Appeal to the Community, why TMD could be better...

[Marske]

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are the views of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the TMD Staff.

There is something wrong with this forum. You can smell it in the air - a deadening stink every time you browse a new topic. What is wrong you ask? Post quality, I answer. I've been wanting to post about this for a long, long time. Since I had some spare time I thought I'd write it up now. This is going to rub some of you the wrong way, which is fine.

The Analogy
Imagine you are a judge, presiding over a court, and you're about to sentence or free a possible murderer. This is no normal court though, this is The Mana Drain court, and the rules of procedure are somewhat... lacking, at least in their enforcement.

Everyone who has gathered before the court are standing in one rowdy ball of people. The lawyers, the witnesses and the media are all there. But there's more still. This is one popular case and it is open to the public, today you have unusually many spectators in the crowd.

The prosecutor has proclaimed his charges, and you're about to give the word to the lawyer. One problem though, you don't know who he is. So you ask out loud, can anyone provide any evidence for me?

One of the spectators is hot on his heels and shouts out loud: "That man is innocent, I swear!". Baffled you ask: "Good sir, are you perhaps the lawyer?". Embarrassed he remains quiet.

Next the main witness starts shouting: "That main is guilty. He stabbed his wife 7 times with a knife!". You respond: How do you know?". Angry the witness thinks: 'I'm the main witness for fuck sakes. Don't you know? Like hell I'm going to respond to someone as rude as you', and so he too remains quiet.

Slightly infuriated you ask if there is anyone out there who can back up their statement.

Now it is the lawyer's turn to speak. He begins without presenting himself and simply says: "That last guy who spoke is a liar, and I can prove it". However, this is one lazy lawyer so when you ask him to actually prove it he goes for a coffee break, and does not return.

Then a journalist speaks out: "I say the accused is innocent, and I will let you know that I have successfully predicted the outcome of over 90% of all trials over the last decade."

Finally the police chief steps into the room and speaks loudly: "I am the chief of the police. This man was dining with be at the time of the murder and I've got the tapes from my security cameras with me. Watch them and realise that he cannot be the killer".

The Problem
There is a lot of awesome advice given out daily in these forums, many interesting insights are being shared and there are some generally fucking awesome posts being made here. However, all that is lost in a whole swarm of imbecilic comments, poor arguments and plain terrible advice. Not only does this make for a somewhat infuriating reading experience, but it also makes it harder to find the important posts due to increased thread length and perhaps most important of all: Not everyone can tell good advice from bad advice.

The Solution
It would be nice if everyone simply stopped making bad posts, but it won't happen. The world is infested with an illusion of self importance. Children are taught to stand up for their rights, to fight for their beliefs, to never admit defeat, to always seek the last word and to take up their god-granted space. Social biases a plenty will keep our forums drenched by the opinions of bad players and poor reasoners. Instead those who know what they're talking about and those who understand this game well enough should try to stick out from the crowd.

How you ask? By actually arguing your points and backing them up with evidence.

The Argument of Authority
No one knows everything about this game, but in general, the better you are at playing, the more you know. If you say "Always counter Ancestral Recall", then that is an argument based on your own authority. However, few of us have any authority on our own.

If you say "<Pro Player or Vintage Legend> says, always counter Ancestral Recall", it is slightly better. But how do we know that he actually said it? When using the argument of authority, provide direct quotes from this forum or link to external sources.

But how do you go about easily finding your sources? I'm lazy and this might take more effort than I'm willing to put into a post. But please, at least try to use a search engine at least once before giving up. TMD's search function allows you to search for posts both based on key words and on poster. If I for example wanted to find the post where Matt Elias says to counter Ancestral every time. I might search for "Counter Ancestral Recall" and by "'Volton00x".

Your authority might still be wrong, but the point is that he'd at least be more likely to be right than you alone.

Reasoning
Now countering Ancestral might be a correct idea in most situations, except some specific situations, for example when Gifts was legal.

