In the eyes of the majority of the Fiesta community, I'm pretty much on par with Methuselah as far as age goes. I turn 40 on the 17th of March. My lovely wife is 2 1/2 years behind me. I've been an MMO player since just after the launch of the 2nd expansion for the original EverQuest back in 2000. Does this make me a foremost authority or expert on anything? Not at all, but it does help to have been "around the block" a few times, if you will.
When Sony launched EQ2 back in 2004/2005, we switched to that game the week after release. That is still our favorite MMO but it is also a habit where we are
forced to spend $66 per month to have access to all of our adventuring and trade-skill toons. We haven't been able to reliably afford that much lately, so after trying a few different "free" MMOs we settled on Fiesta.
I bring up all this back story because of something the EverQuest 2 community came up with. There is a site for that game called eq2flames which is one of the most popular among the EQ2 community. It was set up specifically because Sony's official game forums were moderated in such a heavy-handed fashion that any complaints - be they against the game, against scammers, against plat farmers, anything negative at all - were pretty much either locked or deleted immediately.
The eq2flames site is chock full of very helpful information, guides and suggestions, and there are specific areas where obvious noobs cannot be overly criticized for asking what some may think are silly questions. Everyone has to play nice in many areas of the site.
However, there are also forums where it is open season on corrupt guilds, players, farmers, etc.... For example, extremely annoying players can be blacklisted in the "Rate-A-Retard" section. Threads must name the character(s) in question and their server in the title, and screen shots/videos/copies of chat logs are all encouraged. The community can rate each OP on a 1-5 star system. This way, the obvious bs posts sink like rocks but the genuinely good ones stay around for a while. Similarly, there is a section for bad guilds called Your Guild Sucks, and one for Chinese farmers/currency sellers called The Farmer's Almanac.
Yes, there is some degree of blatant stupidity on the site, but in my humble opinion a lot of really shady people have been disgraced out of the game because of this website and the community as a whole is better for it. EQ2's community is, I would guess, somewhat older than the one here in Fiesta, so running a similar site for this game would require more work, but I feel it would be the best possible way to drive the bums out of the game so that the more ethical players will have a better experience.
If I knew how to set up a website that didn't look like it was designed in 1995, and could afford the bandwidth, I would set up a site like that for Fiesta
yesterday! Sadly, there's just no way for me to do it either financially or from a HTML-knowledge standpoint, so we're stuck with blacked-out names. I can understand why Outspark won't allow such things on their forums and I also understand why this site won't either. But nonetheless, I think such a site would have its place given how this game is growing by leaps and bounds. We like the game a lot and don't plan to leave any time soon. Just my two cents and I also apologize for a huge wall of text.