Short answer: The administrators at the mtgsalvation forums successfully killed my passion for the game.
Long answer:
Since I started playing Magic the Gathering, some time in 2010 or such, I always found the complex interactions between different cards, and the difficult rules questions, very interesting. I quite quickly found the mtgsalvation forums, and the rulings forum was to me the most interesting one in the entire site. I loved learning the game there, asking questions, and reading other people's questions and the answers to them. It was extremely didactic, informative and interesting.
In fact, many of the posts in this blog are directly from questions that people asked in that forum (or questions I asked myself).
Eventually I became so acquainted with the rules that I could start answering people's questions myself. It was actually something I loved to do. In fact, no matter how simple or rudimentary beginner question it was, I loved to teach people the game, even the basics of the game. Be it an extremely complex question about an extraordinarily obscure interaction between cards that requires profound knowledge of the intricacies of the comprehensive rules, or be it just a simple question about how eg. trample works, I loved to answer those questions, and teach people about how the game works, at all levels. I would say that I knew the rules of the game better than most L1 judges (perhaps even better than some L2 judges).
There was one problem, though. Even though the mtgsalvation rulings forum would have been ideal for this kind of interaction between people asking questions about the game, and other people answering those questions, the forum was not run (and probably still isn't run) like that. It's much more draconian.
For one, the forum implements a rather draconian infraction system. I have never seen any such system being used in any other forum I have ever been to (there probably are some forums out there with similar systems, but I myself have never encountered any). If you violate the rules, you get an infraction. Get too many infractions, and you may be penalized in some way.
That all in itself wouldn't be bad. Sure, if someone insults somebody, or attacks somebody verbally, or harasses somebody, is overtly rude, condescending, or shows other form of inappropriate behavior, it's sensible to put a stop to such a behavior.
That's not the problem. The problem is that you could get infractions from the most innocuous things, and completely at random. For example, if you correct an error in somebody's answer, you could get an infraction for "nitpicking". Not consistently, though (which makes it worse). Completely at the whim of whichever moderator happened to be there at the moment. I witnessed over the months and years dozens and dozens, perhaps hundreds, of instances of somebody correcting someone else's erroneous answer, and seemingly completely at random perhaps about 10% of those corrections got an infraction. I swear there was no consistent pattern to it; it was completely random. (And no, in most of those instances it was not a question of somebody actually nitpicking about some complete triviality, like a completely inconsequential minor detail that wasn't relevant to the question at hand. Oftentimes the correction was completely valid and pertinent to the question at hand, yet some moderator still issued an infraction on it, even though you could find at the same time very similar posts with no infractions.)
What's worse, if you answer the "wrong" kind of question, even if that question is completely related to Magic the Gathering, you could get an infraction for "spamming". Yes, "spamming". For example, if a beginner player made a follow-up question to their original question, for example asking for an actual example of cards that do something related to the original question, and you answer that question, you can get an infraction for "spamming". It doesn't matter if the question is related to the original post in the thread, and the answer is 100% correct, you can still get an infraction.
As you may have guessed, I got myself infractions for precisely these kinds of things. Every single infraction was completely ridiculous. I never misbehave, I never said anything bad to anybody, nor attacked or insulted anybody, and all my posts were always on-topic, about Magic the Gathering, and the thread in question. The "worst" offense I ever did was making, completely by mistake, a reply post that wasn't actually an answer to a question that was being presented (the post was something akin to, paraphrasing, "wow! that's a really cool flavor!". I made the post by mistake because I thought I was in the general forum rather than the rulings forum. Explaining the mistake to the moderator didn't help. The infraction stood. No mercy, no leniency, no understanding.)
Because of all these random infractions, for the most ridiculous of things, the climate in the rulings forum was always really oppressive. You could never anticipate when some random moderator would randomly decide to give you an infraction for the most ridiculous of reasons, no matter how on-topic, proper and correct your post may have been.
And I got banned from the rulings forum because of these infractions. In particular, the last infraction I got before the ban was precisely what I described above: A beginner asked a question about whether something worked with some particular card (I don't remember the details because it has been so long, and I obviously have no access anymore), and the answer was no. He then made a follow-up question asking if there are any cards for which that thing works. The question was completely on-topic, related to the original question, and related to the game. I answered, completely correctly, by giving an example of a card for which that thing worked.
Completely at random, a moderator decided to give me an infraction for "spamming".
