It seems that, in this forum, if you make a post that people don't agree with you get a terse response and then ignored. I would have thought that with a role playing game people would be up for some debate, but it seems that people are so set on their own views they can't take any form of disagreement.
Post in this thread or not, I don't care as I am leaving. Just think on it next time you ignore or flame someone, the loudest voice is not always right.
Well, since you're not coming back, I know you're unlikely to actually read this post . . . but eh, what the heck.
What took me a while to figure out about EnWorld was that unsubstantiated claims were going to be met with a healthy dose of skepticism around here. You have to be prepared to respond to someone who says, "No, I disagree with you, that doesn't fall in line with my experience and here's why," while also maintaining an attitude of reasonable objectivity and general good faith.
It's like we're the gang hanging out at a pub, arguing this or that because we genuinely enjoy both the argument AND the company. EnWorld generally isn't a place like a political rally, where you're planting your flagpole in the ground and saying, "THIS IS MY ARGUMENT! WHO'S WITH ME???!!" (Well, sometimes it's like that . . . but not often . . . and most of the time it's done tongue-in-cheek / for amusement purposes only.)
In other words, starting from intractable positions, generally responding in bad faith, and the usual interwebz "persona of snark" don't play well here . . . at all.
The other thing you have to learn is that there's a huge, huge swath of people here that have an ENORMOUS pool of experience to draw from (and I really don't put myself in that category, truthfully. I had some early, formative RPG experiences as a pre-teen, but my "core" RPG experiences really only started in 2003). That experience and perspective is a huge asset, but you have to be willing to put aside your preconceived notions about your own game, your own game preferences, etc., to really learn from it. You have to understand that entering a forum like this, you're actually entering an entire collection of preexisting conversations. There's very, very little in the RPG world these days that hasn't already been talked about, discussed, and digested. Acting as if you're the first person to ever "discover" or "stumble upon" a given topic or idea can come across as naive and ill-informed . . . and it took me a while to figure that out when I joined back in '09.
But more power to you in your pursuit of RPG nirvana!
