- Joined
- Jun 27, 2014
Special thanks to @CatParty, who was absolutely right in insisting this could and should be thread.
Waypoint, for the uninitiated, is the rebranded form of VICE Gaming.
VICE Gaming's rebrand took place on December of 2016, while hiring or maintaining pretty much the exact same people as who it had running VICE Gaming previously. Pretty much everyone on their hiring list was someone who was involved in some hilarious idiocy during the Autism Holy War and beyond it, from Mike Diver trying to start shit with Notch for mansplaining to Danielle Riendeau, an insane troon who has a long and glorious history of covering developers and outlets she's financially connected to. Almost every member they hired was involved in Game Journo Pros as well (the mailing list that confirmed said morons were in cahoots during the outbreak of the Quinn scandal, the attempts to bury which led to Gamergate).
So right out the gate, you're looking at the same caliber of nutter we get at Kotaku and Polygon (complete with mandatory Troon). The idea behind the rebranding, near as I can tell, was to try to distance VICE from its Gaming division, since during GG, the organized boycott campaigns fired off managed to cause serious hurt to Gawker and friends. They wanted to keep doing the ongoing whining about video games they've been doing for years, but VICE wanted a layer of deniability in the way in case they fucked up again. Which given the caliber of the talent on display is more a matter of when, not if, but I digress.
Like VICE Gaming before it, Waypoint became well-known for its incredibly close ties to NeoGAF. Numerous members of the staff (Patrick Klepeck most notably) are longstanding members of said website, and several are on ResetERA as well. In general, when NeoGAF wanted to launch one of their autistic witch-hunts, Waypoint was extremely quick to help them officiate it. This continued until NeoGAF ran aground in 2017, when it was suggested that Klepek knew about the various sex scandals involving NeoGAF's staff and intentionally did nothing about it, much as his Kotaku counterpart Jason Schrier had done. Good times!
In short: It's become a meme at this point that if you want the most retarded coverage of video games possible, Waypoint will fuck it up to the max for you every single time: Most of their fucking coverage has nothing to do with video games and everything to do with the same political BS and agenda-pushing horse-shit that nobody fucking asked for.
This quality of journalism has served them well, to the point where they've been laying off their own employees to cover costs.
But more relevant to this thread is Wayforward's forums - and good god, they are amazing in the sheer level of ineptitude on display. Jokingly referred to as Little NeoGAF by some, Waypoint's forums are a darkly fascinating and hilarious look at how to completely fuck up running a forum on every level.
God-Awful fucking formatting, a site layout that pathologically refuses to load correctly (seriously, expect your browser to need to be refreshed multiple times to get any topic to load), and a grotesque color scheme are the norm, but it's the simultaneous power-tripping and incompetent mod staff that are the site's hallmark. Indeed, if you look at Waypoint on only a surface level, you're likely to be taken aback at just how normal it seems compared to rampaging hives of Autism like ResetERA and NeoGAF.
And it's that contrast that really makes the forum. Whereas on ResetERA and NeoGAF pointing out that another user is being racist can get you banned for Racism, Waypoint's mods are often notoriously lax, often letting things go for days at a time before the report button gets mashed enough times for them to notice and the mod team shows up with the death squads. To give you a good grasp of the caliber of moderatorship on their site, take a good look at their code of conduct (emphasis mine in orange):
YOU ARE ALLOWED TO QUESTION NO ANECDOTE FROM THE OVERLORDS.
That last one is especially funny with how often Patrick Klepeck himself has been involved in harassing people,his shit in the Alison Rapp scandal, to his attempts to blacklist Kevin Dent, or the fact that Waypoint basically operated as NeoGAF's favorite attack dog until NeoGAF self-destructed.
The unusually lax moderation that's inexplicably backed up with overbearing force leads to an unusual situation on the site where conversations go on for days of being productive before the mod team swoops in and declares the thread verboten because it might hurt someone's feelings.
Similarly, any thread that risks actually allowing discussion to take place is also tamped down:
Probably my favorite example of the Mod power tripping in action is one in this thread.
All in all the forum pinballs between borderline-normalcy (by the standards of the people who run the site) to pants-shitting terror, with little middle ground, and everyone worried about what fresh hell the Admins/Moderators are going to subject them to next. Threads also automatically lock after three days if no one posts and they quickly get bumped off the mainpages, so it's actually surprisingly hard to keep an eye on the Autism as it's actively developing.
Still, there's amicable chances to find more and I suspect several will find its nonsense wildly entertaining - provided they can even get the fucking site to load and not 404 every few seconds.
Waypoint, for the uninitiated, is the rebranded form of VICE Gaming.
