Youâve my word that this blogâll be primarily devoted to cute/amusing/cool video game stuff, mainly Mega Man related.
But this one I felt obligated to share. Sorry for the shift into seriousness.
Iâm a backer on Mighty No. 9, the kick-starter-funded âspiritual successor to Mega Manâ from Comcept. Itâll never be Mega Man, but Iâll love it anyway. Thereâs no polls or anything going on yet, so like most of the 67,226 backers I havenât been checking in on the forums.
Back during the kickstarter, Comcept promised that fans would get to give input through polls, surveys, and contests. They went a little further last week, hiring someone for the express purpose of checking the forums to watch for backer input and pass things on, our new âCommunity Managerâ (CM), Dina. When I got the email telling us about her appointment my reaction was âhey, thatâs cool. Thanks Comcept!â But I happened to see something that made me check the Mighty No. 9 tag here, and I got a bit of a surprise.
In the Mighty no. 9 tag thereâs a bit of a commotion, because some people have been saying that the few backers currently in the forums were giving the CM a sexist jerk welcome. And some people in the tag are saying that if people could just see what was happening in the forums theyâd realize it wasnât like that at all.
So I looked up my information yesterday and entered the backers-only forums. And Iâve got to say, my first reaction was to be deeply concerned. There were a lot of locked threads, and the threads that were locked seemed to be ones in which people were saying they didnât have faith in the new Community Manager, that there had been lies, that the thread-locking was unreasonable and that people were being censored. This was worrying. Clearly some people were concerned for legitimate reasons.
I dug a little deeper, and found out that there were threads intended to be THE threads for complaints regarding the staff and questions for the staff. Threads were being locked, not deleted, and people were being asked to post in the threads that already existed about the topic instead of making new ones. This didnât seem like good damage control to me, but apparently the forums are still in beta or something because a lot of mod options like stickies and thread merging donât seem to be working. Still, locking a lot of threads when people are upset is a very questionable move. Concern hovered in the air.
I dug a little deeper, pushing back past the threads that had been locked for being complaints about locked threads. Obviously that couldnât be the start of the problems. And let me just say, seeing a lot of locked threads is a pretty good reason for people to get a little wary. And that probably sums up things for a lot of the people that are upset, people that didnât push deeper, people who are just concerned because thereâs a lot of locked threads. They must be particularly furious some people are calling them sexist, when all theyâre angry about is a lot of threads being locked.
Further back, I found locked threads that werenât complaints about locked threads. They were threads in which people were upset that the new CM wasnât even a Mega Man fan. Let me repeat that: Comcept put someone in charge of the spiritual successor to Mega Man that wasnât even a Mega Man fan. She said so right here:
Well, okay, she wasnât actually in CHARGE of the game, but she was the one meant to pass on our input. And she said in her first email that she was a Mega Man fan but preferred X. How could someone who never played the games have a preference? So, based on that, sheâs clearly a dirty rotten liar.
Yes, they were absolutely right in thinking that she was a liar, based on the evidence they had available, which was the tweet someone had screencapped and showed everyone.
But I saw a couple posters pointing out that there were other tweets as well, ones that werenât being shown. Here:
Turns out that she may not have played Mega Man before the kickstarter, but since then she played through a few of the games. She might not have been a lifelong MM gamer, but sheâd played, and she wasn't lying when she acted like a fan. Actually she explained that a little here:
 So people were getting angry because it sure looked like theyâd been lied to by the CM, and thatâs a good reason to be angry. And the reason they thought theyâd been lied to by her was that theyâd been lied to by other backers.
Which made me angry. Because Iâm sure some of those people that got angry at her were just folks that felt betrayed, and were unaware that they were being manipulated into thinking that sheâd lied to them. And they had darn good reason to feel angry that people outside the forums were calling them all sexists, since they were just angry that their CM had lied to them and never played Mega Man, unaware that she actually had played it and was being honest to them.
I dug deeper. Okay, further back there were people that were angry at the CMâs appointment because way back during the kickstarter campaign sheâd said she wanted Beck (the main character) to be female. People were passing around a screencap of her saying that. Here it is:
Some of the complaints about that were less well-articulated than others, but a common one was that it felt wrong for Comcept to give them a CM that disagreed on Comceptâs basic design vision for the game. It was very late in the game for someone to be pushing for something like changing the main characterâs gender and design, especially given her relative lack of experience with the franchise.
And then I noticed that in the midst of all the people getting angry, there were a couple people pointing out that the screenshot was misleading. Hereâs the next post sheâd made:
She had just meant it would be nice to have a âfemale-Beckâ option. Option. Not getting rid of male Beck.
So there were people worked up that the CM was trying to significantly change the gameâs artistic vision, unaware that the person or persons who said âlook at her trying to change Beck!â had left out the part where she said âjust as an option thoughâ.
So a good few people had gotten annoyed because it looked like the CM was going to try to remake the game in her own image. And they came to that conclusion because some other backers tricked them, leaving out the part where she said that wasnât her intention at all.
Hereâs the game she worked on by the way:
http://toucharcade.com/2009/12/28/plushed-quirky-and-beautiful/
I bring it up because some people have been saying she has no qualifications at all. She's got a degree from Kyoto University of Art and Design, and experience with game design.
And speaking of game design, the art style she uses isnât really one suited for Mighty No. 9. This got people concerned because someone had gone through her tweets and found a tweet where she said she was going to be a designer on Mighty No. 9. This sounded like backers had been lied to, since Comcept had promised it would be veterans working on the game. Some people were going around spreading this story about her being a designer despite her style being a bad fit, and despite the promises backers had gotten.
Then there was her explanation. Comceptâs a startup company, an underdog, when they hired her they said they might ask her for design input sometimes since sheâs an artist and theyâre not a big company. But sheâs not doing game design on Mighty no. 9. People got the wrong idea because they went through her tweets and started reading them out of context.
So there you have it. I thought about trying to get some people to calm down in there, but there were people already doing a better job of that than I could. And until they get the forumâs full coding working, a lot of comments are just going to end up getting missed. So I did this instead.
Go easy on the forumgoers. Some backers that have only just started participating on the boards are upset. Some of them are feeling hurt and offended that theyâre getting called sexist slime when theyâre just worried over threads being locked, and because they heard the game is being ruined by an unqualified individual appointed by nepotism, despite never playing a Mega Man game, who wants to remake the game in her own radical vision. And thereâs an even smaller group of genuinely terrible people that didnât bat an eyelash using deception to spread that rumor, in order to stir up discord in the backer community. But theyâre not representative of the whole. People really should have more faith in Comcept, but Mega Man fans have been burned so often itâs not surprising they start getting scared every time they see a matchbook. People in general just need to calm down.
yousharknotpass
baratheonpilled
dededos
blakekathryn
