Is it allowed to raise questions about marketing/partnerships in this forum?

I ask this because I tend to assume to lounge section of any forum is made for broader topics, but i’ve seen two different topics locked out quite soon and with not much of a chance for appeal, or explanation given.
One was a detailed collection of controversies surrounding Tencent, the other a question about the exploitative design choices of DT’s shop.

Now, as a FS fan I find the closure of these topics disturbing. I barely spend time on socials or reddit/twitter etc and I would ask: which better place to discuss this game (and the company who made it) than “Fatshark forums”?
While some of the comments in those topics were toxic I have found worse in gameplay feedback topics, and moderation could take a middle stance between ignoring them and locking a topic up.

Help me understand, I find removing the possibility of discussing these topics in this forum to do more damage than addressing them, or indeed even stating the company is not commenting on the subject, but letting the fans raise their opinions.

4 Likes

It’s absolutely fine provided people post their thoughts without attacking each other or breaching the forum guidelines.

And if you see users violating guidelines or common decency in other threads, just flag the posts so we can check it out.

3 Likes

If you would truly just care about the personal attacks - wouldnt it make infinitely more sense to just remove the offending post individiually rather than locking the entire topic?

IF you would actually think that is a good way to go about it (and i really dont think youre that lacking in intellect), it would allow literally anyone on the internet to shut down any discussion on any topic he dislikes simply by going into the topic and throwing around personal insults. It would be completely ridiculous!

I’m not buying it.

The Tencent thread in particular was very well put together.

2 Likes

We removed the gross stuff from it and political posts aren’t welcome on the forums. But by all means a thread on the matter of tencent as an investor in games is welcome. Just political discourse and sinophobia wont fly.

You literally cant talk about tencent as an investor without it being political because of their major involvement in chinese politics. If you say “no politics” its the exact same as saying “not tencent”.

Original Post with a lot of effort put into it:

.
.
.
.
.
A random thing i happen to know of:

" According to the official Tencent website, Ma is a deputy to the 5th Shenzhen Municipal People’s Congress and served in the 12th National People’s Congress."

" As China is an authoritarian state,[7][8][9] the NPC has been characterized as a rubber stamp for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)[10] or as only being able to affect issues of low sensitivity and salience to the Chinese regime.[11] Most delegates to the NPC are officially elected by local people’s congresses at the provincial level; local legislatures which are indirectly elected at all levels except the county-level. The CCP controls nomination and election processes at every level in the people’s congress system, allowing it to stamp out any opposition."
.
.
.
.
.

Idk man, it all sounds like:

“We just forgot to add the currency bundle that actually doesnt make you overspend lol”.
I have no clue how people are liking thoses posts man.

3 Likes

You can draw your own conclusions, but it’s not the only discussion that has been shut due to a breach of community guidelines, or due to breach of the quoted point in particular.

That was added to the Forum Guidelines (as a part of a major revision) on September 23rd 2019.

If you want to, you can go through all revisions made since the forum guidelines were posted a couple of years ago.

I do agree with shutting down sinophobia, but by glancing at that (in)famous tencent topic, back then, I seem to remember everything was on the level. Surely sinophobia has to be more than criticizing a company or some practices of a government or political body.

As for political discourse, I think a clarification would be helpful as well. I’m not interested in reading general political discussions here, but if it’s something affecting your games or company I’d find it relevant. For example (and I really don’t think I’m being political here) Australia has strict rules on content, leading often to censoring features of a game, or banning games entirely. If Vermintide was censored there (haven’t checked) it’s something I’d find interesting being mentioned or talked here.
Purely political topics would be another matter, as they would bear no relevance to the game.

Wasn’t that the year Tencent bought the stake in FS?
I don’t remember political topics being a problem before then. I know it’s a common rule in forums, but again, I guess I’m asking for a clearer definition, and if “political” topics bearing an impact on the games/fatsharks can be discussed.
(Another example springs to mind: I seem to remember there were a couple of instances were VT2 wasn’t available in Russia. Would that count as a political topic as well?)

1 Like

Thought struck me as well but I would say that the thought itself is more of a self-fulfilling prophecy than anything else. That’s why I added the part quoted below.

Re-visting the change I can correct myself about the date. The major change was made the 5th of June 2018. Many things changed and the length of the text grew by about 50%.

The following was added (2018-06-05):

Summary

The button on the right can be used to check the version history of a post.

I’m obviously not speaking for the company but sinophobia in particular has been o the rise since covid, and a lot of topics have been politicized lately (generally speaking). An even more recent example would be russophobia, tied to another recent international event. My thoughts on this (the rule) is that it’s always hard to keep a discussion within certain bounds, and that’s why it’s easier to just outright ban discussions on gender, race, religion and politics, instead of trying to do a good job moderating them.

Pretty sure there has been mention of that recently (some games not being sold because of sanctions). I’m pretty sure the topic was more along the lines of “worried consumer” rather than an argument for/against sanctions, even if some posts definitely fit the bill of breaking the “political” rule. Locked topic. There has also been topics of blocking/separating Russian and Chinese players based on frequent usage of hacks and about individuals hacking. Most of them are pretty old though, and the individual ones are usually blocked under the “name and shame” rule.

This reply becamse way longer than I expected. I feel like the quote below isn’t relevant anymore as I slowly evolved(?) into an official spokesperson. I’m still not a real spokesperson though, promise.


