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What any newbee on the forums should be careful about is not to respond to the trolling, as it is more often than not intended to upset the freshly minded. Experience helps you recognize such threads even from the title and the handle, so responding to them and actually including arguments in your responses will just reveal your unbruised, fresh and innocent attitude. From time to time when things get really boring, though, getting into such a thread and posting the words learned in other similar threads helps relieve stress. But be sure to have plenty of registered posts before you do so.
Labeling someone as a troll is also used in situations when you disagree with the person. This will usually happen when a discussion has already turned into a flaming contest. Doing so is in a sense even worse than trolling itself, and the namecalling soon brings back memories of the 5th grade. Don't do it unless you are absolutely positive that the person is no doubt a troll. And even then it will be hard to tell.
Fig. 3. The Backfire launching from a Carrier.What's the story?But, hold it right there, there is a new term here, namely 'flaming'. As the name suggests it denotes a heated discussion, but is different from trolling in the way that people are not just doing it for the fun of it but are usually passionate about what they are writing. Sooner or later you will find yourself in a position where a post will seemingly hurt your feelings. As with responding to the trolls, sometimes it is fun to just let your instantaneous feelings out and becoming a troll yourself, but, of course, always having your registered number of posts in mind. If you want to have a serious discussion, though, read each post that provokes you twice, and if it still does, do it again a couple of minutes later. You will notice how your own mood can affect the contents of a post. If you feel that someone wants to make things personal, their post will reflect this. If you read the same post immediately after falling in love, you will see that the same content reflects the findings of the most adorable person in the worls apart from the one which you fell in love with, of course. It is all a matter of that wonderful internet detachment feature striking again. Think the best possible of the person you are responding to, although more fun can be had from time to time in doing the opposite.
Now that the rough aspects are covered, what can actually be found on the forums? There are wildy differing topics, but most of them can be put in various categories. The most common are the bug and 'bug' reports. While the first ones are insightful and helpful as people are sometimes surprisingly willing to help, the second ones are really self promoting ego trips of the sort 'the ASM-421U in the sim (the QCT guided naval variant of the AGM-672T but with modified tailfins and should have yellow stripes on the warhead which are not there in the sim) has a range of 14.5 miles when fired from low altitude, while everyone knows it should be 15 miles. This really kills the immersion for me. A patch is sorely needed!' With posts like these one never knows whether it is a troll writing or not.
The patch waiting and requesting posts go hand in hand with those bug reports. It happens that all the sims of today are so complex that there are always issues with them that were missed during the testing, or a sim was simply released prematurely. The quantity of the patch posts goes up after a developer has acknowledged the bugs and said a patch is in the works. Forums really start buzzing once the patch release date is passed and nothing has happened yet. On the other hand, you can also be sure that a link to the patch will be posted minutes after it is uploaded to any FTP server. I always wondered how these guys do it, do they have multiple browser windows with all the possible patch sites open and are clicking refresh in cycles all the time? You will also see requests for a new patch ,that are again a testimony to the brilliance and accuracy of the poster, spring up mere minutes after the current patch is out, with the poster being disappointed with the developer because '... while the range of the ASM-421U is now correct with the new patch, the yellow stripes are still off, and the next patch will hopefully solve this.'
Anyone here?Sometimes if you're really lucky people will actually start discussing the features instead of the lack of them. If you are even more lucky, actual pilots or developers will join the discussion. These discussions are the reason why you joined the forum (foral ?) community in the first place, but once you are in you tend to forget that. One just wishes there were more topics like these present.
You are here mostly for the people who have the same hobby as you. As I said, people who like to sim are of all ages and interests, the passion for simming is probably their only common denominator. They also come from all over the globe, but, just like on most of the net, they are unfortunately still predominantly from the western countries. All this diversity creates another reason why joining such a community is a thrilling thing. It also can be a source of many a clash due to the cultural and ethical differences. See the thread on patching a cracked version of Jane's F/A-18 for an example.
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