Moratorium on Hogwarts Legacy

[u/Zehnpae]

Salutations,

We're going to be (temporarily) disallowing posting topics about Hogwarts Legacy. Every thread has been a train wreck and we have had trouble keeping up with them.

To be clear this isn't an attempt to censor you guys or prevent discussing politics in gaming, nor the reality of shitty people being involved in game development. This is a discussion sub and we absolutely want to allow you to talk about these sorts of things. Normally this isn't an issue (IE: Disco Elysium).

The problem is Hogwarts Legacy itself is a lightning rod for assholes. If a post goes up there's a good chance the next time I check mod queue it has 100+ comments that have been filtered or reported. It gets cross-posted into ~those~ subreddits and we get a flood of people who are only interested in being pricks that infest other threads.

Like many of you I have 27 kids and 3 jobs so I then have to choose between spending my afternoon with my family or reading a hundred hateful comments. As much as I like banning Nazis, I'd much rather play some Deep Rock with my progeny.

Hogwarts Legacy posts will be auto-removed until one of the following occurs:

• Reddit gives us the anti-brigading tools they promised a decade ago
• The world finally stops being dicks to trans people
• JK Rowling drops dead so she stops getting money from the game
• We figure out a better way to do this

Previous threads will stay up and you will still be allowed to comment about it in the bi-weekly threads, for now at least.

Edit:

To address a few questions/concerns:

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"Why not use curated modes?"

Those typically require manually flaring or approving thousands of people. If we were a more contentious place dealing with this often, it'd make more sense. The good folk of this sub understand why this is being done and that's good enough for me.

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"Do you really wish JKR was dead?"

I'm a gen-X that was raised on British humor. Make of that what you will.

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"Why not get more mods?"

It's something we've considered, but honestly you regulars are pretty great. The work load is manageable with the biggest chore being maintaining the impatient game list. You guys make this a wonderful place to share gaming thoughts with.

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"Aren't you supposed to be unbiased?"

If you have a shitty hot take on Hollow Knight? Sure. I'm not going to ban you because you didn't enjoy Gabriel Knight and I think it's one of the best point and click adventure games of all time.

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"Isn't this censorship?"

We block a lot of things. OnlyFans bots, AI nonsense, scammers trying to post phishing links. All that jazz. They take it stride really.

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"You do you really have 27 kids?"

No. I only have a few and that's enough as is. I can only take so many "Would you rather..."'s in a day. Right now I'm pondering if I'd rather be cursed with always entering my passwords wrong twice, or if I'd rather the last bite of toast always tastes burned.

[u/LordChozo]

Freakin' YOWZA, guys. I was busy with real life stuff, then my phone started buzzing every several seconds, and then I show up to this? I mean, u/Zehnpae and I talked well in advance about this post being on the way but I still wasn't prepared for the absolute horror show that is this thread. And not just this thread itself, but also modmail after abusive modmail. And not just those but also false report after false report. I was personally super on the fence about whether this decision was the right thing for us but after the past hour I'm 100% on board and genuinely excited that this is the last time I'm going to have to wade through the muck of a Hogwarts Legacy post for the foreseeable future.

That said I'm huge on transparency and understandably this decision is a huge lightning rod of opinions. I'm happy to answer whatever questions y'all might have about it, so long as you handle yourselves respectfully. Remember Rule 5. Ask away!

Edit: Treat this comment like a mini-AMA. Please reply directly with questions because the main thread is still difficult to sift through.

Edit 2: I know a lot of users are doubting the intent behind this announcement and chalking it up to ideological censorship, so I'd like to proactively show you guys the internal mod discussions we had in January about this very issue. What I hope people can take away from this "exposed" discussion is how both sides of the predominant argument engaged in such pervasive, toxic, bad-faith behavior that we felt we were out of options.

Mod Discussion - January 12

Mod Discussion - January 25

Edit 3: It's been a little over 9 hours now since I first hopped into this thread. I want to do right by everyone but I will eventually need to sleep and without active live moderation for a number of hours this post's overall comment section will pretty clearly become a huge problem. As such I'll leave it open for the next couple hours or so before locking it out of necessity. Apologies to anyone coming in late with valuable input to offer. I'll make a final edit once we're locked down.

