If you teach chess to kids it's the same story. At that age the most important thing, by far, is that they're having fun. They'll pick up strategy whenever they're ready.
It depends a lot on the kind of wrath you include. Running all the four mana variants is very different than running something like Rout. Black also has a couple of recurrable aggro creatures, you seem to have included all I can think of off the top of my head.
Personally I'm a bit sad there's no echantment theme.
No worries. This is a case where a lot of people seem to have an agenda to spread wrong information or deny what's going on, it's easy to skim a thread or two and get the wrong impression. That's why I linked the professor's video.
It's not about people being mean, it's about people orchestrating a prolonged harassment campaign on top of the usual sexist bull***** that's going on anyway. Let's not pretend this is someone throwing their toys out of the pram.
It doesn't even matter if you cared about her cosplay either, that's just about the worst reason for a content creator to leave a community.
The Prof has a good video on the whole thing which also shows some of the vile stuff that's been going on. I'd recommend watching that before being sarcastic.
So far I see no reason to split this small community. Most of the rares that get played are about on par with peasant and it's not like the peasant+ stuff is drowning out the peasant topics.
If you play with people who play Magic for fun you'll say "I've got this cube, it's cool because it's only got commons and uncommons in it" and the then they'll complain about the rares in your cube and say they are too powerful, but they're going to be totally fine with Mum because she has a silver symbol. True story.
You're talking about mountain/molehill, but you make an awful lot of that one thread. I care less about the alpha/kaladesh thread and more about the kind of thing that happened to VariSami and me tbh, because those are instances where implicit community standards clash with the way the forum as a whole is moderated. Those are the kind of penalties that seem most out of place to me as a result. You also say we need to have a conversation, but the kind of moderation we've seen isn't about having a conversation.
I teach kids for a living. If you have a problematic kid, the first thing you do is talk to him/her, because you need a relationship with that kid to solve those problems. This is especially important if the events we're talking about aren't outright violations of rules, but borderline behaviour. If you want to enforce rules in a problematic group, the way you do it is you gather the group and come up with rules as a group. You draft a document with those rules and have people sign, so that, whenever someone violates them, you can point to that document and say "this is what we all agreed to."
Notice how at the center of it all is simply initiating a conversation as the person who has to maintain the rules? It's very different than going on a forum and reading the community guidelines or moderation standards. Not to harp on about it, but using the example _i0 cited, "More talk about Amonkhet / Pauper, less everything else." is not about initiating a conversation. Neither is dropping random warnings (which I call random, because that's what they will look like to people in borderline cases where community standards clash with moderation style because no conversation happened). _i0 can correct me, but if I read him right, that's what's bothering him. I didn't like it either. Again, part of this is that this forum doesn't feel like a big community to me, because I only frequent the P&P subforums, where we'd actually have the opportunity to talk things out because we are such a small group. It's not about creating more works for the mods either, it's as simple as rephrasing the sentence I cited above or dropping a pm instead of just slapping on a warning saying "two more and you're banned", especially in cases where the mods could recognize that the infraction was probably down to this neck of the forum woods being a different kind of community than say, the commander section.
It's not about us being allowed to shout each other down really.
As far as I can see pretty much everybody who has contributed so far has an appreciation for the kind of difficulties the moderators face when they're doing their job, even if there is disagreement. As long as that's true I can't see what's wrong with discussing recent moderation and our reactions to it, we're not bashing or attacking anyone here.
I've been flagged a couple of months ago for a sarcastic comment, but disputing it is kind of pointless.
Let's take VariSami's joke. I don't even remember it, but I've got a good memory and I've read the relevant thread a couple of times. Which means my brain took it in, didn't flag it for being remarkable and promptly forgot about it. Reading it now, I actually do find it rather funny, if only because we all know _i0 is frequently leaning in the direction of hyperbole and sepukku is an extreme act to match those extreme opinions. It's a joke based on what we know about _i0, it may be tasteless, but it's not actually a bad joke.
However, there's no point in trying to explain that kind of joke to a passer-by who happens to listen in. It'll always look bad. Moderation is a difficult job.
Handling it internally: I've been part of small communities without moderation and it really wasn't a problem. Sometimes people get passionate, but that's why we're here in the first place, isn't it? Sometimes people are a bit too sharp, but that's what happens to us in real life too. We generally know how to take it, because we know each other, so we shake it off or talk it out and move on without any need for moderation.
As for magnifying, it seems like we had a couple of instances lately, whereas the years before were extremely quiet. Not sure why that is. Ultimately in a small community like this our passion drives our participation. Having moderators stepping in and giving out warnings that seem kind of random and inappropriate in our context (even if I know why they happened) doesn't really improve the community. That's something that we (have to) do on our own. It's not like the community is dysfunctional by any measure.
Without context, trying to judge language is utterly pointless. "I'm riding your horse" can be a grave insult in the right circumstances. "He's so gay" used to be a way to say "what a jolly fellow". Without context there is no meaning.
