Hi! everyone this is going to be my first ever post on minecraft forums page its the start of something great i think . i picked this topic because i have minecraft Xbox 360 and played on PC once but Anyways i love love love! minecraft Xbox 360 edition but there are many flaws and upsetting moments in the console version first im going to talk about the good things 1. if you start the game you can try out the tutorial version to get a little taste of the game which is pretty awesome i don't know how many times i played it 2. ANIMALS i love animals alot mostly only pigs and dogs you can get wool from sheep leather and steak from cows tame wolves. and the pigs omy gerd i luv pigs you can put a saddle on one and ride for hours till you accidently kill it lol but i know i didn't get into all of the good things but sadly we have to talk about the said things 1.most of the time when you join any game with good connection or bad it lags out 80% of the time 2. the world is very very small compared to PC version and lastly you cant customize your own skin no texture packs and no mods but i know the update is coming soon and there is talk about new skins and introducing textures plus a forest biome i cant wait well this was my first post don't judge me if i did something wrong thnx piglet out
PiggyLover14, in the event that you are a real poster, let me give you some advice:
1. Read a few other people's posts so you can see what the usual is around here.
2. Don't mess around with font sizes, colors, etc. The default is what it is for a reason.
3. Don't tell us things we already know. We know what the XBox version is like; we play it!
4. Punctuation is your friend. Or at least, punctuation is our friend. For the love of all that's holy, break up that Great Wall Of Text so people can read it!
...off to do something about the bleeding eyes.....
Hi! everyone this is going to be my first ever post on minecraft forums page its the start of something great i think . i picked this topic because i have minecraft Xbox 360 and played on PC once but Anyways i love love love! minecraft Xbox 360 edition but there are many flaws and upsetting moments in the console version first im going to talk about the good things 1. if you start the game you can try out the tutorial version to get a little taste of the game which is pretty awesome i don't know how many times i played it 2. ANIMALS i love animals alot mostly only pigs and dogs you can get wool from sheep leather and steak from cows tame wolves. and the pigs omy gerd i luv pigs you can put a saddle on one and ride for hours till you accidently kill it lol but i know i didn't get into all of the good things but sadly we have to talk about the said things 1.most of the time when you join any game with good connection or bad it lags out 80% of the time 2. the world is very very small compared to PC version and lastly you cant customize your own skin no texture packs and no mods but i know the update is coming soon and there is talk about new skins and introducing textures plus a forest biome i cant wait well this was my first post don't judge me if i did something wrong thnx piglet out
Since no one else has said it; Welcome to the forums. It's always nice to see people excited about a game.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
The good people, they always die. And the bad people do too...But the weaker people, the people like me, WE have inherited the Earth. -Morgan Jones
Hello, Piggylover, welcome to the forums. Some of the members here can be extremely rude, but they do have a point. This section is meant for discussion of the game itself.
Hello Piggylover, welcome to the forums. As Nosejob said, some of the people on these forums can be quite rude, most of the time unnecessarily. This is a discussion thread and your post is completely viable, except for the grammar. I don't know about some people, but I read and reread my posts multiple times before I post them to ensure that I have proper grammar. Again, welcome to the forums.
ouch i said do not judge i was just telling you guys what i thought and btw i was really excited to post my first every time i did not care about grammar i just thought have fun and do not be the same but im starting to think this website is not for me alot of people are too uptight and boring :/ it was fun while it last
And we have already chased off someone.
Hmm, well done, everyone.
Even I, the English perfectionist, am impressed with your speed and need for better English.
Don't they teach things like sentence structure, punctuation, or basic grammar in school anymore?
Actually, I don't think the problem is what they teach; it's how they teach it. Children are taught that readable writing is only something you do in school, so you can pass tests, rather than it being a communication protocol (rather like, say, TCP) that one uses to ensure that the message is communicated accurately. So, since they think of it as "something you do for school" rather than "something you do so people can understand you", they think that when they're not in school, it doesn't matter. As a result, people have a hell of a time understanding them.
