- Drowsy Demon
- |
- Heroic Member
Civil Discourse:
Civil discourse is engagement in discourse (conversation) intended to enhance understanding.
It seems that this forum is constantly at war between two drastically different ideologies unable to agree on even a single point of contention between themselves.
On one hand, we have the "casuals," players that are generally content with Bungie's new gameplay mechanics introduced in Halo: Reach, such as Bloom, Armor Lock, no Bleedthrough, etc.
On the other hand, we have the "competitive" players - people who see these new additions as either unnecessary, random, or unbalanced additions to gameplay. They usually maintain the viewpoint that MLG is the best playlist in Reach.
Whenever a thread is started on any number of the contentious subjects that have been beaten to death, it seems that both sides start a "race to the bottom," where whatever discussion that the OP created (if any at all) is immediately discounted in favor of name-calling and stat-pulling. It seems a cruel twist of fate that the Waypoint forums actually got something right, but I have realized that, for far too long, we have all been lax on this.
There needs to be more civil discourse. You can agree or disagree with your opponent as much as you like. However, we must stop churning out these specific arguments:
The "K/D" card
This argument is used all the time by competitive players. It seems to imply that simply because your playing ability is not up to par, your opinion is of less worth and should be discounted. This is extremely arrogant, not to mention false on all accounts. Any variation of this, such as "ur bad kid," "1v1 me anytime scrub," etc. adds nothing of value to the discussion.
For those who see nothing wrong with using this argument, two words:
Darkside Eric.
However, "stat-pulling" can be put to use in special circumstances. For example, if someone says that Armor Lock is a great addition to Team Slayer, yet has only played 10 games in that playlist, his argument is weakened by the fact that he does not have enough experience in that playlist to make a reasonable judgement, and as such, stat-pulling is justified.
The Adapt card
This infamous "argument" has gained much traction amongst the casual players, and is also equally arrogant, not to mention idiotic in some respects. It usually goes something like this:
Forum member one: "Armor Lock is unbalanced when compared to the rest of the Armor Abilities."
Forum member two: "ADAPT."
This is elementary school reasoning at its finest. For some reason, there is a strong misconception among the casual community that the competitive community simply cannot deal with gameplay elements such as an Armor Lock user in-game, and thus someone complains about it on the forums when he is killed. Considering that it has been more than a year since Reach was released, I think that everyone can indeed kill an Armor Lock user, and any argument related to that specific AA is not based on this faulty reasoning.
Name-calling
Sorry, but contrary to popular belief, name-calling does not make you seem smarter. Dropping the "retard" bomb every 5 lines only aggravates the person you are arguing against. I know I'm being a bit hypocritical, but both sides need to stop this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v= nAUSQPORFY0#t=33s
"It's just your opinion."
Any argument going along this vein simply states an obvious truth that everyone already knows. Since this a forum created to discuss gameplay elements in Halo: Reach, everyone will have their own, subjective opinion on what the game should be like. It is already implied that every single one of your posts comes with a disclaimer at the beginning saying "In my opinion..."
"Don't like? Don't play."
On the surface, this seems like a reasonable argument. If some players hate Reach so much, why don't they just quit and stop playing? The answers to this are varied. Some forum posters have actually genuinely quit and moved on to other games. Other forum posters only play Customs and MLG and avoid the perceived problems with the default playlists that they occasionally talk about on the forums. Still others merely play because they feel as bad as Reach is, there's no other game on the market that really appeals to them, since they've been playing Halo for what has been a decade now. People have to understand that there's usually more than one reason for how they act, and as such this argument shouldn't be brandied about as much as it is.
I'll be updating this with any other argument that the community wishes for me to address.
tl;dr Play nice(r).
[Edited on 01.08.2012 5:52 PM PST]