When Gifts Ungiven was legal in Vintage, Ben Kowal and I were looking for an edge in the mirror match, and we sat down to test. As the evening progressed, we noticed something peculiar, the player who resolved Ancestral Recall would consistently lose. This was obviously confusing. Ancestral generates a big advantage for a really small investment of resources; people at the time were warping their decks around finding and resolving it quickly – but we just weren't getting those results. Ben came to the conclusion that Ancestral Recall was terrible, and when I played it, he stopped caring, and he started winning.

Linkage ^{(See what I did?!)}

But how do I know? If you tell me that it is a good idea because if the opponent resolves Ancestral in their favor they are up 3 cards which in Vintage brings them closer to winning, then I will at least be able to follow your reasoning. Perhaps I find your argument solid, or perhaps I see a flaw in it.

By providing your reasoning you accomplish four things:
1) You make your argument less opaque and give your readers the possibility to judge for themselves.
2) It allows other people to make shorter counter arguments as they only need to point out where you failed instead of providing the counter argument to all possible arguments backing your statement.
3) You not only provide advice which helps knowledge, but advice which also help understanding.
4) If you argument is found solid you prove that you have some understanding of the game, which gives you a small authoritative argument.

Demonstrating
Don't we all love to discover a post demonstrating the exact problem we've been struggling with, and how to solve it? Some posts provide incredible detailed information about a situation. This can work as an argument of authority, but all those details also allow others to criticize your argument. They might for example make counter-arguments of the "But if you do that he can just do that, you're actually playing it blindly and gambling!"-kind.

Be wary of your own posts and examples though. There are so many ways to win in this game and come out ahead in certain situations even with flawed strategies or logic, this is exceptionally true when presenting testing results.

For example, even though your deck was bad, your opponent might have been horrid or playing a suboptimal version of the deck. Or perhaps he didn't know how to play against your particular deck, but it is so simple that more advanced players easily figure it out when playing against you. Or maybe you just got lucky.

The Appeal
Consider the following sentence, for it might be true: "I could be wrong, I might be making a bad post". A lot of bad posts are made, and they have to come from somewhere. Could you be among the guilty? Now, TMD's staff does a great job in keeping things somewhat streamlined... and I know from experience that it's a rough job. We can all make a bigger difference though, beyond relying on these brave souls to lead us.

My appeal to the community is to devalue your own opinion, take a step away and look at outside evidence. If you cannot provide evidence for your statements, then how do you know you are right? Please consider not posting at all. And if you actually have evidence, then please share it, else we might not be able to tell you from the scrub two posts down.

Providing evidence takes some effort, but if you actually care about making a good post it is effort well spent.

[Mindstab_Thrull]

Marske

There is a lot to be said about what you bring up in this post. In fact, many sites have a general rule of posting that goes something like this:

Before you hit Submit/Post, stop and re-read what you wrote.

This one small piece of advice, posted on many sites and I believe even here on TMD, stops a person from making many of the mistakes often found in posts. This doesn't just count spelling and grammar, but also whether the information is logical, how the post flows (does it make sense to be in the order presented?), whether information is redundant or missing, and so forth.

Sadly, there is a large difference between information commonly disseminated, and information commonly read - or remembered. How many people look under a Forum's General Topics and read over the Stickies that explain what the administrators are looking for with respect to how to post - and of those that do, how many mentally respond (or even verbally, sometimes) with "Yeah, whatever" or laugh it off? It doesn't take much to actually start posting in an appropriate manner once you have a grasp of what the administrators want from a post.

One last thing about posting (and this is to the General Public, not Marske specifically): Don't try and use the question "Have you tried it?" or something similar in your post. If you have, give feedback on what you have determined. Let's say for the sake of argument, you have a Dredge list that kicks Storm combo decks in the keister left right and center, and it uses Kaervek the Merciless as a Dread Return target. (I'm not suggesting it does, by the way; if it did, why don't more people use it, at least in the sideboard?) Tell us what you've learned about Kaervek, give us a list, and it's possible that it might not be Kaervek himself but the interaction between him and other cards in the deck. What you've learned, however, is still valuable information. There's also a lot of people on here who have tried Kaervek, and found him not to be as good as other creatures, or other angles of attack, or whatnot, who have a lot of experience with Dredge. It's quite possible it was already tried Some Time Ago, dismissed, and with an explanation on what it did as well as what it didn't do. Then there's people who are able to identify how Dredge operates on a tactical level, and how it has to leverage that against other decks like TPS, and Kaervek just doesn't fit in its plan at all - and a remodel of Dredge to make it good makes it worse against everything else!

