I still use GameFAQs and post on boards that are now hidden because GameFAQs hopes they died off. A mod once told me I was the only reason a certain board had not been deleted. I made my account in 2000.
I don't post as often as I used to but the board I keep alive gets visited all the time by people who haven't posted in years. It's amazing when you see someone post that they are glad that place still exists and they just wanted to drop by and say hello. The community also helped me through the worst three years of my life. So I will continue to post until it's gone or I am.
I still use the FAQs and have contributed screenshots and videos to many obscure games that had none.
I like that everything looks really simple and you can easily turn off the image and video displays they added in recent years. We never had to deal with ten giant animated sigs loading up on a page back when AOL dialup was a thing.
Jesus Christ. Now there's a website I haven't thought about in like a decade. GameFaqs was hot shit in the early internet days. When YouTube didn't exist, and the best way to get video game info was magazines until this shit came along. I'd spend hours reading the user reviews and FAQs.
The boards never really appealed to me much, but I partook in a few of them. I assume now it's a cesspit of ulra-lefties, SJWs and tranny jannys? Plus the website was purchased by Gamespot, one of the most reprehensible video game "media" shitstains imo. Such a sad ending for a once great website, kind of like Something Awful in a way.
I remember back when CJayC said the site would never be sold to CNET!
People really cared about making very thorough FAQs instead of trying to Pewdiepie their way through an LP full of sponsorships from Skillshare or Audible ect...
I don't go to many of the boards. But I didn't have a ton of issues. Some of the more popular franchises are rife with autism. But that's a given anywhere. I did have fun with the Xbox One shills and the No Man's Sky and Mass Effect: Andromeda boards though.
I'm a good lil' egg and I have only received minor moderations for stupid things maybe four times. One was because I was having on ongoing "feud" all in good fun with a guy named El Fred. He reported me for flaming because I said he lived in a dumpster behind McDonald's. I got modded for that.
The other was for not posting a spoiler warning that Aeris dies. This was way before spoiler tags so you pretty much just wrote SPOILER WARNING followed by a bunch of vertical spaces and hoped when people scrolled past it they'd avert their eyes. I was in a thread talking to a couple people and I just didnot think it was a big deal. The game has been out for like five years at that point. For the love of God you had to spoiler warn that Zack dies in that PSP game. Crisis Core I think. And that Anakin was Darth Vader. Really? Come on that's a little much if you ask me.
The third moderation was for something so stupid that I can't even remember what it was for.
The last one was for insulting a twitard. Sorry if your stupid Stockholm Syndrome vampire novel sucks. The fact that it triggers you was worth the moderation though.
I posted worse about Andromeda, Xbox One and No Man's Sky on boards way more popular than the one the Twilight comment was on and nothing happened to me. Honestly, the moderation has always been weirdly unbalanced. But I don't do anything bad enough to risk an account from 2000 either. I've been there long enough to know how to play the game. But then again the internet has changed so much. The wild west days are indeed very much over. C'est la vie.❤
GameFAQs, hahahahahahahahahaha. Jeff "CJayC" Veasey is a faggot.
The GameFAQs forums are notoriously garbage, but their biggest issue is how they're moderated. Their moderation staff doesn't think for themselves like just about anywhere else, even fucking Reddit; they go strictly by-the-book. You couldn't cuss on there until just a few years ago, so even just typing "s***" would get you a notification, to let you know that you broke the "Censor Bypass" rule. Do that again within a short timeframe, and you'll be bumped up to a "Warning". But if time passes and the moderation expires, you'll only get a notification again.
This led the forums to be a toxic shithole where regulars skirt the rules all over the place, trying to provoke one another into getting in trouble. So, over time, most of the userbase became trolls, looking for any which way they can to piss one another off, ad infinitum. There's also a new feature where you can ignore other users, but you can't actually see who's ignoring you, so you could type up a reply, or even a PM, to someone only for them to just not see it, which kinda sucks since there's no way to know if you're wasting your time. They also discourage long-form posting, since everything purges out and gets locked so quickly. And despite how literally every video game ever made gets its own dedicated board, it's not really worth posting on any that are dead, since the two-weeks-to-lock rule still applies, and it might be months before someone else even sees your topic.