Doubtful, seeing as she (according to the profile, the poster is female) has posted several other times since this "you're all meanies and I'm going away" post.
ouch i said do not judge i was just telling you guys what i thought and btw i was really excited to post my first every time i did not care about grammar i just thought have fun and do not be the same but im starting to think this website is not for me alot of people are too uptight and boring :/ it was fun while it last
You said "Do not judge." I said "I want to judge." (well, I thought it) Why should I do what you want, rather than what I want? Rather than trying to give orders to complete strangers who have no reason whatsoever to follow them, you're more likely to get the result you want if you don't give them a reason to do things you don't want. Like, oh, use some punctuation sometimes.
I'm going to go off on a bit of a rant here about things not necessarily specific to that post, but inspired by it.
You're solving the wrong problem.
You posted something that, whether you agree they're right or not, torqued a bunch of people. Your next post in the thread is explaining how you felt and what you wanted when you made the first post. The thing is, the problem was not that people didn't know how you felt or what you wanted. In fact, people probably couldn't care less about either. The problem people had involved how you wrote, not how you felt.
This is, of course, not uncommon. Fred steps on Charlie's foot. Charlie yowls in pain. Fred then says "I didn't mean to step on your foot." This doesn't help much. Charlie's problem is not, in fact, that he thinks Fred is a malicious foot-squisher. That hasn't even entered into his thinking. Charlie's problem is that his foot hurts because, y'know, Fred just trod on it. In boots. And Charlie was wearing flip-flops. So Charlie gets annoyed by Fred because he thinks Freddoesn't care that his foot hurts. Fred is trying to solve the wrong problem. Theproblem as he sees it is that Charlie might think he's a different kind of person than he does (namely a malicious foot-squisher). The problem as Charlie sees it is that his foot hurts. So Fred's solution doesn't address the actual problem (Charlie's sore foot) at all. Fred thinks Charlie is not a very understanding person (he didn't seem to care about Fred's motives) and Charlie thinks Fred is a selfish twit (he only thought about the perception of himself, not the sore foot). Fred tried to solve the wrong problem, and everyone ends up unhappy.
What would work better? "I'm sorry I stepped on your foot; can I get you some ice?" That's an expression of sympathy ("I'm sorry" is kind of a special case that way), rather than unnecessary self-defense, coupled with an offer to try to make things better. More important, though, when looking at this interaction, it is addressing the actual problem, namely Charlie's stepped-on foot, rather than a problem that exists only in Fred's head, Charlie's perception of why Fred did it. (unless Fred does have a habit of smashing people's feet and cackling with glee, in which case we have a whole other level of problems here) It takes a bit of analytical thinking, admittedly, but it's worth the effort if you want to avoid bad feelings and annoyed people (possibly with throbbing feet).
So how does that apply here?
Piggylover14 posted something that was, frankly, nearly unreadable. People had a problem with that, and said why: "this made my eyes bleed." Piggy then read the responses (some of which, by the way, were things like "welcome to the forums" and responded. However, she did not respond to the problems that people said they were having: for instance, writing in paragraph-long run-on sentences with no capitalization, punctuation, or anything else. Instead, she believed that the problem was that we hadn't noticed that she told us not to judge her, that we didn't know that she was excited, or we didn't know that she was telling us what she thought. Except, of course, that none of those is the actual problem. She's not the boss of me, so I don't care if she said "don't judge me" and I doubt if anyone else does either. Whether or not she was excited doesn't matter to me, either; I don't have to live with her IRL! And, likewise, the fact that she was telling us what she thought was obvious -- that's what pretty much every post in these forums is, except for things like bug reports -- so the problem was not that we didn't realize she was telling us what she thought!
The real problem was, in fact, that the post was very hard to read. The things that mattered to Piggy were not the things that mattered to the people trying to read it. Her post would have addressed the problem of people not knowing how she felt, if that had been the actual problem. But it didn't address what everybody else thought was the problem: the writing. She solved the wrong problem.
So, what could Piggy have done?
To start with, identifying the actual problem (in this case, the writing). Apologizing (for the right thing!) always helps. "I'm sorry I wrote like that." Changing what caused the problem. "I'll be more careful with my writing in the future." And, of course, actually doing so.