Just my two Sarpadian coppers,
Mindstab_Thrull

[Troy_Costisick]

Marske,

The best way to improve post quality here is to focus on Actual Play.  In fact, the whole site should be focussed on that first and foremost, with everything else a distant second or third.  The very first forum here should not be the Newbie Forum or the Article forum, or worse, the Deck Discussion forum.  It should be Actual Play.  And it should be a forum for all Actual Play using the Vintage format.  And I'm not talking about the TO reports.  In fact, unless it is an account of actual play during a tournament, it shouldn't be posted there.  All the Top 8 lists, "thanks for hosting this thing...", and "I had a great time..." stuff should be in a seperate forum.  Those posts no value when analyzing play.  The Actual Play forum is where a person- of any stripe- can talk about their experience playing Vintage and have it critiqued and scrutinized by the community in a serious but constructive way.  And not just tournament winners.  Kitchen table play should be posted.  Tournament losers, the 0-4-drop guys need to post too!  Analyzing what went wrong is just as important as analyzing what went right.  By improving our play and improving our discussions about play, we will improve this site.

Then, all decks that are proposed in the Deck Discussion forums- whether it is the OP in a thread or the 300th post in a thread- should be linked to an Actual Play thread.  If you can't point to a deck that has at least 73 of the same cards being used in Actual Play, then it doesn't even need to be discussed.  Keep it to yourself, take it to PMs with somebody, OR go play the deck against somebody across the kitchen table and get some Actual Play data to share with the community.  There is way too much knee-jerk tossing out of ideas in the deck discussion forums- just a bunch of lobbing decklists all over hoping that maybe you hit something through sheer volume of fire.  Enforcing that rule will also cut out a lot of the "Hey!  Just saw a new card spoiled on MTGsalvation, here's a deck with it.  Bye!" type posts. 

On the topic of new cards, I don't like the General Strategy forum being used for talking about new cards since it's mostly pie-in-the-sky theoretical guesswork that usually doesn't amount to squat.  The question about how to use Necropotence in ANT is a great question, but it's getting burried under spaz posting about wonky new cards (I know, I'm guilty of this myself but at least I can spot my faults).  Discussion of new cards should be limited to the Rumors thread or given a seperate forum for that sort of thing.

But the minor quibbles like that aside, focussing on Actual Play is the key to making TMD a more serious and profitable site.  Until we do that, the forums will continue to languish in their current state.  We all know that the more you play Magic, the better you get at Magic.  Why is that not translated into how we organize and use these forums?

Peace,

-Troy

[AmbivalentDuck]

Markse, I believe the problem you've identified is actually one of authoritative information being elusive.  I've been quietly working on ways to change the quality of the discussion by automatically including accurate information in the first post of automatically generated topics.

1)  emidln now has a very nice deck database.  Why is someone not parsing it weekly and automatically generating statistics on what's winning?  Instead of metagame analysis being Steve, a spreadsheet, and hours of manual entry, it should be automated multiple regression with an R script.  Yes, I'm happy to script the stats portion.

2)  Steve and I recently discussed and identified problems with automated deck analysis in this thread.  In particular, many builds are suboptimal at a glance (ie. Exclusion of Mana Crypt from MUD), but sample sizes are not large enough for an algorithm to realize that.  While it's perfectly reasonable to automatically generate forums for discussing differences in Standard Jund builds including significant statistics on the differential winningness of making one choice over another, this is unreasonable in Vintage.  For example, a forum would include a single topic on an aggregate "best" list and a second topic would start with only consensus cards (ie. 4x Bloodbraid Elf, etc) and link "branching" topics with a winningness analysis and summary of both.  That way players can discuss whether or not a particular choice is wise in the context of a shifting meta, but with the present "best" choice firmly presented and grounded.

2a) I hear that you're one of the Cockatrice developers.  A patch on the cockatrice server that fed all public games and decklists back into a database would give us plenty of data for this.  Compare that to a top8 where we only get to observe 7 matches' outcome.  Again, I'm happy to script any and all stats.