VICE Gaming's rebrand took place on December of 2016, while hiring or maintaining pretty much the exact same people as who it had running VICE Gaming previously. Pretty much everyone on their hiring list was someone who was involved in some hilarious idiocy during the Autism Holy War and beyond it, from Mike Diver trying to start shit with Notch for mansplaining to Danielle Riendeau, an insane troon who has a long and glorious history of covering developers and outlets she's financially connected to. Almost every member they hired was involved in Game Journo Pros as well (the mailing list that confirmed said morons were in cahoots during the outbreak of the Quinn scandal, the attempts to bury which led to Gamergate).
So right out the gate, you're looking at the same caliber of nutter we get at Kotaku and Polygon (complete with mandatory Troon). The idea behind the rebranding, near as I can tell, was to try to distance VICE from its Gaming division, since during GG, the organized boycott campaigns fired off managed to cause serious hurt to Gawker and friends. They wanted to keep doing the ongoing whining about video games they've been doing for years, but VICE wanted a layer of deniability in the way in case they fucked up again. Which given the caliber of the talent on display is more a matter of when, not if, but I digress.
Like VICE Gaming before it, Waypoint became well-known for its incredibly close ties to NeoGAF. Numerous members of the staff (Patrick Klepeck most notably) are longstanding members of said website, and several are on ResetERA as well. In general, when NeoGAF wanted to launch one of their autistic witch-hunts, Waypoint was extremely quick to help them officiate it. This continued until NeoGAF ran aground in 2017, when it was suggested that Klepek knew about the various sex scandals involving NeoGAF's staff and intentionally did nothing about it, much as his Kotaku counterpart Jason Schrier had done. Good times!
In short: It's become a meme at this point that if you want the most retarded coverage of video games possible, Waypoint will fuck it up to the max for you every single time: Most of their fucking coverage has nothing to do with video games and everything to do with the same political BS and agenda-pushing horse-shit that nobody fucking asked for.
This quality of journalism has served them well, to the point where they've been laying off their own employees to cover costs.
But more relevant to this thread is Wayforward's forums - and good god, they are amazing in the sheer level of ineptitude on display. Jokingly referred to as Little NeoGAF by some, Waypoint's forums are a darkly fascinating and hilarious look at how to completely fuck up running a forum on every level.
God-Awful fucking formatting, a site layout that pathologically refuses to load correctly (seriously, expect your browser to need to be refreshed multiple times to get any topic to load), and a grotesque color scheme are the norm, but it's the simultaneous power-tripping and incompetent mod staff that are the site's hallmark. Indeed, if you look at Waypoint on only a surface level, you're likely to be taken aback at just how normal it seems compared to rampaging hives of Autism like ResetERA and NeoGAF.
And it's that contrast that really makes the forum. Whereas on ResetERA and NeoGAF pointing out that another user is being racist can get you banned for Racism, Waypoint's mods are often notoriously lax, often letting things go for days at a time before the report button gets mashed enough times for them to notice and the mod team shows up with the death squads. To give you a good grasp of the caliber of moderatorship on their site, take a good look at their code of conduct (emphasis mine in orange):
Rule 1 said:
YOU ARE ALLOWED TO QUESTION NO ANECDOTE FROM THE OVERLORDS.
Rule 2 said:
That last one is especially funny with how often Patrick Klepeck himself has been involved in harassing people,his shit in the Alison Rapp scandal, to his attempts to blacklist Kevin Dent, or the fact that Waypoint basically operated as NeoGAF's favorite attack dog until NeoGAF self-destructed.
The unusually lax moderation that's inexplicably backed up with overbearing force leads to an unusual situation on the site where conversations go on for days of being productive before the mod team swoops in and declares the thread verboten because it might hurt someone's feelings.
Similarly, any thread that risks actually allowing discussion to take place is also tamped down:
Probably my favorite example of the Mod power tripping in action is one in this thread.
Predominantly, the thread, up until the point, is 99% the same six or seven users circlejerking over why they think people don't like feminism. At this point, a brash but comparatively gentle-natured dissenting voice pokes its head in:
Something very interesting happens: Other users agree.
Indeed, this even gets some positive nods from one of the moderators. And then, like clockwork....
...All productive discussion is quashed because god forbid anyone acknowledge that the great work that is Third Wave Feminism is in any way flawed.
Something very interesting happens: Other users agree.
Indeed, this even gets some positive nods from one of the moderators. And then, like clockwork....
...All productive discussion is quashed because god forbid anyone acknowledge that the great work that is Third Wave Feminism is in any way flawed.
All in all the forum pinballs between borderline-normalcy (by the standards of the people who run the site) to pants-shitting terror, with little middle ground, and everyone worried about what fresh hell the Admins/Moderators are going to subject them to next. Threads also automatically lock after three days if no one posts and they quickly get bumped off the mainpages, so it's actually surprisingly hard to keep an eye on the Autism as it's actively developing.
Still, there's amicable chances to find more and I suspect several will find its nonsense wildly entertaining - provided they can even get the fucking site to load and not 404 every few seconds.
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