Add new comment

The problem with official forums operated by a game's publisher / developer nowadays is that those companies do not want a place for players to discuss the game. They want a place that they can point potential investors / customers to and say "See? Our existing players like our product!". Along with this comes selective moderation, backed up by a catch-all rule like "trolling" to remove the "bad" ones and a "we cant view / moderate all threads" excuse to leave other, more positive ones (that might violate other rules nevertheless) on the boards.
It doesn't matter if a post is against community guidelines or not, what does matter is if a post casts a positive or negative light on the product.

What the companies haven't realized is that they cannot silence negative posts. If they are banned from the official forums, they will be posted in popular 3rd-party-forums. A direct effect of this is that the official boards will be filled up by a false image of the product (overly positive, setting up potential buyers for a huge letdown, which cant be good for long-term player retention), while the 3rd-party-boards will be filled up by a false image of the product, also (overly negative, scaring off customers who frequent those boards).

I dont think it is healthy for a business to try to "control" customer opinion by selective moderation therefore. A far better option in terms of community building would be to actually address the negative posts and discuss the issues players have with the game. Of course, this directly leads up to a discussion about how much influence players should have in the design of a game, and how much reporting and reasoning the designers should have to do to the players. Seeing that a lot of negative posts complain about seemingly unneeded changes, publicly disclosing the reason for those changes would go a long way in my opinion.

In the end, selective moderation is just an expression of the overall attitude of "if you dont like how the game evolves, you always have the option to cancel your subscription" - an attitude which is always very risky for a business, because customers are not as easily replaceable for a company as a game is replaceable for a customer (granted, this depends on the actual game, but it generally holds true for all "mainstream" games).