3) There's a longstanding misunderstanding on the authority of top8 matches.  In particular, the insignificance of "who won" seems to elude many.  Yes, stats are hard, but TMD's moderation staff needs to start giving warnings for denial of math.  Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but TMD permits criticism of facts.  It's as asinine as arguing that Owen isn't really the world champion because you weren't there to see it.  I'm happy to work with other mathy users to write a stats primer that can be linked during discussions and serve as the basis for moderation.  Simply put, denying facts cannot be tolerated, but I understand that we need to first establish them.  I'm happy to accept a moderator position limited solely to linking a community-written stats primer in bold, red text.

[Tha Gunslinga]

Do you have any evidence for your claim, Marske, or is it just your opinion?  Because I think that overmoderation is the "deadening stink" on this forum.  Most of the people who would agree with me don't even bother posting much of the time.  I already discussed this previously, so I'm not going to bring up my "problems with TMD" list.

[Diakonov]

Are you talking about the Deck Discussion forum?  That's what this seems to be targeted at.  I mostly browse everything except that forum on TMD, and I've noticed no stink.  Other than the Magic Psychology thread, the Strategy forum has only been active with speculation on spoiled cards.

[Juggernaut GO]

Sorry to say, but no one really gives a fuck.  It is no longer 2004, and this website is about as fresh as a Styx reunion tour with 1 original band member performing.

This place is ONLY used to advertise upcoming tournaments, the rest is just nonsense.

[vassago]

blah blah blah

I don't want to sound sarcastic, but you're complaining about the content when there really isn't any to begin with? This site is kind of dead for the most part. I get excited when some one actually posts something, regardless of how much it may or may not suck when in regards to the standards of the website.

I do like the quality of your post though, and it does raise interesting points, but not everyone is going to care as much to put any actuall effort into posting. Which is sad, but whatever.

Sorry to say, but no one really gives a fuck.  It is no longer 2004, and this website is about as fresh as a Styx reunion tour with 1 original band member performing.

This place is ONLY used to advertise upcoming tournaments, the rest is just nonsense.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

[Eastman]

I mean I'm pretty happy with where we are.  In the wake of official support for Legacy that many including myself thought would destroy the format, a diminished but nonetheless active T1 community has remained.  TMD has helped hold things together by being a central place to advertise and dissect tournaments.  People also still talk about deckbuilding as well.  So I guess I don't really smell the stink.  

Nor do I think the level of moderation has a lot of impact on the quality or frequency of posts.  From what I've seen the people who actually get moderated tend to post even more (usually throwing in barbs as Travis did above).  Moderation is an easy target for what goes well or poorly on this site, but as long as I have been here the quality of discussion has always reflected the state of vintage in general and has ebbed and flowed with the meta and cardpool.  Granted the existence of TMD as THE vintage site on the internet helps enormously to maintain the format.  But within that I don't think we as mods are game-changers.  

[Suicideking]

Make the Carps Mods.  That would make the site instantly interesting, and I bet a lot more people are posting. 

[emidln]

AD,

Nobody is parsing my deck database because I'm not publishing the results that I pull in from the web right now due to lack of time (starting a new job). If someone with knowledge of python (I'm using Django) and/or javascript (JQuery) has some time and wants access, by all means let me know because I hate to see the data not being used.

[Daenyth]

Do you have the software posted anywhere like github or sourceforge? I'm sure other people would volunteer to help out..

[AmbivalentDuck]

AD,

Nobody is parsing my deck database because I'm not publishing the results that I pull in from the web right now because I haven't had time to work on my software since starting a new job.

Unfortunate.  

Do you have the software posted anywhere like github or sourceforge? I'm sure other people would volunteer to help out..

I'm volunteering.

[Daenyth]

I'm familiar with python and wouldn't mind having a crack at it.

[Rico Suave]

The website doesn't make itself.  A lot of the people who were putting time and effort into this website no longer are doing so, either because they are no longer playing this game, don't care enough to put in the effort, they have found somewhere else to talk, or genuinely have nothing to say.