Instead, she did the exact same thing people had complained about, solved the wrong problem, and then threw in some insults to the forum users for good measure. ("boring" and "uptight" in particular) This didn't solve the problem; if anything, it made it worse. And the insults didn't make people who complained about her writing change their minds and start liking it; instead, they gave the message "the writer is a disagreeable person" and may, in fact, have caused people who had some sympathy for her to shift to the other side.
All in all, this is a really long analysis of a brief post. I know this! But it's something worth thinking about, not just in the context of this post but of every communication we have with other people, and everything we do, whether it's talking to someone or mowing the lawn: Solve the right problem!
To summarize in neat bullet points:
Writing is a communications protocol, so like any such protocol, it needs to be used correctly.
Solve the right problem. It's probably not what you think it is.
ouch i said do not judge i was just telling you guys what i thought and btw i was reallyexcited to post my first every time i did not care about grammar i just thought have fun and do not be the same but im starting to think this website is not for me alot of people are too uptight and boring :/ it was fun while it last
I read the OP before there was a single comment and I seriously thought, " Wow, this is so over the top, there is no way this is not a troll."
For what its worth Piggylover, I'm sorry I reacted with my gut. The truth is, your post was difficult to read. And your enthusiasm for the game seemed artificial. I was not the only one who thought so,either.
You can get angry about it if you want, but the only solution is to take peoples' advice and at least try to write coherently. Continuing to write in a way that caused the issue in the first place is a clear indication that you missed the point. And frankly, only feeds the fire.
Akynth's post was an (overly-long, though well illustrated) attempt to help you understand why people reacted the way they did. My guess, judging from your last post, is you either hadn't read it or you misunderstood the intentions. Nobody here wants to chase you away. Were they rude? Yes. Was I rude? Yes. But failing to address the problem accurately, and becoming irate over it just might change some minds.
I'm sorry for mocking you. I hope we both come away from this having learned something.
Heather, if you're going to be calm, starting out by shouting at us is not a good way to begin.
I've seen no haters in this thread. On the contrary, I've seen people welcoming you to the forums, people trying to help you, and one poor fellow whose brain melted because of my last Great Wall of Text (sorry, Mr_Science). Also, nobody here has been rude to you, while the converse is not true: you're the one who insulted other people. I think you really need to calm down and get some perspective here.
I'm starting to realize that you have been a very protected, pampered child. The problem is, you're very close to being an adult instead. The real world is about to come crashing down on you like a ton of bedrock. People aren't going to treat you like you're the most important person in the world, entitled to special consideration, obedience, and petting; they're going to treat you like everybody else, which is to say expecting the same from you as from other people. The world can be a harsh place, and you can't change that by wanting it to be otherwise. You think people in this forum are mean because they have the same expectations of you that they do of everyone else. In reality, this forum is a very sheltered place. I'm nice here (relatively speaking). Most other people are a whole lot nicer. The real world ... is not.
Now relax, calm down, mellow out, take a chill pill, and go have a chocolate chip cookie. Then come back and read over this thread again, looking at it from a totally objective viewpoint. I think you'll see it differently.
Actually, I don't think the problem is what they teach; it's how they teach it. Children are taught that readable writing is only something you do in school, so you can pass tests, rather than it being a communication protocol (rather like, say, TCP) that one uses to ensure that the message is communicated accurately. So, since they think of it as "something you do for school" rather than "something you do so people can understand you", they think that when they're not in school, it doesn't matter. As a result, people have a hell of a time understanding them.
Your posts are readable. That guy who likes posting in light cyan, on the other hand ....
Doubtful, seeing as she (according to the profile, the poster is female) has posted several other times since this "you're all meanies and I'm going away" post.
You said "Do not judge." I said "I want to judge." (well, I thought it) Why should I do what you want, rather than what I want? Rather than trying to give orders to complete strangers who have no reason whatsoever to follow them, you're more likely to get the result you want if you don't give them a reason to do things you don't want. Like, oh, use some punctuation sometimes.
I'm going to go off on a bit of a rant here about things not necessarily specific to that post, but inspired by it.
You're solving the wrong problem.
You posted something that, whether you agree they're right or not, torqued a bunch of people. Your next post in the thread is explaining how you felt and what you wanted when you made the first post. The thing is, the problem was not that people didn't know how you felt or what you wanted. In fact, people probably couldn't care less about either. The problem people had involved how you wrote, not how you felt.
