You're likely a much less cynical person than i am then, and i guess we simply will not agree on this one.

Regardless, it is very nice to see one of old "faces" still around, all the best for you. Cheers.

Thank you for being the rational voice on this thread. The white-knighting for GOG and over-dramatizing of T4T's (or anyone with a remotely negative) position is one thing that has always pushed and pressured me, you could say, away from GOG's forums. It's pretty clear that T4T was a GOG customer prior to being a Zoom customer and holding GOG up to its supposed values is neither a new thing, nor should it be an unexpected thing. I say this as someone who buys from GOG, but refuses to buy titles in which GOG has been errant in their policy.

That said, I have always found it disconcerting that GOG does little to minimize Steam giveaway threads and I can see that they have taken the opportunity to punch down at the up and comers to make this policy change. GOG probably let this go on for too long in all honesty. I love free speech, but if GOG has a no politics rule and has (a somewhat inherent in their forum design space) limited space for open discussion, it doesn't make sense to have competitors clutter their forum space.

I think it makes sense to have GOG moderators (or better yet an actual prominently positioned employee) to clarify new rules in the forum, and not just in a private discussion. There will be modest delays in enforcement and prompt shows of force which will cause confusion and they should do their best to clarify that openly. I understand the 'no discussion of moderation' rule, but I think that there should be some leeway in terms of tolerance for the sake of understanding.

As a concession, I think T4T should have a full disclosure remark at the top of his boycott post (I understand he will have to make multiple edits to multiple posts to make that fit onto his post). He wasn't affiliated with Zoom at the time, but he is now, and forums have a way of blending old and new positions together.

You operate in extremes. One does not have to bankrupt their competition to achieve their goals. His goal is most likely to take a chunk out of GOG and funnel the business to his own preferred platform. And this is exactly what he has done in the past, trying to tell people GOG isn't trying to look out for the customer's interest, come to this other store, we have cookies.

I host a Steam Giveaway annually and have been told I cannot this year. They are not blindly allowing this.

Fair enough, my opinion on the giveaways was more in regards to the past. I am open to the idea that they are now (at least trying) to moderate the new policy with an even hand.

"You operate in extremes. One does not have to bankrupt their competition to achieve their goals. His goal is most likely to take a chunk out of GOG and funnel the business to his own preferred platform. And this is exactly what he has done in the past, trying to tell people GOG isn't trying to look out for the customer's interest, come to this other store, we have cookies."

I think it's actually you that has taken the extreme view here. You're talking about illegal anti-competitive practice.

Now, I looked at the following idea: "funnel the business to his own preferred platform".

Imho that should be everyone's effort all the time, especially when it comes to ethics and upholding good consumer practice. If Graco makes good car seats and their competitor makes borderline unsafe ones, I'm going to go full Ralph Nader on the competitor, even though I have no stake in Graco. If (let's say, only a hypothetical) GOG errantly left Denuvo installers in their product, I would consider them a harmful platform and lookout for whatever is available to compete and compel others to do so as well.

Now T4T is affiliated with another platform, and if he is not being open about that, I definitely consider that unethical. But not warranting any kind of charge. A moderator isn't exactly a financial stake. If he's making defamatory statements, that's something sanctionable (actionable by GOG), but I haven't seen him say anything false about GOG that would warrant that.

Ah, there's also the fact that, if I remember well, T4T had alienated part of his boycott participants by refusing to broaden the reasons of the boycott, and by keeping it as a specific message for specific changes.

I believe that, if harming GOG was the goal, he would have embraced and encouraged all the causes of discontent as a whole, piling numbers and drowning the boycott's demands in a populist, wide and blurry "down with gog" movement. He had the opportunity (with GOG's pride sales, Ukraine support, etc). He did the opposite, effectively pushing away from his boycott a lot of people who were hostile to gog for the wrong reasons.

But again, it could be Part Of The Plan, and a cunning misdirection. Has to, I suppose.

On the one hand, I enjoy valiant free speech defender T4T getting his just desserts for stabbing the Russian users in the back ("Ohnunononono, that all-purpose boycott thread wasn't realyl an all-purpose boycott thread at all! Actually, it's strictly a censorship and DRM thread! In fact, it has always been strictly a censorship and DRM thread! Getoutta my strictly a censorship and DRM thread and make your own boycott thread, filthy ruskies!")

On the other hand, I have to concede that Telika, of all people, has the most sane take ITT.

Oh well, I told T4T 10 months ago that his shilling for Zoom will bite him in the ass sooner or later (albeit in my usual facetious manner, which probably caused him not to heed my warnings and here we are...). As for him being a Discord mod: He's probably Zoom's only regular customer, so they decided to promote him. Boo-fucking-hoo.

That had to do more with him not wanting the thread to be closed, which would lead to getting fewer people to boycott. He also wasn't really against the banning of you know who, so it was not something he wanted to boycott.

Just because he joined ZOOM after the boycott thread doesn't mean he didn't start anti GOG/pro- ZOOM motive. Especially when you have the CEO of ZOOM bashing GOG and encouraging what his fans are doing. He is very proud of what there doing.

T4T really dedicated to all this but he only has 57 games on GOG. Who knows how many on ZOOM. He seem to talk more than buy. To be honest I probably bought more games from ZOOM than him.

I am not going to respond to any of the accusations that are being thrown around at me here. I don't answer to you people and I don't need to justify myself.

Aggressive behavior, accusations, calling out of other users, thread hijacking are all in violation of the GOG forum code of conduct and are on show in abundance here. Any impartial person reading this thread would see that it has clearly been hijacked by an aggressive group of users who are trying to twist it so as to put me on trial. They have been successful in getting one thread they didn't like locked and now they are targeting another one. This is as obvious a case of thread hijacking as you could possibly imagine.

I have reported the users who are in violation of the forum CoC to the moderators. I will not post any further in this thread, but will wait for the moderators to take action (and hopefully restore some discipline to this forum).

From the GOG forum code of conduct:

Also from the GOG forum code of conduct: So I hope you reported yourself as well.

Pot, meet kettle.

Frankly considering the history of your posts this just sounds like more projecting onto others and deflecting.

Plus again be sure you report yourself as you violated the forum rules with this very thread, you were given plenty of answers and explanations but you choose to ignore every single time and just escalated things then blamed everyone else but yourself. Stop playing the professional victim.

May I see this as another example of "this went not the way it was intended"?

While the withdrawal battle fought here is entertaining to watch to be honest.

Are you going to report users in a thread created by you, a thread about discussing the rules and moderation in public?

What are you playing at?

Really making yourself look good my friend.
He had to know what would happen.

I detect psychological issues, possible narcissistic tendencies, but still unsure, as the official report hasn't been released, yet...

I gave you an advice after you called me a "shameless GOG fanboy" in the "Games At Risk of Being Removed from GOG's Catalog - Tracking Thread".

Start thinking about your own behavior.

You ignored it.

Instead you escalated the whole situation in the ZOOM Platform thread, you made this thread, and you act with reckless disregard for the negative consequences for other users posting in this thread. The whole thread breaks the CoC of the forum because it is a discussion about a decision by the moderation team after all.

Nevertheless, I will accept any punishment including a ban if the GOG moderators think it is necessary.