In order for this site to succeed, it requires people to come in and fill that void of missing people.  But not just anybody can fill it either.  I'm sorry but not everybody can just start producing quality material.  And we don't even have to look beyond this very thread to see that lack of quality has been spreading like a disease.  And like a disease, once it has taken hold it changes everything around it and becomes very difficult to exterminate.

[nataz]

The world is infested with an illusion of self importance.

please tell me this thread is some kind of meta joke


edit

This thread is amazing on so many levels.

seriously though, I'm sure the OP had good intentions but take a moment to look at his past posts. You have to go back to last November before you get anything remotely related to a quality strategy related post. Now to be fair, you'd have to go back about 4 years (or more!) to hit anything quality by me, but I didn't start this thread.

If anyone is curious on how to improve TMD (besides getting rid of the silly number of layers!) model yourself after one of the best things to happen to vintage in years -  Matt fucking Elias.

The man obviously plays a TON of vintage, and on top of that shares what he finds. This is opposed to the 95% of TMD (myself included) who either post but don't really put the hours in, or put the hours in but don't post. Fuck appeals to authority (most of the people who think they are vintage "masters" are really just big fish in a small pond - average at best), if you want to be taken seriously just play, practice, and post.

Take moment to read through Matt Elias's post history. He has recently, and I assume purposefully, been churning out tons content on TMD in every section. Not to mention the fact that he has managed to become a dedicated and REGULAR vintage write at SCG. He's like the old menendndlkasdlaian - circa 2006/7ish who not only put up excellent Vintage articles on SCG, but also started/instigated tons of strategy and discussion threads on TMD.     

/edit

[ReubenG]

I preface my reply with the fact that I am new to the forum (Sept. 2010), and to playing Vintage as a format.  I can't comment on a "stink" in the forum, as I have no reference to the past, but I come every day and many times hoping for more constructive discussion and information.  Don't get me wrong, I find a lot of good information, but it takes a lot of effort to separate the good information from the puffed up posturing.

The area that I find the most difficult to weed through the bad information to find the good is with Deck Discussion.  Too many times I see decks posted, with not much discussion on the whys and what for’s, and only backed up with I’ve tested it.  
I actually think that the difficultly of thoroughly testing a Vintage deck is so great that I ignore anyone claiming “I’ve tested  it”.  

I feel the reason for the difficulty of testing decks is the complexity of the game states and how much the win percentages can change on just the drawing of a single card in current game state.  Take standard for example (when I used to play it); I felt fairly comfortable with a deck and how it matches up against another deck in under 10 matches.   Playing 10 matches in Vintage in not nearly enough to get a feel for how a deck is fairing against another.  The singleton nature of the decklists, don't allow for enough of equally strong starting hands and draws to test effectively without a large sample size.  Making things worse is trying to get enough testing in with as many playable decks there are in Vintage.  Additionally compounding this is that in areas like mine were the Vintage scene is small and makes it hard to even find live testing (which is needed to effectively breakdown a test session).

I think the deck discussions need to establish a base build that is common to the strategy, with card choices to suit differing metagames.  I would rather see the discussion following to be different play states against opposing decks, lines of play, card choices to improve the decks position in that game state, and sideboarding choices/options.  I find too many of the deck discussions turn into why someone thinks the posters card choices are wrong and what card they should use.

What I feel really derails a deck discussion thread are the replies to a deck discussion that has an alternative decklist and “this is better I’ve tested it”, or “I’m playing this, what do you think”.

I would encourage a moderation of the Deck Discussions toward having a staring decklist discussed and only the original poster making changes to the original decklist.  If someone wants to post their list, start another thread.  If someone posts an alternative decklist, move it to its own thread.  Deck discussions need to be about the handful of slots that are changeable from the base build for that strategy, play discussion, and sideboarding for metagames, not a competition within the thread for the best version of the deck.

[honestabe]

Make the Carps Mods.  That would make the site instantly interesting, and I bet a lot more people are posting. 

[Marske]

Awesome, just like I expected, 3 things happend.