This is, of course, not uncommon. Fred steps on Charlie's foot. Charlie yowls in pain. Fred then says "I didn't mean to step on your foot." This doesn't help much. Charlie's problem is not, in fact, that he thinks Fred is a malicious foot-squisher. That hasn't even entered into his thinking. Charlie's problem is that his foot hurts because, y'know, Fred just trod on it. In boots. And Charlie was wearing flip-flops. So Charlie gets annoyed by Fred because he thinks Freddoesn't care that his foot hurts. Fred is trying to solve the wrong problem. Theproblem as he sees it is that Charlie might think he's a different kind of person than he does (namely a malicious foot-squisher). The problem as Charlie sees it is that his foot hurts. So Fred's solution doesn't address the actual problem (Charlie's sore foot) at all. Fred thinks Charlie is not a very understanding person (he didn't seem to care about Fred's motives) and Charlie thinks Fred is a selfish twit (he only thought about the perception of himself, not the sore foot). Fred tried to solve the wrong problem, and everyone ends up unhappy.
What would work better? "I'm sorry I stepped on your foot; can I get you some ice?" That's an expression of sympathy ("I'm sorry" is kind of a special case that way), rather than unnecessary self-defense, coupled with an offer to try to make things better. More important, though, when looking at this interaction, it is addressing the actual problem, namely Charlie's stepped-on foot, rather than a problem that exists only in Fred's head, Charlie's perception of why Fred did it. (unless Fred does have a habit of smashing people's feet and cackling with glee, in which case we have a whole other level of problems here) It takes a bit of analytical thinking, admittedly, but it's worth the effort if you want to avoid bad feelings and annoyed people (possibly with throbbing feet).
So how does that apply here?
Piggylover14 posted something that was, frankly, nearly unreadable. People had a problem with that, and said why: "this made my eyes bleed." Piggy then read the responses (some of which, by the way, were things like "welcome to the forums" and responded. However, she did not respond to the problems that people said they were having: for instance, writing in paragraph-long run-on sentences with no capitalization, punctuation, or anything else. Instead, she believed that the problem was that we hadn't noticed that she told us not to judge her, that we didn't know that she was excited, or we didn't know that she was telling us what she thought. Except, of course, that none of those is the actual problem. She's not the boss of me, so I don't care if she said "don't judge me" and I doubt if anyone else does either. Whether or not she was excited doesn't matter to me, either; I don't have to live with her IRL! And, likewise, the fact that she was telling us what she thought was obvious -- that's what pretty much every post in these forums is, except for things like bug reports -- so the problem was not that we didn't realize she was telling us what she thought!
The real problem was, in fact, that the post was very hard to read. The things that mattered to Piggy were not the things that mattered to the people trying to read it. Her post would have addressed the problem of people not knowing how she felt, if that had been the actual problem. But it didn't address what everybody else thought was the problem: the writing. She solved the wrong problem.
So, what could Piggy have done?
To start with, identifying the actual problem (in this case, the writing). Apologizing (for the right thing!) always helps. "I'm sorry I wrote like that." Changing what caused the problem. "I'll be more careful with my writing in the future." And, of course, actually doing so.
Instead, she did the exact same thing people had complained about, solved the wrong problem, and then threw in some insults to the forum users for good measure. ("boring" and "uptight" in particular) This didn't solve the problem; if anything, it made it worse. And the insults didn't make people who complained about her writing change their minds and start liking it; instead, they gave the message "the writer is a disagreeable person" and may, in fact, have caused people who had some sympathy for her to shift to the other side.
All in all, this is a really long analysis of a brief post. I know this! But it's something worth thinking about, not just in the context of this post but of every communication we have with other people, and everything we do, whether it's talking to someone or mowing the lawn: Solve the right problem!
To summarize in neat bullet points:
Writing is a communications protocol, so like any such protocol, it needs to be used correctly.
Solve the right problem. It's probably not what you think it is.
Or that. Though red is at least endurable. The guy with the cyan, I have to select his whole post to even read it. Half the time I don't even bother. If he has something worthwhile to say, someone else will probably quote it.
