week after week, so I find this premise shaky at best.  Furthermore, all my friends and I said (in the chat, not in the radio show) is that we were ducking out of the conversation.  We didn’t stop anyone from talking about Star Wars or anything else.  They talked about it for another 25 minutes.  So I find the accusation: “if someone wants to discuss something that you have no interest it, then let those that are interested talk about it and let them have the conversation,” well, a little baseless.  It feels like my friends and I are being accused of (or at the very least lectured for) something we didn’t do.

And when it comes to forums or Discord threads or whatever, I would agree 100% with your statement.  If you’re not interested, just go to another thread or start your own.

However, when it comes to things like the Radio Show, there is no other “thread” or “forum.”  There is only one show.  I have to reorganize my real-life workday to even have a hope of participating.  It comes once every two weeks.  And God bless Warren, he tries.  In the May 12 radio show he literally had to raise his voice and say, and I quote: “Everyone be quiet and calm down” so I could even begin a sentence (it’s recorded, so you can go ahead and check).

So you’ll forgive me if my spikes go up when people suggest I am squashing other people’s conversations.  The exact opposite is happening, over and over, for several weeks now.  So maybe cool it with the whole “prams and toys thrown all over the place” language?  Before we start telling the community we’re being “toxic” and implying immaturity?

3) Expressing Opinions: Here’s a radical concept … If we accept that if Person A has the right to talk about a certain topic, maybe Person B has that same right to talk about how much they don’t like that same topic?  Strange how the “right to express an opinion” always flows in one direction. I find the position indefensible at best, especially since we’re all supposed to be such “adults.”  Yet we get misty eyed and tremble-angry when someone makes fun of our toys?

4) Selfishness of the Ego:  When I finally got back into yesterday’s conversation, I tried to talk about other people’s projects and interests, i.e., Michael’s Stalingrad project.  Many here must have missed that part of the conversation.  But even that was cut brusquely short.  In any event, I didn’t wrench the subject to my own projects and interests, as so many people constantly, constantly do (do I really need to cite examples here)?

5) The “Broad Church”: Nor do I buy the idea that this community is that broad of a church, at least to the extent for which we all love to pat ourselves on the back.  There are vast areas of the wargaming hobby … vast … that this community chooses never to cover or discuss … which, yes … is completely fine (and no, I’m not talking about “historical”).  I am never going to tell other gamers what to be interested in, and I sure as hell will never tell the OTT team what to feature or where to shine a spotlight.  Likewise, you will never see 40K or Star Wars on Sitrep.  But we don’t claim or pretend to be a “broad church,” and there’s the difference, perhaps?

Yet as a fan, player, presenter, and designer of the kinds of wargames this community chooses never to acknowledge (at least not in the last three years, and again, totally fair and everyone’s prerogative to do so), I further take exception to comments like “it is not about excluding people but rather encompassing people.”

Really?!

Don’t get me wrong, be interested in what you want.  Talk about what you want.  But dispel the idea that we’re “encompassing everyone.”  I can assure you we are not.  So forgive me if I respond badly to paternal, sagacious lectures warning me “not to exclude people” when I am one of the “excluded” people, and have been for years.  Might I suggest it’s a good idea to climb down off our shaky stool of self-congratulation about how “inclusive” we are?

In summary, I’m amazed more people don’t see the quiet elitism and “cliquishness” that has settled into the roots of the community … i.e., if it’s not Star Wars, Saga, 40K, or whatever certain “rock stars” are interested in lately … well, there goes 90% of the community conversations in which you can participate.

So I agree there’s a problem.  But while I would never presume to tell the community to change or improve, I would suggest that we could all be just a little more self-honest.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go pick up all the toys I threw out of my pram.

[crazyredcoatParticipant 13642xp 3]

@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.

[ninjillyParticipant 11673xp 1]

Wow, there’s clearly something very different going on here. That was a very personal post @oriskany. I don’t listen to the radio show anymore so I’ve no idea what the heck happened. Whatever it was, I’m sorry to hear it’s causing to much pain to apparently everyone.

I was speaking to the other places we are meant to be a community. No one said toxic, and I don’t think there is anything wrong with a community discussing ways to improve as a group but from the sounds of it, this is not going to be a productive conversation after all. It feels a lot like we’re just eating our own tails these days.