-The Trolls come out the woodwork because somebody posts something about making TMD a better place for everybody.
Hi, vassago, JuggernautGO, Tha Gunslinga,Suicideking, honestabe,  good to see you guys still haven't moved on from checking TMD to see if there's something to Troll. If the sites so goddamn horrible with the current people leading it, fucking leave already will ya...don't let the door hit you on the way out, you'll sadly will not be missed.

- People will start talking about something that isn't part of the subject of the thread (for once, it isn't the Dutch that do it)
Ambivilant Duck, your Idea regarding getting content to TMD was good, but this thread was meant to talk about people taking the responsibility of making an effort to post. Not about having decklists brought to you on a silver platter.

- Some people feel attacked and go on the offense
Hi Nataz !

So, with those obvious knee jerk reactions out of the way, I'll oblige you guys by responding to several of the points brought up (I'll ignore the Trolls because frankly, who gives shit about what they think anyway)

I mean I'm pretty happy with where we are.  In the wake of official support for Legacy that many including myself thought would destroy the format, a diminished but nonetheless active T1 community has remained.  TMD has helped hold things together by being a central place to advertise and dissect tournaments.  People also still talk about deckbuilding as well.  So I guess I don't really smell the stink.

I guess I have higher standards or preferences, I haven't seen a usefull deck discussion on TMD in ages.

Nor do I think the level of moderation has a lot of impact on the quality or frequency of posts.  From what I've seen the people who actually get moderated tend to post even more (usually throwing in barbs as Travis did above).  Moderation is an easy target for what goes well or poorly on this site, but as long as I have been here the quality of discussion has always reflected the state of vintage in general and has ebbed and flowed with the meta and cardpool.  Granted the existence of TMD as THE vintage site on the internet helps enormously to maintain the format.  But within that I don't think we as mods are game-changers.  

Agreed. Although the State of Vintage is different from each person's perception. the NE crowd says Vintage is dead, the NYC/Philly crowd says Vintage is amazingly alive, and Europe, well, 300+ events says it all I guess.

The website doesn't make itself.  A lot of the people who were putting time and effort into this website no longer are doing so, either because they are no longer playing this game, don't care enough to put in the effort, they have found somewhere else to talk, or genuinely have nothing to say.

This is totally correct and at the center of the void that has been left by these people, nobody has stepped up and taken their place.

In order for this site to succeed, it requires people to come in and fill that void of missing people.  But not just anybody can fill it either.  I'm sorry but not everybody can just start producing quality material.  And we don't even have to look beyond this very thread to see that lack of quality has been spreading like a disease.  And like a disease, once it has taken hold it changes everything around it and becomes very difficult to exterminate.

This is true, there are however uncut gems in the rough, I'm of the opinion that TMD should try to promote good posting behavior, get people to think etc. Good posters / players will eventually be filtered out again.

And now, the big one.

The world is infested with an illusion of self importance.

please tell me this thread is some kind of meta joke

No it's not a joke.

This thread is amazing on so many levels.

seriously though, I'm sure the OP had good intentions but take a moment to look at his past posts. You have to go back to last November before you get anything remotely related to a quality strategy related post. Now to be fair, you'd have to go back about 4 years (or more!) to hit anything quality by me, but I didn't start this thread.

Yes, you have to go back to November 2010, why ? Let me do the "Menendian" and quote myself:

My appeal to the community is to devalue your own opinion, take a step away and look at outside evidence. If you cannot provide evidence for your statements, then how do you know you are right? Please consider not posting at all. And if you actually have evidence, then please share it, else we might not be able to tell you from the scrub two posts down.

I haven't posted any quality strategy related post because frankly I haven't played Magic since October 2010. I haven't touched a single card or tested a single match. So I have nothing to say... I could have started a lot of threads about strategy, could have replied a lot to stuff that was posted on TMD based on my experience and knowledge and made entire essay's of posts and be all elitist-know-it-all. I didn't, because I wouldn't have been able to back anything up. I have no intention of testing or playing again in the near future. So don't expect a lot of "quality" content from me

If anyone is curious on how to improve TMD (besides getting rid of the silly number of layers!) model yourself after one of the best things to happen to vintage in years -  Matt fucking Elias.

Can't argue with this!