It all comes down to the idea of communications protocols, really. One would never throw a malformed TCP packet out on the 'net and expect whatever's on the other end to make sense of it. It's obvious that if it doesn't follow the standard, it's just gibberish to the receiver. Yet people seem to think that everything they've ever learned about writing a clear, understandable English sentence is "just for school." They don't understand that the basic rules of writing (you start a sentence with a capital letter, you end it with a period, "they're" is not the same word as "their", etc.) exist for the exact same reason as the formatting for any other communications protocol: so that the recipient can make sense of what you transmitted.
And this is not just stuff someone invented last week. Take the whole matter of hard-to-read text colors: Black on white has long been a standard for a very good reason, and that reason is contrast. There's a reason books aren't printed in pale-colored ink on unbleached paper, and that reason isn't that bleaching the paper and making dark ink is somehow cheaper; it's not. It's that more people can read them if they're printed that way. That's been the case since the first scribe wrote on a papyrus scroll instead of damp clay.
I think part of it is the incredibly self-centered nature of a lot of people today. "My stuff is so important that people will try harder than average to read it." Except, of course, it's not. It's no more important than any other forum post, and if you post it in a hard-to-read color, or reduce the font size, or write like a semi-literate grade-schooler, or use words that just kind of sound like the ones you want, but don't mean anything of the kind, people aren't going to make that extra effort because you're not that special (for any relevant value of "you"). These are the kids who come from "competitions" where everybody gets a prize, and schools that teach them that expressing themselves (something, I should point out, that my cat can do very well when someone steps on his tail) is more important than being understood. They think they're the most important person in the world (after all, their parents keep telling them that) and they're going to crash headlong into millions of other people who also feel like the most important person in the world. That isn't going to be a good thing. As a wiser person than I once said, if you're one in a million, then there are 8 people just like you in New York City.
There are websites that do this. They don't tend to last long. If a site doesn't have what Vincent Flanders calls "heroin content" -- the kind of thing that people will crawl through swamps full of alligators to see -- then nobody is going to bother with its low-contrast text, or its eye-tearing background, or its strange navigation system, or whatever else someone thinks makes their website "different." They'll just move on. Forum posts are the same thing: if your post isn't overwhelmingly important to everyone else, they're not going to go to any extra work. Around here, that means anything that isn't signed "4JSteve".
What's interesting is that by trying to make their posts distinctive and memorable (at least I think that's what they're trying to do!) people like the OP of this thread mostly get ignored instead.
Now, my posts stand out for their sheer, overwhelming length. This isn't actually intended -- I do try to edit them down to a less intimidating size. Imagine what they'd be if I didn't! But I'm not writing Great Walls of Text just to make my posts stand out in some way; rather, it's that I have a lot to say, and I do tend to be long-winded in how I say it. What I do try to make distinctive and memorable, though, is the ease of reading. I know I'm not the most important person in your world; you are (for every "you" in this forum). So I have to write in a way that maximizes the reward it provides per unit time spent reading it.
To pick on the post that started this thread, for instance, it actually provided nothing useful to the reader: it told us what Minecraft was like ... duh! It told us a few things about the poster ... frankly, nobody cares; they already know everything there is to know about the most interesting person in the world (themselves!). Content-wise, it was a null. And in order to figure this out, the reader had to not just read it but decode it. So it totally failed in the effort:reward evaluation. As a counter-example, take pretty much any good seed post from that board. They provide the seed, a list of important things nearby (spawners, etc.), possibly information about the biomes, and they do this in a way that anyone who's interested can read quickly and easily. "The seed is this, I can find good things here and there, etc." Valuable content, minimal effort. They come out much higher on that effort:reward ratio.
If you're trying to communicate with other people, you have to make it easy for them to understand you and give them a reason to want to read it. There are a distressing number of people (and far from just here) who don't seem to get either one.
Ah, well ... I guess I ought to write this up for my widely-ignored blog, rather than filling up forum space with it.