The crazy thing is, the social boards have remained largely unchanged for nearly two decades, with a lot of users with really old accounts posting on them. If there was one guy from GameFAQs who could be classified as a lolcow, it'd be MrDuckBear. I know he goes under different usernames, but he seems to be a severely autistic Asian man who registered his first account, "mrduckbear3" in 2000, and just homesteaded there, still posting nineteen years later. He drifts around various social boards, posts news stories, and acts generally... weird. Kinda like CWC, come to think of it.
There's also LUE, a board that was pretty much an early r/atheism that ended up getting quarantined for being a shithole. When the quarantine hit, you could only access it if you registered and requested access back in like 2003. It's still active. If you want access today, you missed the boat by about 16 years.
So here's a screenshot of it:
View attachment 1038712
You're really not missing anything.
I never made my account LUEable because I was stupidly mad at LUE over something. The mod tools went down for awhile one night leading to a glorious display of anarchy that we shall never see again. When the mod tools went back up bans as far as the eye could see! I mocked this and got spammed most rightiously elsewhere with the Unholy Trinity. The people were LUE regulars.
Looking back it was absolutely hilarious. But I was just annoyed then.
Oh well.
My friend started/was among the first to use the "moderator nazi" trend that led to nazi being a no-no word for awhile. He actually got banned for using the term to refer to the mods. I was far more lucky. But I heard others were banned for it too.
There used to be a user tool called Meta Mod where you could give feedback on randomly selected marked posts. I am not sure why they did away with it. Maybe too many people rated the moderation too harsh.
I've seriously put some footwork into trying to find him. Nobody knows.
It's GameFAQs, so people have said all sorts of crazy random stuff about him, including CJayC himself once claiming to look like Jeff Goldblum. In reality, he's remained a total enigma forever. I'm even suspicious that "Jeff Veasey" might be an alias.
The one solid piece of information I've ever seen on him has been that radio interview someone recorded ages ago:
Personally, I'm inclined to believe he's a gay white guy. Aside from his voice sounding effeminate, you weren't allowed to say the word "faggot" as early as 2001, at a time when "faggot" wasn't even considered a bad word in the public consciousness. There was another administrator that claimed to be his wife, "Shadotak", but information about her was even more scarce - I don't think we even got a first name. I don't remember a particularly noteworthy writing style, either, so Shadotak could have been anyone.
Though in the radio interview, it does sound like he has a Texas accent, and domain lookups back in the day pointed to the site being registered in Texas. So I guess he really is from there.
After he stepped down at some point, handing the site over to Allen "Sailor Bacon/SBAllen" Tyler (a man whose identity has never been a mystery), he just kind of vanished. Even the most insignificant people involved in the gaming industry have some kind of footprint, but Jeff Veasey never shows up on attendee lists for conventions, in the credits for any games, nothing. He's an enigma. That's why I think Jeff Veasey was an alias - he just vanished.
I thought the guy that beat up his mother was Xsquader
I remember emailing CJayC a few times and he always promply responded to me. One of those times was trying to get my flame war buddy El Fred unbanned. He overstepped his bounds somewhere. I missed our little wars and thought his ban was unfair. I can't remember why he was banned but it was likely a stupid reason. I was told it wasn't happening. That was the only time I ever tried to get someone unbanned. He did come back though under the name EI Fred.
I am fairly sure that CJayC posted a pic of himself around the time the site went to CNET or he handed the reigns to SBAllen. He also posted a pic of his girlfriend and I think a name was indeed given. But damn me if I can remember what it was. But I think those pics were on the home page for a short amount of time. I could be wrong.
However, what I do remember is the epic deluge of comments over her looks. Which of course led to bans. My friend who helmed the moderator nazi term was banned again (after amnesty for the original ban) for the stuff he said about her appearence. At the time there was a lot of anger from some people about selling to CNET after all those claims that it wasn't happening. So I think Shadowtak just ended up being collateral damage even though a looker she was not.
I would have to ask him if he remembers seeing the pics and if Shadowtak's name was ever posted. He might remember more than me because he was banned over it. But I can't even remember the exact year. It's probably longer than I think.
have no idea what actually happened to Jeff Veasey. I believe CJayC stayed on for a spell though. But I don't think he still posts. If he does it may be some other admin using the account. I looked through site related boards and don't see his name anymore. But I swear he did post in those boards for awhile or at least the account was being used.