I have family in Victoria and they had some interesting experiences with censorship, among other things, during a recent pandemic. That’s a topic for another place though, as the quoted rule is still being enforced. :stuck_out_tongue:

1 Like

Looking back, I think it was added in Jun 5, '18.

It’s a tricky line to define honestly, and why we will typically lean on the side of caution in shutting down discussion that involved politics.

Politics has grown increasingly a divisive topic as social media has grown in prevelance and dying media agendas push to divide people further to bolster their incomes.

What would be totally fine is to discuss Tencent as an investor in games/studios, and this can be done without talking about Tencent’s involvement in the political sphere. It really can, but it rarely could be executed in a way that meets with the forum guidelines because it’s just not how public discourse generally works outside of a very controlled environment with very select participants.

1 Like

@WhereIsBaoDur

Compare our answers and tell me if I’m actually a spokesperson or not. I’m not as convinced anymore :stuck_out_tongue:

2 Likes

FS is dependent on Tencent, which has proven time and again, that they are predatory, anti-consumer and don’t care about their workers, clients or claimed companies/studios. I don’t need to add any politics to this.

I imagine how hilarious it would be, if during WW2 some major companies would go “let’s please not get political, we have a business deal with the Third Reich, but we’re wholesome and friendly and we never heard of any death camps you mention. Please stop being toxic. We just want to have fun here, please disregard the piles of corpses, we have nothing to do with them and we don’t want to get political and acknowledge our good, wholesome business partner as an evil entity bound on world domination - people come in all shapes and sizes, with different views and religions, can’t we just get along and let the Third Reich eradicate the Jews?” - Sorry, I wanted to share my fanfiction with y’all, this has nothing to do with the subject AT ALL.

4 Likes

Umm, dude, you know how much iron Sweden supplied to Rheinmetall, right?

2 Likes

And you’re welcome to unpack this on the forums, it’s not a discussion that would be shut down as it’s not political.

This is pretty reaching comparison and I’d ask you to avoid a comparison that disrespects the trauma that was WW2 for those who suffered and continue to.

2 Likes

Oh god, everyone is an activist nowdays, can i eat my hamburger without having to be lecture on whatever is going on this week?
Obviously fs took the tencent money because it was the only way to be allowed to release their gaems on chinese market, huge profits there, theres 0 reason not to do that.

I would have taken it, what am i supposed to be? the saviour of humanity? NO i just wanna afford hamburgers. Whatever bad thing china is doing is still gonna be there even if they did boycott them but overtaking an authoritarian regime is not the job of an eletronic entertainent provider, that is a job for the affected people themselves to fight (and they are, follow china uncensored on yt).

1 Like

The dude is making some pretty silly claims, anyway. The whole “genocide” thing in China is an accusation of America and their allies that most of the rest of the world has dismissed. It has gotten no legs at the UN because there aren’t any “mounds of corpses” nor any other evidence. There are standards of evidence that haven’t come close to being met.

Not to mention that the people trying to sell this story are the same ones who made up things like the “Iraq soldiers killing babies in hospitals” and the Nayirah incident in the US Congress. And I mean literally, they’re many of the same PR people involved in those events doing this. I mean, it’s possible they’re right, but they’d have to show it with evidence, and they don’t seem able to do that.

Some of these posters just have hate-boners that they really need to see a doctor about, because they’ve lasted longer than six hours.

2 Likes

Hey Hedge! Really interesting to see you here, in this thread, seemingly verbose and maybe even speaking freely. Im from Australia and we certainly keen on the Tencent discussion! I really do appreciate seeing your voice there for a second, Im not being sarcastic, I know its hard to tell.

For anyone playing at home Tencent owns 51% of Fatshark, making Fatshark a Tencent subsidiary.

The influence of Tencent on this project (Darktide) and its design choices is pretty glaring - and as Hedge is suggesting its probably worth going into.

NVidia, too, had an interesting stake in this project and at one time Tencent and Nvidia were partners - Indeed I cant actually find anything to indicate it wouldn’t still be the case. Lots of ‘unpacking’ to do.

Hedge is also correct when he says this conversation can be had without politics, business is business.

1 Like

Really? How many jobs have you had at Tencent?

Tencent has probably the best benefits and it’s definitely the dream job for programmers, artists and designers. My wife said they have massage chairs on every floor. She took free Kendo lessons They provide all kinds of free stuff like yoga classes, in-office counseling, VIP banking, international travel teambuilding trips, monthly teambuilding dinners. Cost alleviation for your parents to get yearly medical physicals. Really a top level game studio. And this isn’t even the HQ studio…

I think I thoroughly debunked a lot of that talk… why can’t you let FS have ownership of their design choices and experimentation instead of copying VT2? Let’s say Tencent said “you must do a MTX store”… What other design choices do you expect Tencent had someone fly to Stockholm and force on the designers?

Wowowow. Have you seen Google and their benefits? So I assume selling your health for some fluff BS “free stuff” is OK. It’s totally worth 6 day work weeks and constant crunch. Every man’s dream xD The shut downs and firing hundreds of employees is nothing. Your wife guarantees it! LOL.

You’re free to go and change the working norms of a country you don’t live in. Which game company in China is the alternative with 5 work days? There are none.

You say that as if 6 day work weeks were the end of the world. I’ve done it before. Plenty of guys have. I’m sure without being coerced into it, either. Usually it pays to stay extra and take on extra burdens.

Despite what many would have you believe, most employers do appreciate it and hand more >currency< over in exchange for it.