FINE YOU KNOW WHAT!!!! im gonna be calm and not type anything rude unlike some of you, haters gonna hate
Yeah you need too Learn to live with this, if you stay, honestly it gets to me sometimes. A few tips: punctuation, proper capitalization, NO abbreviations ie. BTW, LOL, B4, TBH, and so on. Most people don't post about their opinion of the game, check out other people's posts you'll figure it out. post some thing informational or at least worth reading. The Xbox community isn't the most forgiving place in THIS forum. Wait awhile you'll get not the swing of things and you will have a bunch a rep and friends and what not. All the same good luck and welcome to the forums I hope you find your place, and don't leave.
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fat german kids walking around dropping bread
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Retired StaffPiggyLover14, in the event that you are a real poster, let me give you some advice:
1. Read a few other people's posts so you can see what the usual is around here.
2. Don't mess around with font sizes, colors, etc. The default is what it is for a reason.
3. Don't tell us things we already know. We know what the XBox version is like; we play it!
4. Punctuation is your friend. Or at least, punctuation is our friend. For the love of all that's holy, break up that Great Wall Of Text so people can read it!
...off to do something about the bleeding eyes.....
The golden age: it's not the game, it's you ⋆ Why Minecraft should not be harder ⋆ Spelling hints
I've seen worse around here. Aside from the lack of punctuation, and the slightly small text, it's really not that bad.
Since no one else has said it; Welcome to the forums. It's always nice to see people excited about a game.
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Retired StaffImpossible.
I see that you have never replaced your blood with pure redstone.
That is only step 1 in the 1 million step plan for redstone mastery.
Hmm, well done, everyone.
Even I, the English perfectionist, am impressed with your speed and need for better English.
Stay fluffy~
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Retired StaffActually, I don't think the problem is what they teach; it's how they teach it. Children are taught that readable writing is only something you do in school, so you can pass tests, rather than it being a communication protocol (rather like, say, TCP) that one uses to ensure that the message is communicated accurately. So, since they think of it as "something you do for school" rather than "something you do so people can understand you", they think that when they're not in school, it doesn't matter. As a result, people have a hell of a time understanding them.
Your posts are readable. That guy who likes posting in light cyan, on the other hand ....
Doubtful, seeing as she (according to the profile, the poster is female) has posted several other times since this "you're all meanies and I'm going away" post.
You said "Do not judge." I said "I want to judge." (well, I thought it) Why should I do what you want, rather than what I want? Rather than trying to give orders to complete strangers who have no reason whatsoever to follow them, you're more likely to get the result you want if you don't give them a reason to do things you don't want. Like, oh, use some punctuation sometimes.
I'm going to go off on a bit of a rant here about things not necessarily specific to that post, but inspired by it.
You're solving the wrong problem.
You posted something that, whether you agree they're right or not, torqued a bunch of people. Your next post in the thread is explaining how you felt and what you wanted when you made the first post. The thing is, the problem was not that people didn't know how you felt or what you wanted. In fact, people probably couldn't care less about either. The problem people had involved how you wrote, not how you felt.
This is, of course, not uncommon. Fred steps on Charlie's foot. Charlie yowls in pain. Fred then says "I didn't mean to step on your foot." This doesn't help much. Charlie's problem is not, in fact, that he thinks Fred is a malicious foot-squisher. That hasn't even entered into his thinking. Charlie's problem is that his foot hurts because, y'know, Fred just trod on it. In boots. And Charlie was wearing flip-flops. So Charlie gets annoyed by Fred because he thinks Fred doesn't care that his foot hurts. Fred is trying to solve the wrong problem. The problem as he sees it is that Charlie might think he's a different kind of person than he does (namely a malicious foot-squisher). The problem as Charlie sees it is that his foot hurts. So Fred's solution doesn't address the actual problem (Charlie's sore foot) at all. Fred thinks Charlie is not a very understanding person (he didn't seem to care about Fred's motives) and Charlie thinks Fred is a selfish twit (he only thought about the perception of himself, not the sore foot). Fred tried to solve the wrong problem, and everyone ends up unhappy.
What would work better? "I'm sorry I stepped on your foot; can I get you some ice?" That's an expression of sympathy ("I'm sorry" is kind of a special case that way), rather than unnecessary self-defense, coupled with an offer to try to make things better. More important, though, when looking at this interaction, it is addressing the actual problem, namely Charlie's stepped-on foot, rather than a problem that exists only in Fred's head, Charlie's perception of why Fred did it. (unless Fred does have a habit of smashing people's feet and cackling with glee, in which case we have a whole other level of problems here) It takes a bit of analytical thinking, admittedly, but it's worth the effort if you want to avoid bad feelings and annoyed people (possibly with throbbing feet).