The man obviously plays a TON of vintage, and on top of that shares what he finds. This is opposed to the 95% of TMD (myself included) who either post but don't really put the hours in, or put the hours in but don't post. Fuck appeals to authority (most of the people who think they are vintage "masters" are really just big fish in a small pond - average at best), if you want to be taken seriously just play, practice, and post.

Also agreed.

Take moment to read through Matt Elias's post history. He has recently, and I assume purposefully, been churning out tons content on TMD in every section. Not to mention the fact that he has managed to become a dedicated and REGULAR vintage write at SCG. He's like the old menendndlkasdlaian - circa 2006/7ish who not only put up excellent Vintage articles on SCG, but also started/instigated tons of strategy and discussion threads on TMD.  

You do realize Matt Elias is on the same Vintage Team as I am right? You also do realize that most of those opening posts are copy pasted DIRECTLY FROM OUR TEAM BOARDS... in hopes of getting more quality content to TMD... Now we could move entire multiple page threads onto TMD if we so choose. But frankly, I'd rather have people think for themselves then rely on us / Meandeck / <insert other team> to do the work for them.

Innappropriate content struck - Eastman

[AmbivalentDuck]

- People will start talking about something that isn't part of the subject of the thread (for once, it isn't the Dutch that do it)
Ambivilant Duck, your Idea regarding getting content to TMD was good, but this thread was meant to talk about people taking the responsibility of making an effort to post. Not about having decklists brought to you on a silver platter.

The spirit of my comment was that I believe you've highlighted a problem of elusive facts.  While you believe posting effort should go up, I'm suggesting that effort required to make a quality post should be decreased.  We share the same opinion about the problem at hand and merely disagree on how to solve it.  Also, I would certainly be more convinced that I should increase my posting effort if you addressed the content of my post and left rhetoric out of your response.  In particular, it is not apparent that asking for a larger community effort is intrinsically better than assuming the same effort and trying to make that go farther.

[voltron00x]

I will post tonight as TMD is not accessible from my work computer, but thanks for the kind words.  The best thing we can do for TMD is promote the format and site to drive traffic to both.

[Tha Gunslinga]

If the sites so goddamn horrible with the current people leading it, fucking leave already will ya...don't let the door hit you on the way out, you'll sadly will not be missed.

YOU made a thread about how horrible the site is.  I did not.  YOU need to stop talking about how horrible TMD is, then blaming other people for it.  If you would stop tearing down TMD, perhaps people would enjoy it more.
I understand this is a retort to a blatant flame, so no warning at all.  But I'm striking this content because we don't want this thread to turn into a back and forth about who sucks.  -Eastman

[Eastman]

Locked.  This thread is going straight to flameville.  No warnings issued. -Eastman


Edit: Unlocked.  I've cleaned things up a bit but want to state very clearly that any more ad hominem stuff and I am locking this thread back up.  This thread will be very closely moderated from here on out.  

[vassago]

Take your own advice, devalue your opinion.

Now, I understand you're going to dismiss this, because that's the general nature of self righteous indgination, but you're not helping or solving the issue by complaining about it. Your attempt to create a good thread about the issue, while a good idea and admittedly has some merit but I don't see the point really when you red text assault people who actually had some thing valuable to add (Duck, Nataz). If you're going to nerd rage, throw a hissey fit and abuse your mods powers like this, keep it to yourself next time.  Weren't you complaining about the post quality?  Though well written, I'm pretty sure you are failing to meet your own standards by sinking to our percieved level and replying in the fashion that you did. Good Job there Homestar.
I would ask, "what are you going to do about it," but in your last post you said :
 

I have no intention of testing or playing again in the near future. So don't expect a lot of "quality" content from me

So I guess since you're not going to be part of the solution, then you're obviously part of the problem, right? While, I am joking I do find it hilarious that you're going to add absolutely nothing.

[Eastman]

I've cleaned things up a bit but want to state very clearly that any more ad hominem stuff and I am locking this thread back up.  This thread will be very closely moderated from here on out. 

Locked. - Eastman

Note to Vassago: the red font and strikethrough in Marske's post was my way of indicating which content violated site rules.  I have used the same technique in your post above.