Alvor, on 26 February 2013 - 06:31 AM, said:
All joking aside there is the goon issue & this will have to be decided on individual basis.
They have a checkered history on multiple online games so doing some of your own research may be a good idea.
Search on these key words may help:
goonswarm, goonwaffe, Burn Jita, GoonSwarm Federation, Jita's On Fire, goonfest, Goon recruitment policy enforced, Goonswarm - Recruitment, JihadSwarm, Jihad Swarm, Asakai EVE, Goonion.
My own research concludes that Goons typically exert either a positive net force on a gaming community (EVE, STO, MWO, WoT, et. al), or behave like an insular gaming group who wants as little to do with outsiders as possible (WoW, et.al). Either way, Goons typically make greater positive contributions to the community by finding and reporting bugs/exploits, free stress testing, ridicule bad posters, drawing more players to a game, creating fantastic fan art/fan videos, tools related to making players' lives easier, and much more.
This "checkered history" you speak of is a result of Goons not caring about who's been there the longest or stepping on the toes of people with fragile egos. Skill and dedication are all that matter, or at least that's the way it usually works. I'll admit that we have our internal quibbles and that not every Goon lives up to the ideal of perfection that we strive for, but we're still leagues ahead of most groups in terms of not being terrible.
Really, I don't get the whole "Goons ruin everything" (GOONS RUIN EVERYTHING) view that seems to spread whenever people realize that there are forums members of Something Awful playing a game, or even that people make us into some kind of monolithic hivemind. If you bothered to actually visit forums.somethingawful.com, you'd realize that
there are a lot of goons. We have people who play video games, make video games, not care about video games, bake cakes, make jewelry, practice martial arts, do ultra-marathons, mess with other forums users, read books, discuss movies, almost anything you could think of. Something Awful.com is not a hivemind. It is a collective of individuals, who all communicate with each other.
Besides, if you're gonna dump on WoLgoons, you gotta dump on KAOS, Draguuuuuuuuuuuun, [all the various fan-groups dedicated to] Clan Wolf, and every other player group. Principals of impartiality/universality apply here. :colbert:
edit: Also, the second EVE video you linked to fails to mention how BoB were both morons and had a dev on their team who helped them violate the ToS and provided them with extremely rare stuff. Goonswarm, for all its warts and occasional jerk-like behavior, was still leagues ahead of BoB and most other corporations in terms of "not being buttes".
Edited by Wales Grey, 28 February 2013 - 10:42 AM.