FORUM GUIDELINES

This is a Place to Discuss the Fantasy Strike fighting game by Sirlin Games

The forums here are specifically to discuss the Fantasy Strike fighting game by Sirlin Games and related topics. Any topics not related to Fantasy Strike are subject to deletion.

This is a Civilized Place for Public Discussion

Please treat this discussion forum with the same respect you would a public park. We, too, are a shared community resource—a place to share skills, knowledge and interests through ongoing conversation.

These are not hard and fast rules, merely aids to the human judgment of our community. Use these guidelines to keep this a clean, well-lighted place for civilized public discourse.

Improve the Discussion

Help us make this a great place for discussion by always working to improve the discussion in some way, however small. If you are not sure your post adds to the conversation, think over what you want to say and try again later.

Do you have ideas on new strategies? Can you help people with rules questions? Would you like to run or participate in an event? Share fan artwork? Share your experiences in games you’ve played. Write storylines for Fantasy Strike fanfiction. This is all great stuff.

One way to improve the discussion is by discovering ones that are already happening. Please spend some time browsing the topics here before replying or starting your own, and you’ll have a better chance of meeting others who share your interests.

Be Agreeable, Even When You Disagree

You may wish to respond to something by disagreeing with it. That’s fine. But, remember to criticize ideas, not people. Please avoid:

Name-calling.
Ad hominem attacks.
Responding to a post’s tone instead of its actual content.
Knee-jerk contradiction.

Instead, provide reasoned counter-arguments that improve the conversation.

Don’t Be Overly Negative

This doesn’t mean you can’t disagree with things; of course you can. The problem is tone. If you emit a field of negativity all the time, it drags everyone else down and makes them miserable too. Don’t look to frame things in the worst possible way. Don’t casually insult other users or Sirlin Games employees and don’t attempt to mask those insults or that negativity with passive-aggressiveness. This isn’t a place for that stuff.

A chronic problem on gaming forums is claiming something about a game is broken or highly imbalanced without having a real grasp on things. Posting that “X is broken” is an incredibly strong claim, and is pretty antagonistic in many cases. How would you even know unless you had detailed knowledge of all high level play (and even then, you might not really be able to know). Even worse would be if you threw in personal insults about the developers, as in “Person X is idiotic for making this move, also it’s part of some agenda.” It’s much better to ask questions than make blanket, bold-to-the-point-of-wrong statements (plus, that last example is basically harassment). Saying “I’m not able to win with X, what am I missing?” is a good approach. If you’re not missing anything, that will be borne out eventually!

Don’t throw around language about some character being “not competitive viable” unless it actually makes sense. Some players believe that if a character is microscopically disadvantaged, that they are “not viable.” This flies in the face of actual tournament results and misses the part where player-skill dominates small imbalances here or there. Yes, there is such a thing as competitively non-viable, though the that is a very extreme case. If you find yourself throwing that term around where it shouldn’t apply, you make our games look bad for no reason, you deceive players who would enjoy the supposedly “non-viable” character—and who would be able to win a lot with them!—and you actually derail posts because people have to come in and explain that your bar for “non-viable” is probably unreasonable and that you’re really exaggerating. And to top it all off, you probably added nothing to the thread. This is a form of being overly negative and we’d like this to be a positive place. If you post with a non-snarky, non-hateful, non-passive-aggressive, non-exaggerating tone, you’re almost certainly able to convey the substance of your point in an acceptable way.

Your Participation Counts

The conversations we have here set the tone for everyone. Help us influence the future of this community by choosing to engage in discussions that make this forum an interesting place to be—and avoiding those that do not.

Discourse provides tools that enable the community to collectively identify the best (and worst) contributions: favorites, bookmarks, likes, flags, replies, edits, and so forth. Use these tools to improve your own experience, and everyone else’s, too.

Let’s try to leave our park better than we found it.

If You See a Problem, Flag It

Moderators have special authority; they are responsible for this forum. But so are you. With your help, moderators can be community facilitators, not just janitors or police.

When you see bad behavior, don’t reply. It encourages the bad behavior by acknowledging it, consumes your energy, and wastes everyone’s time. Just flag it. If enough flags accrue, action will be taken, either automatically or by moderator intervention.

In order to maintain our community, moderators reserve the right to remove any content and any user account for any reason at any time. Moderators do not preview new posts in any way; the moderators and site operators take no responsibility for any content posted by the community.

Don’t post about locked or deleted threads

Posts that are moderated have a reason behind the moderation. It’s up to you to read these guidelines to determine what you did wrong, learn from your mistake, and attempt to post again without breaking any rules.

Always Be Civil

Nothing sabotages a healthy conversation like rudeness:

Be civil. Don’t post anything that a reasonable person would consider offensive, abusive, or hate speech.
Keep it clean. Don’t post anything obscene or sexually explicit.
Respect each other. Don’t harass or grief anyone, impersonate people, or expose their private information.
Respect our forum. Don’t post spam or otherwise vandalize the forum.

These are not concrete terms with precise definitions—avoid even the appearance of any of these things. If you’re unsure, ask yourself how you would feel if your post was featured on the front page of the New York Times.

This is a public forum, and search engines index these discussions. Keep the language, links, and images safe for family and friends.

Keep It Tidy

Make the effort to put things in the right place, so that we can spend more time discussing and less cleaning up. So:

Don’t start a topic in the wrong category.
Don’t cross-post the same thing in multiple topics.
Don’t post no-content replies.
Don’t divert a topic by changing it midstream.
Don’t sign your posts—every post has your profile information attached to it.

Rather than posting “+1” or “Agreed”, use the Like button. Rather than taking an existing topic in a radically different direction, use Reply as Linked Topic.

“Reply as Linked Topic” might be new to you, so it’s worth special mention. This form of replying will create a new thread that has links both ways to the old thread. You’ll be able to take the topic in a new direction without disrupting the original flow of the conversation. Note that in order to use this feature, you must reach level 1 status, which usually only takes about 15 minutes of using our forums.

Post Only Your Own Stuff

You may not post anything digital that belongs to someone else without permission. You may not post descriptions of, links to, or methods for stealing someone’s intellectual property (software, video, audio, images), or for breaking any other law.

Terms of Service

Yes, legalese is boring, but we must protect ourselves – and by extension, you and your data – against unfriendly folks. We have a Terms of Service describing your (and our) behavior and rights related to content, privacy, and laws. To use this service, you must agree to abide by our TOS.