We are such a small group here that we are much more familiar with each other than the average forum group, so it's really hard for moderators, who are essentially outsiders in this context, to judge where the line was crossed. A lot of the posts here would look totally different if the community was larger and we were less familiar with each other, so we're not using the same standards the moderators have to adhere to to keep the larger forum sections healthy. Sometimes that means harmless bad jokes get you flaming warnings, but I don't really see how that can be changed.
I feel like that, too. I used to love the PT drafts, but most recent draft sets have been very dependent on bombs and it's not even fun to wait for someone else to be crushed by a random topdeck. To be fair though, some of the sets in the last 4 or 5 years have avoided the problem, so they do know how to do it.
Hopefully the decision to stop pushing story characters into oblivion helps improve the situation.
The Third Power is fun, but is pretty much rare cube only and comes out like 4 times a year. Peasant or Pauper come up occasionally, but it's basically just a throwaway minute in between.
Disorganized Wizards Club is worth checking out, it's very spiky and they talk about anything you can play competitively, including limited.
"You can't cast cards with the same name [cardname]." or something similar.
Personally I'm a bit sad there's no echantment theme.
It doesn't even matter if you cared about her cosplay either, that's just about the worst reason for a content creator to leave a community.
The Prof has a good video on the whole thing which also shows some of the vile stuff that's been going on. I'd recommend watching that before being sarcastic.
If you play with people who play Magic for fun you'll say "I've got this cube, it's cool because it's only got commons and uncommons in it" and the then they'll complain about the rares in your cube and say they are too powerful, but they're going to be totally fine with Mum because she has a silver symbol. True story.
I teach kids for a living. If you have a problematic kid, the first thing you do is talk to him/her, because you need a relationship with that kid to solve those problems. This is especially important if the events we're talking about aren't outright violations of rules, but borderline behaviour. If you want to enforce rules in a problematic group, the way you do it is you gather the group and come up with rules as a group. You draft a document with those rules and have people sign, so that, whenever someone violates them, you can point to that document and say "this is what we all agreed to."
Notice how at the center of it all is simply initiating a conversation as the person who has to maintain the rules? It's very different than going on a forum and reading the community guidelines or moderation standards. Not to harp on about it, but using the example _i0 cited, "More talk about Amonkhet / Pauper, less everything else." is not about initiating a conversation. Neither is dropping random warnings (which I call random, because that's what they will look like to people in borderline cases where community standards clash with moderation style because no conversation happened). _i0 can correct me, but if I read him right, that's what's bothering him. I didn't like it either. Again, part of this is that this forum doesn't feel like a big community to me, because I only frequent the P&P subforums, where we'd actually have the opportunity to talk things out because we are such a small group. It's not about creating more works for the mods either, it's as simple as rephrasing the sentence I cited above or dropping a pm instead of just slapping on a warning saying "two more and you're banned", especially in cases where the mods could recognize that the infraction was probably down to this neck of the forum woods being a different kind of community than say, the commander section.
It's not about us being allowed to shout each other down really.
Let's take VariSami's joke. I don't even remember it, but I've got a good memory and I've read the relevant thread a couple of times. Which means my brain took it in, didn't flag it for being remarkable and promptly forgot about it. Reading it now, I actually do find it rather funny, if only because we all know _i0 is frequently leaning in the direction of hyperbole and sepukku is an extreme act to match those extreme opinions. It's a joke based on what we know about _i0, it may be tasteless, but it's not actually a bad joke.
However, there's no point in trying to explain that kind of joke to a passer-by who happens to listen in. It'll always look bad. Moderation is a difficult job.
Handling it internally: I've been part of small communities without moderation and it really wasn't a problem. Sometimes people get passionate, but that's why we're here in the first place, isn't it? Sometimes people are a bit too sharp, but that's what happens to us in real life too. We generally know how to take it, because we know each other, so we shake it off or talk it out and move on without any need for moderation.
As for magnifying, it seems like we had a couple of instances lately, whereas the years before were extremely quiet. Not sure why that is. Ultimately in a small community like this our passion drives our participation. Having moderators stepping in and giving out warnings that seem kind of random and inappropriate in our context (even if I know why they happened) doesn't really improve the community. That's something that we (have to) do on our own. It's not like the community is dysfunctional by any measure.
We are such a small group here that we are much more familiar with each other than the average forum group, so it's really hard for moderators, who are essentially outsiders in this context, to judge where the line was crossed. A lot of the posts here would look totally different if the community was larger and we were less familiar with each other, so we're not using the same standards the moderators have to adhere to to keep the larger forum sections healthy. Sometimes that means harmless bad jokes get you flaming warnings, but I don't really see how that can be changed.
Hopefully the decision to stop pushing story characters into oblivion helps improve the situation.
Disorganized Wizards Club is worth checking out, it's very spiky and they talk about anything you can play competitively, including limited.
I could probably do that, depending on what exactly you need/want.