That labeling of "spamming" has always irked me. Actual, real spam was always a problem in the forums, with spambots flooding the forums with spam posts (ie. those kinds of automated posts that advertise all kinds of products and so on, that are completely unrelated to anything in the forum). Whenever I saw such posts, I diligently reported them for being spam.
By labeling someone's answer (correct answer, may I add) to someone's question about Magic the Gathering as "spam", that's in essence calling that post worthless garbage. I always felt it as an insult. I always posted to try to help people, and these moderators were labeling my posts worthless garbage, and giving me an infraction because of them, even though the posts were always on-topic, and never out of line.
I had complained about this, in private, to the moderators in question several times in the past. I did so this time as well.
I obviously cannot know what happened behind the scenes, but I suspect that this particular moderator decided to teach me a lesson, and convinced the other staff to ban me from the rulings forum.
And mind you, this ban came completely out of the blue, and was permanent. No warnings, no grace periods, nothing. There was no warning like "if you keep doing this, you will be banned". It was not a temporary ban to teach me a lesson. No. No warnings, nothing. Completely out of the blue, a lifetime ban from the rulings forum, with no possibility of appealing the decision.
And why? Because I answered somebody's question about Magic the Gathering.
The rulings forum was the main reason why I was a regular visitor of the site in the first place. As I described in the beginning, I was very passionate about the game and its rules, and I loved to ask, read and answer questions related to the game. Banning me, permanently, from the rulings forum was in essence no different from banning me entirely.
I tried to appeal to reason in the proper appeals thread. It made absolutely no sense to ban someone (and ban them permanently for that) for answering people's on-topic questions about the game. It made absolutely no sense for the forum rules to punish people for answering people's on-topic questions.
What I encountered in that thread was a completely unwavering hive mind. Something like 4 or 5 site moderators and administrators participated in that discussion, and they all behaved like clones of each other, repeating the same mantras about the forum rules, and never conceding anything, never presenting any dissenting opinions, or anything.
At one point I posted a list of something like 5 questions to these moderators. These were questions like (paraphrasing): "Should the purpose of the rulings forum be to teach people how to play the game?" "Should people be able to correct errors in other people's answers without the fear of receiving an infraction?" and so on. Not a single one of those moderators answered even a single one of those questions, even though I asked them to do so several times. They completely ignored the questions, repeatedly.
It's hard to describe the atmosphere in that discussion, but it really felt like speaking to a hive mind, or a cult. The forum rules were absolute and unchangeable, and the moderators were always right when implementing those rules and giving infractions, and at no point did any moderator present even the slightest sign of dissent towards the others, or of understanding and leniency towards me. Even a simple request of them stopping labeling people's clearly non-spam posts as "spam" had absolutely no effect. Even that one word could not be changed in the rules.
It became quite clear that I was permanently banned, with absolutely no possibility of appeal, and they would not listen to any reason or arguments. So I just got fed up and got myself completely banned from the site. It made no difference to me, since if I was banned from the rulings forum I could just as well be banned from the entire site.
I could have easily created a new account. In fact, a year or so after that incident I did exactly that, just to try if it would work, and there was no problem. I created the account, and could post just fine. However, I never used that new account for anything but a couple of initial posts.
This whole incident with the forum administrators just killed my passion for the game, and my desire to keep interacting in the forum. The oppressive nature of the rulings forum, and the amazingly oppressive cult-like behavior of the administrators, somehow just gave me a really bad taste in the mouth to even think about participating in the forum anymore. Even though I read through posts in the rulings forum a couple of times, the passion, the willingness to answer people's questions and teach them the game, just wasn't there anymore.
And the amazing thing about all this is that the mtgsalvation forum is, in essence, the only viable MtG forum out there. In the past Wizards of the Coast had their own forum for precisely this kind of thing, and it was quite awesome. People would ask sometimes really complex questions, and sometimes quite long threads discussing that situation, and its implications, would ensue. (In a few instances I even witnessed such a question resulting in actual rules changes in the game.) But then WotC, for some reason, ended that forum. And mtgsalvation became the only viable forum out there. (There are, of course, myriads of smaller MtG related forums out there, but they are usually very small and not very active. And many of them have even more draconian rules, such as not allowing anybody to answer any questions in their respective rulings forums.)
Given that lately the MtG community has been slowly been overtaken by social justice warriors, making the whole community even more oppressive, I suppose I don't even long back anymore. It's just not for me. The mtgsalvation administrators killed my passion for the game, and now social justice warriors are killing the community, so I suppose that's it. It's just not for me.
But it's a shame, really. I loved creating these blog posts.
