Poor old ArcheAge. Since Black Desert opened its vast realms have been depopulated to an extent that pvpers wave at each other and have a chat before they get down to the business of trying to lop each others’ heads off. AA was having major problems long before BDO opened its doors, mainly to do with its terrible launch and equally horrible upgrade releases and mind-numbingly stupid community management. But at least there were some committed players that gritted their teeth and stayed for the long haul.

Those die-hard players can get pretty tetchy, however when they watch the game slowly dying before their eyes. They are apt to complain, to vent their frustrations in public in an attempt to see some improvement in their increasingly miserable gaming lives. And so what does the AA community management team do in these circumstances?

Why, they introduce a long list of rules under which all players must grovel.

Thanks for dropping by to participate in the myriad of conversations that happen here on the forums on a daily basis. The ArcheAge community is a safe, welcoming environment for everyone playing the game. We want to encourage all of you to post your many in-game experiences, discuss the latest news, ask questions to the staff, participate in our events, and perhaps meet new friends!

That said, before you jump into any of our many threads, we do have a few rules that all community members must abide by when participating in the community. These rules are in place so everyone may freely take part in our community and let their voices be heard. Please take the time to read the below rules in full, as not knowing them does not excuse you from breaking them!

Hmm. Lots of exclamation marks there! The key line that characterizes this as a pure SJW takeover is the line that I have bolded. Safe and welcoming means you may no longer voice disagreement with the new political mindset. Their ‘few rules’ run to a list that is 22 points long. Good luck not breaking one of them because you couldn’t remember it! But at the bottom of the list they have written this:

This list is not considered to be exhaustive, and moderators and community team members maintain the ability to discipline and ban accounts at their sole discretion. These rules may be modified or added to by the Community Team at any time, with or without prior announcement.

So there you go. Even if you play by their ‘few rules’ their moderators can ban you for no reason at all. But wait, there’s more.

Hand in hand with this announcement was AAs first ‘Letter from the Community Manager’. Her name is Seraphina “Celestrata” Brennan and she has been there for 9 months now! [I don’t know why she has a made-up game name when she could just use her actual first name as a pretend game handle.] She starts off her new announcement with this little snippet:

First, let’s talk about where we are at right now as a community. I want to be honest with everyone: We don’t have the best reputation as an open, welcoming player base.

I’m sure many of you read the articles that people write about our game and our community across the internet. From those many articles, the one point of feedback that personally hits me the hardest is when I see someone tell their friends that we are a toxic community that should be avoided.

How about that for a way to start your first community announcement? Slag off the whole community! At least, what’s left of it. There’s a whole lot of rambling where she says not much at all and then lots of exciting new features they’re going to introduce, and then at the bottom she slips in this little doozy:

On May 26th, all server-specific forums in the Worldgates section (except for the Public Test Server) will be closed and retired to an Archive forum. Those threads will be preserved so others may refer back to them, but the Archives will be closed to new posts. If there’s any information you wish to personally save from a thread, make sure to do it before May 26th!

For those not in the know, the individual server forums were the community hub of AA. When I played the game they were the only forum that I checked out. But with all those forum servers it’s kinda hard to police a 22 point long list of behavioral rules and regulations. What to do? Close them down and lump everyone in together! It will be inclusive!

The reaction to this, well, it hasn’t gone down too well. But this is what happens when you hit the panic button and let SJWs into the building to save you. They will save you by killing you. Better to have a completely pure and politically correct game that is dead and empty than risk having anyone who spreads that ‘toxicity’ and ‘hate speak’. This will be the final nail in the AA game coffin. I’m expecting a large influx in BDO as we speak.