[ninjillyParticipant 11673xp 1]

@crazyredcoat thank you, that was a fantastic post.

[laughingboy 20728xp 0]

Ok @panzerkaput then I can’t really argue/debate back without some evidence/data/reference of kinds of behaviour it is all just perception. Personally, then my perception is OTT and its community is very accepting in general, there are always some bad eggs but the small number should not outweigh the large majority.

Of the hundreds of people in this community, it is the same 10-15 voices that get heard the most and the opinions of those people tend to set the tone/direction/what is liked/disliked others will either follow along or stay quiet.

I will leave this thread now because I guess I don’t understand what good it is trying to do.

[crazyredcoatParticipant 13642xp 0]

@laughingboy As you are one of the ‘big figures’ (for want of a better term) within the community, I think it’s actually a good idea to hear your opinion on the state of the community. Even if you might not get what good it would do, it will help to hear how the community appears to someone like yourself who is such a big part of it. Your point about the same ‘core’ of people leading conversation is true, but what are your thoughts on how that affects our community? How can we challenge that? Should we challenge that? Do you think there has been a recent change in the community? Maybe there is something that you have observed that the rest of us have missed. I, personally, think that’s an important thing to look at. I understand if you choose not to get involved too deeply here, but your voice added to a civil discourse about our community may do some good to combat these concerns that have arisen. There may be some disagreement, in fact I’d be surprised if there wasn’t, but a civilised debate may help.

[panzerkaput 33943xp 2]

Actually it was about self reflex and whether what I perceived was right or wrong and I think it is bigger than that. What I do know is I am not going to get involved further with this and going to ask the admin to remove this thread as I was not having a shout against the community.

But I want to be very clear, I am really confused by @oriskany statement as this was not an attack against him at all and I do not understand why he thinks that. Frankly I am more than a little annoyed and frankly disappointed with it, I dont want to be personal, well are you or at least I see it that way. I left the show shortly before all you sited so I dont really know what was said or went on and frankly I dont really care, it is not my business.  Good bye there oriskany and I wish you a long and happy life.

[admiralandy 1647xp 4]

Hi all,

I’ve been away from OTT/BOW(wow) for a year or two other than an occassional dabble, so I can’t comment on any negative trends that may or may not be emerging here. That are perhaps linked to a new media introduced over the last year or so where there’s been a lack of politeness especially where something as directly interactive as a comms channel.

@panzerkaput Whatever your meaning or intent if your start referencing peoples behavouir in a negative conatation some people will naturally have a response of does he mean me. Especially if been involved in a spat however trivial that at the end of it left, someone was left with a feeling of I shouldn’t have reacted that way. So if you hit someones wrong button on the wrong day and they already feel self conscious and got at and respond emotively. Referencing things with the broad net as your did without a specific frame of reference was almost certain to catch some of that. Then it ends in a downward flame spiral and not the constructive discourse you were maybe looking for.

Also I don’t wish to be overly presumptive or intrusive, but your post title kinda sounds like your looking for positivity and help. For everyone and I don’t mean to sound patronising for everyone who already gets this, just wishing to share my view of things. Which is we all have our perception of things which can be quite different from one another and we can focus on some aspects more than intended and I get a frustrating sense of misunderstanding and some anger as a consequence arising in this topic. Also after 14+ months of a pandemic I think its fair to say everyones mental health is a little fractured, and perhaps we need to consider trying to be a little more delicate when peoples skin is a little fragile and thinner than it may have been 18 months ago for a robust topic such as this.

I’m afraid intolerance is still a fact of life on whichever subject we discuss, the best we can do is try and educate for a more tolerant perspective in society.

Lastly I think we need to have some perspective that given we have been living through one of the most personally challenging year of our lives and not exactly a clear end in sight depending where you live in the world or personal circumstance. It maybe in the example getting referenced of people not being allowed to finish a sentance that those being a bit of a dick, maybe they haven’t spoke to another person for a week or more and got carried away.

 

I apologise for my over use of perspective, there’s probably a better way to express it, but I think I’ve already rambled more than I intended. (Oopsy)

 

Just remember folks there are channels avaiable to help with Mental Health, and consider how the past year has gone for a whole heap of people where it has been a case of lifes too short to be a dick.

 

 

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