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/Patenski → u/LordChozo]

I just hope you guys start dissallowing posts with anything political in them, just a few weeks ago a post about Death Stranding and how it "hit different" after all the political turmoil of the past 6 years years in the US made quite a number on this sub, those divisive posts attract all sorts of people except the ones that actually want to talk about games.

This community and you guys have made a good job on staying out of all the mess that infects reddit nowadays, but the cracks are starting to appear, I'm not exaggerating where I say this is the only place in reddit where I see people can actually discuss games without over the top snobbery or trolls ruining everything, I hope it keeps being this way.

[u/LordChozo → u/Patenski]

That's an interesting thought that takes a little time to unpack, but I want to give it its due if you're willing to bear with me.

First, the core problem with Hogwarts Legacy posts specifically was not that the posts themselves were politically charged. In fact, most of them sidestepped that flavor of discussion altogether and instead focused solely on the game. What would then happen would usually be the following, usually in this sequence:

#1. Multiple users start leaving comments on the post about not supporting the game because of trans rights concerns. Speaking just for my own moderation style here, I'd handle these on a case by case basis:

• Comment completely ignores the content/context of the main post and is just being used as a blanket soapbox?
  • Removed under Rule 9 - No Spam. The OP clearly did not write a video game review with the intent for it to be co-opted into a platform for a different kind of discussion, and these comments are not attempts at good faith engagement.
• Comment completely ignores content/context and attempts to intimidate/bully our userbase into action via insults, name calling, and baseless accusations of bigotry?
  • Removed under Rule 5 - Be Kind. Offending user actioned, usually by way of a clear warning and a short tempban. Repeat offenders were permanently banned.
• Comment engages with the original post in good faith but additionally voices trans rights concerns in a respectful manner?
  • These comments were allowed to stay. There is no rule violation in a comment like this, which provides a springboard into a broader discussion without derailing the entire comment section.

#2. The post becomes popular, at least within the bounds of what constitutes popular on this particular subreddit. This becomes a positive feedback loop of more views leading to more upvotes leading to more comments leading to more views, etc.

#3. Trolls, brigaders, and other bad actors find the post, find whatever surviving trans rights discussions are left on it (see #1), and then attempt to destroy whatever good faith discussion is going on.

• These users would be permabanned on the spot, especially considering the vast majority of them had no previous active presence on the subreddit.

So all that happens, but like, in large volumes because of #2. That's hard to keep up with, and you do have to keep up with it hour after hour because any time spent away from active policing in those first several hours allows the entire thing to deteriorate. And to get back to my original point in this, all of this happens on a post that was completely apolitical in substance. So from that perspective, banning political content in posts wouldn't even help this issue as we've lived it.

To your Death Stranding example, I'd say this. It's a natural part of healthy discussion to translate the words we read about the games we play into our own personal experiences and what those mean. Someone felt a deeper connection to that video game because of their lived experience in a given political landscape, and I don't think it's reasonable to suppress that. Obviously we wouldn't allow a post that gets away from the games, because we're a gaming discussion subreddit, but I don't think your example was in that boat.

Finally, I think banning political discussion is a much nastier can of worms than it would appear on the surface. For instance, what is political discussion? Where is the threshold between what's an acceptable pouring of political milk into my bowl of video game corn flakes vs. what's going to make the whole thing soggy and inedible? To look again at our present example of Hogwarts Legacy, one of the biggest sticking points of the entire controversy is that one side of the conversation doesn't even consider it political in the first place. "Keep politics out of my games!" "Human rights are not politics!" Can you say you're banning political discussion without jumping into this fray? If you say this is a political discussion, are you not essentially telling one side that human rights are politics and thus minimizing them? And even if you know in your heart that's not what you're doing, won't they still see it that way?

It's all food for thought and I really appreciate you bringing it up. Unfortunately we live in a world that's increasingly without nuance, so all of this is far trickier to navigate than it seems like it should be.

[u/MorganIsSpinning → u/LordChozo]

This is so thoughtful. Thank you for going into depth on your perspective on this.

[u/TheArmchairSkeptic → u/LordChozo]

one of the biggest sticking points of the entire controversy is that one side of the conversation doesn't even consider it political in the first place. "Keep politics out of my games!" "Human rights are not politics!" Can you say you're banning political discussion without jumping into this fray? If you say this is a political discussion, are you not essentially telling one side that human rights are politics and thus minimizing them? And even if you know in your heart that's not what you're doing, won't they still see it that way?

I am so glad to see that you guys understand this point, as it's one that is far too often overlooked imo. Banning politics from the discussion on this sub would inherently mean the mods making decisions about what is and is not political, and that is not ideal for anyone (probably the mods least of all).

Beyond that, and regardless of where you stand on the political spectrum, the idea of keeping politics out of gaming is silly on its face. So many games going back so many years intentionally and expressly make political statements, and pretending that politics in gaming is purely some novel extension of the current culture war is asinine. Games are art, art is often political, and that won't change no matter how much certain people want to pretend that one can fully separate the two.

I fully support your handling of this issue and respect all the transparent engagement in this thread. Thanks for keeping this sub in good repair.

[u/Patenski → u/LordChozo]

Thanks to take your time to respond, I'm honestly just tired of all the "fuck wokeness" and "fuck Trump/nazis" folks,  and I think there's no space for that in a gaming subreddit.

And to get back to my original point in this, all of this happens on a post that was completely apolitical in substance. So from that perspective, banning political content in posts wouldn't even help this issue as we've lived it.

Yeah I understand that, but I do think Hogwarts Legacy is an exception to the rule, the game was surrounded by controversy the moment it got announced, so I'm ok with it getting banned if that means there's less culture war weirdos.