This community used to have a large, highly intelligent, and vibrant Microsoft community early in the generation. It was however culled away by biased moderators. Who were corrupted, because they were convinced to intervene in the whole console war games. They not only favored one side, and banned to aid that side. They created forum rule sets, and shadow rule sets that benefited one side over another. Once that happened the side that took the most abuse abandoned the site, and sullied its reputation in communities they moved into.
Basically we had a contingent of Sony Care Bears on these forums. You have to understand that Care Bears aren't necessarily interested in a clean fight. They are only interested in having a equal chance of winning a fight. Even if they don't put forth the effort, or even have the facts on their side. To them if that means rigging the system to handicap the other side then that is what has to be done. They played the role of victim, and they conned moderators into fixing their little fights so that if the other side of the debate came out on top. It still lost, because a few posters on the other side would get banned. So that the Care Bears could claim they won, or their was in fact a tie.
Needless to say most respectable posters want to win or lose on merit alone. They don't need to win to have a sense of real accomplishment, and they don't take losses personally. To them even if the team they are playing for loses. They can still claim to have scored some good points. However once you start cheating them, or punishing them for doing a good job. Then they do take it personally. Since the Care Bears focused most of their manipulations against the Microsoft contingent most of them were forced out of this community. That isn't to say that in the end they weren't the only losses, or even the worst loss.
Thanks to their antics we ended up losing a number of contingents on this site. The Care Bears ended up dragging what was left of the Sony Defense Forces with them when they ended up being culled themselves. The Nintendork population went through the floor, because they lost the Microsoft retro gaming contingent they talked with. We even lost a lot of our genre specific groups, because we ended up losing the critical mass to support them.
I am not saying that the Microsoft contingent was ever as big as the Sony contingent, but it was easily three quarters of the size of the Sony contingent at the beginning of the generation. Which as far as debating was concerned was pretty even. Can we get back to that I absolutely think that we can. When the next generation of Sony and Microsoft consoles come out we should see a big influx of new faces. That should dwarf the current population of these forums.
To me the only question is have we learned from the past, and that does kind of concern me. Even though we lost the corrupt moderators ages ago, and those Care Bears who played the system rather then the game ages ago. We are still a little too soft for the kind of debates that are going to be coming. I am afraid we are going to fall back into the same trap that ended up just ravaging this community. I can easily see a number of posters on these forums taking up the Care Bear mantle, and finding a way to replay the whole scenario all over again.
It isn't just the Microsoft contingent that suffered, because of that whole fiasco. It may be the most obvious sign, but what was really lost was the competition that made the conversation better. All we need to do is be welcoming, and more importantly we need to recognize that the whole console war thing is just a game we are playing. The goal may be to win, but the point is to have fun playing the game. I think everyone on these forums should recognize that a small Microsoft contingent isn't a good thing for any of us. If we realize that a well balanced community is actually in our best interest. Then we probably won't be all that tempted to fall back into bad habits.