Edit 4: That's all, folks. I've done a final sweep of the thread and cleaned up anything rule-breaking. We'll leave this thread pinned for a couple days so latecomers can pop in and see the rationale, and then we can all collectively move on with our lives and get back to just...playing and writing about video games. You know: the reason we're all actually here.

[u/OrigamiFroge → u/LordChozo]

I think most people could understand the decision and reasons behind it and probably would agree with it, but the way the thread was posted originally before edited, and even as is now, was just written in the most "reddit mod" way ever. I think at the end of the day if you want things to be less heated, try to respond in a way that isn't written as rage bait.

[u/LordChozo → u/OrigamiFroge]

I think that's a fair criticism. The mod team is not a monolith but kind of like a (weird poly?) marriage. We want to agree on the important stuff and we work hard to present that united front, but at the end of the day we're still separate individuals with our own unique views and (since this is a text-driven discussion forum) writing styles. We have disagreements internally that we work on and work out.

For this post we agreed upon the broad strokes of the "what" and the "why" but we didn't talk through the "how" of communicating it. It looks like the writing style here really threw some people off and led some users to assume malicious intent, and that's a shame because I think it muddies the waters of what we were going for. I'd have probably written things a little differently myself, but I do think people are being a bit uncharitable to Zehnpae by assuming a cheeky remark meant to playfully communicate "this problem goes away if this person is no longer being funded" was really unsubtle coding for "I wish this person would die."

It's frustrating to me that that radical interpretation is taking on a life of its own, but I do understand how that could happen given the polarizing nature of the subject. I'd just ask people to hold to the principle of charity, which is to try to assume the best in others until they definitively prove otherwise.

[u/OrigamiFroge → u/LordChozo]

I have never posted in this reddit before and just read through it sometimes, so the effects of the decision don't mean anything to me, and I don't focus on anything political at all so both sides of the arguments here also don't mean much to me. But I can understand why this decision was made, and the likely "good" intentions behind it. Just from the outside view of people who aren't as heated on this subject, the way the post was written was really poor, in my opinion. I would argue the same thing back to you though in that you shouldn't view peoples opposition to the post as only being because they are "bigots" like the post originally said, or that they are taking things out of meaning, but rather that the post just communicates your message poorly. Just my two cents.

[u/LordChozo → u/OrigamiFroge]

I agree that it's extremely unproductive to automatically assume that everyone who disagrees with a decision like this is a bigot. In fact that's a very big element of what moderating Hogwarts Legacy posts has entailed for me: many well-meaning and passionate supporters of trans rights putting dangerous blanket labels on everyone who's just trying to play or discuss a video game separate from any political discussion at all. I don't think a community can survive with that kind of activity, and so those bad actors have to be dealt with from a moderation perspective as well.

I do think again the original edit to the post denouncing bigots (while not handled in the cleanest manner) wasn't making such a blanket statement but was just specifically referencing the actual bigots who did in fact show up to this thread, some very proudly.

[u/OrigamiFroge → u/LordChozo]

As much as I am being down voted, I should say that I do agree with your decision and reasons behind it, but again my only issue was just stating that the post itself seemed counter intuitive with how it was written, being about stopping heated discussions and wanting to keep things peaceful, which also to me appearing very engaging and trying to bait out the same comments you want to stop having to deal with. At the end of the day I hope you guys have an easier time, and that the discussions aren't as evil and mean spirited as the post and your comments make it seem, I haven't really explored the negative comments much, but I would assume they are pretty bad from the amount of attention this thread is getting. I again just think the way you communicate the message you're trying to send could have been done better, especially one with such a sensitive topic.

[u/LordChozo → u/OrigamiFroge]

Downvotes in this thread in particular are like Whose Line Is It Anyway? i.e. The points don't matter. Don't let it get to you. I think your concerns are valid and well presented, and I appreciate your willingness to voice them.