I was browsing other card game sites and forums as I am wont to do, and AEG's forums just really made it sink in how great it is to not have to deal with inane and arbitrary rules and enforcement here. So, thank you FFG. I just wanted to say "Good job" in that department.

So for the record, locking topics that have already been discussed once upon a time is bad.

Locking topics for "thread necromancy" is bad.

Those two rules together is..... probably a combination for a very difficult time to discuss anything.

Wow - do other sites really do that? What the hell - newbies are always going to ask about "topics that have already been discussed". You'll turn posters off with such an attitude. How asinine.

You're right, Will - the mods around here do (and pretty much always have) done a great job letting this board flourish. Of course it hasn't been too tasking of a proposition until very recently, but still you catch my drift.

Oh yes, go take a look. Shouldn't take too much browsing to find locked topics. I think I saw four on the front page last night when I was browsing.

Also, yes, I agree, but on the even more positive side, isn't it great to have quite a bit of discussion going on now? I hope we keep this up.

Kennon said:

I guess no one really wants to set up those rules and enforcements, it´s more like other forum operators are either forced by some third person to setup and control the rules they make or just see the absolutely necessarity because the rules of etiquette are ignored by the users and too many off topics come up which unwanted content. See, you can´t run a card game with customers age 10+ and have sort of sex threads etc. on the forums, that would naturally lead to complains.

So yes one the one hand a very good job FFG for keeping things easy and on the other hand thanks FFG for finding the right average customers for your card game which keep the forums free of unwanted stuff.

~ If someone was locking rules threads as "already asked...," I might be out of a "job."

Best way to keep the discussion going is to keep participating!

At first I thought this was going to be a negative thread, but you're right these boards don't see alot of that kind of abuse, and even the negative threads are treated with respect (and, thankfully, there are less of those than there once was). It's taken almost 15 months to get the boards to this state, but it does seem like the community for this and other games is really succeeding, and FFG deserves thanks for this.

Those kinds of rules are basicly the hazing wall for n00bs.

The argument for them is that its lazy to just go in and post a question without looking through the boards.

Note: I am just pointing out the rationale, not justifying it. I like being lazy

It gets worse in say IRC, not only do you have to spell words correctly, speak in proper grammar, but if you annoy the mods, you can get banned from the channel, and if you annoy the server admin, you're whole subnet could get banned (it happens occasionally). Not to dissuade someone from trying out mIRC, after all many people put up with the trolls to participate in the oldest online community aside from usenet (which is dying/dead IIRC... unless you want to read spam).

And not to bash the AEG community, I know folks who play L5R (and so do some of you). It's another game thats dead around boston right now (as is everything non magic).

bloodycelt said:

The forum isn´t really what it used to be, usually it took only about half an hour to have one or more comments here refering to "Satg Lrod". ;-)

More seriusly, the correct grammar and spell words rule is of course also excluding a lot of the international audience. So this kind of rulings could be bad for buisness, at least if you take the FFG boards as a reference which seems to have a good percentage of non-US citizen forum users/customers. And naturally about 99 % of them misspell words or misapply grammar rules.

bloodycelt said:

Yeeahhhh...I have no idea what any of that means. Is that a facebook site or something?

JerusalemJones said:

Rofl, everyone assumes when I post something that it's going to be negative. Are you guys still holding that Blackfish/Hand of the King/ Cersei's Favor thing over my head?

I agree the AEG MOD's are really carried away, especially Ling, just one more reason why I have again left that community last year, that and I cannot support CCG's business model anymore.

Kennon said:

More like the "I hate the new layout of the cards! Waaaaah! :'("-Kennon

Staton said:

And he was serious?

Actually, yes, I was serious. And after trying once again last week to explain to a brand new player how to tell the difference between attachments and locations, I still stand by my belief that a couple of the work-in-progress designs that the later showed to us would have been better.

But current design is so pretty. Actually it's the prettiest I've ever seen.

Stag Lord said:

I can't tell if you're sarcastic or not. Since you are old enough to have possibly used the internet before AOL, Compuserve and Prodigy. (No I'm not poking fun at your age.)

IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat. The most popular client now is called mIRC, I was introduced to it when I was 12 as an easy way to download movies while they were in theaters. I currently use it to keep in contact with the fansubbing community and to occaisonaly contact the wizards across the pond in when i'm trying to compile (geek for a masochistic way to install software... ) their software and need help. Its basicly an incredibly old protocol for chat rooms, but because there is no single server and very little identity tracking, it has become sort of the seedy underbelly of the internet. Hence while legitimate services use IRC, you can also find pretty much everything and anything illegal on there if you know someone and where to find it. Nowadays many chat clients like Pidgin (GAIM) support IRC chat.

Compile: An arcane self-flaggelation ritual involving one inducing chronic neural trauma and stress as an alternate means of installing new software on a machine. See also : BSDM, IT Support, K-Mart Customer Service, Playing against Martell.

Kennon said:

I do think that the current design is aesthetically very pleasing but agree with you that the lack of any text stating what card type a given card is and the lack of anything delineating the text box is not conducive to teaching the game.

I remember how much fun I had when FFG first printed the ITE demo decks... :/ Something made me see this as a parallel to Ktom's Ned thread. You can think of card layout on a form v. function graph. And (assuming it's operating along the maximal efficiency boundary) I just wish this was a nudge or two closer to function.

It took me a while to get used to the new template, but I very much appreciate the new larger artspace... and esp. with how well Zoe (the art coordinator) has done at improving the overall quality of work. I think I was just attached to the original bolder background colors, and find the muted tones a bit to artificially "mature." Especially when you look at an old-format Targ card and see the scales in the background.

I do think that having the word "Attachment", "Location", "Character" even in the keyword/trait section would have helped.

Also... sometimes the colors stark/greyjoy lanni/targ/martel are too close. Granted I have a certain degree of color blindness (example... the red and green on the portals for arkham horror, they both look red to me... someone just recently pointed that out). But other folks have pointed that out. Honestly if FFG were to tweak the card layout/design again, may I suggest coloring the "white" borders too. ("Black" -> Targ, Greyjoy, Lannister "White" -> Stark, Baratheon, Martell)

Just an idea...

Did we actually lose ANY players over the border color flap? (one of the sillier tempests to blow across these forums).

*shrug* I think the border colors were just a case of one too many straws on the camel's back at the time.

Stag Lord said:

Us? Doubt it. CoC? Possibly. They were much more vehement about it than we were.

Playing Magic for a long time made me think that white borders looked ugly. Playing with the AGoT Core Set showed me that white borders can actually look pretty good. It's the mixture of different colored borders that is not aesthetically pleasing (in my opinion). Magic was primarily black bordered, while AGoT is now primarily white bordered. In my AGoT LCG decks now, it's the A Clash of Arms cards that stand out as the eye sores.

Also, just to add more anecdotal evidence to the impracticality of the newer card frames: when I first started playing with War of the Five Kings I had a hard time keeping attachments and locations straight at first. The presence of the Kingdom card frame in the mix really threw me for a loop. I also had no idea what was going with events until a friend explained them to me.

Maester_LUke said:

I do remember that first announcement with Aeron Damphair ITE in the new template and i still think that the uproar wouldn´t have been that big, if this very ugly picture of Aeron Damphair wouldn´t have been chosen for the presentation of the template.That was a dumb move in my book, there are so many great artworks that look great with the ITE template and for whatever reason that rough comic style Aeron was chosen for the presentation.

~And i will respond to that border change thing. :-)