So how does that apply here?
Piggylover14 posted something that was, frankly, nearly unreadable. People had a problem with that, and said why: "this made my eyes bleed." Piggy then read the responses (some of which, by the way, were things like "welcome to the forums" and responded. However, she did not respond to the problems that people said they were having: for instance, writing in paragraph-long run-on sentences with no capitalization, punctuation, or anything else. Instead, she believed that the problem was that we hadn't noticed that she told us not to judge her, that we didn't know that she was excited, or we didn't know that she was telling us what she thought. Except, of course, that none of those is the actual problem. She's not the boss of me, so I don't care if she said "don't judge me" and I doubt if anyone else does either. Whether or not she was excited doesn't matter to me, either; I don't have to live with her IRL! And, likewise, the fact that she was telling us what she thought was obvious -- that's what pretty much every post in these forums is, except for things like bug reports -- so the problem was not that we didn't realize she was telling us what she thought!
The real problem was, in fact, that the post was very hard to read. The things that mattered to Piggy were not the things that mattered to the people trying to read it. Her post would have addressed the problem of people not knowing how she felt, if that had been the actual problem. But it didn't address what everybody else thought was the problem: the writing. She solved the wrong problem.
So, what could Piggy have done?
To start with, identifying the actual problem (in this case, the writing). Apologizing (for the right thing!) always helps. "I'm sorry I wrote like that." Changing what caused the problem. "I'll be more careful with my writing in the future." And, of course, actually doing so.
Instead, she did the exact same thing people had complained about, solved the wrong problem, and then threw in some insults to the forum users for good measure. ("boring" and "uptight" in particular) This didn't solve the problem; if anything, it made it worse. And the insults didn't make people who complained about her writing change their minds and start liking it; instead, they gave the message "the writer is a disagreeable person" and may, in fact, have caused people who had some sympathy for her to shift to the other side.
All in all, this is a really long analysis of a brief post. I know this! But it's something worth thinking about, not just in the context of this post but of every communication we have with other people, and everything we do, whether it's talking to someone or mowing the lawn: Solve the right problem!
To summarize in neat bullet points:
The golden age: it's not the game, it's you ⋆ Why Minecraft should not be harder ⋆ Spelling hints
After reading the original post then your post my brain has melted.
Relaxed Survival Community Realm (NO KIDS)
For what its worth Piggylover, I'm sorry I reacted with my gut. The truth is, your post was difficult to read. And your enthusiasm for the game seemed artificial. I was not the only one who thought so,either.
You can get angry about it if you want, but the only solution is to take peoples' advice and at least try to write coherently. Continuing to write in a way that caused the issue in the first place is a clear indication that you missed the point. And frankly, only feeds the fire.
Akynth's post was an (overly-long, though well illustrated) attempt to help you understand why people reacted the way they did. My guess, judging from your last post, is you either hadn't read it or you misunderstood the intentions. Nobody here wants to chase you away. Were they rude? Yes. Was I rude? Yes. But failing to address the problem accurately, and becoming irate over it just might change some minds.
I'm sorry for mocking you. I hope we both come away from this having learned something.
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Retired StaffI've seen no haters in this thread. On the contrary, I've seen people welcoming you to the forums, people trying to help you, and one poor fellow whose brain melted because of my last Great Wall of Text (sorry, Mr_Science). Also, nobody here has been rude to you, while the converse is not true: you're the one who insulted other people. I think you really need to calm down and get some perspective here.
I'm starting to realize that you have been a very protected, pampered child. The problem is, you're very close to being an adult instead. The real world is about to come crashing down on you like a ton of bedrock. People aren't going to treat you like you're the most important person in the world, entitled to special consideration, obedience, and petting; they're going to treat you like everybody else, which is to say expecting the same from you as from other people. The world can be a harsh place, and you can't change that by wanting it to be otherwise. You think people in this forum are mean because they have the same expectations of you that they do of everyone else. In reality, this forum is a very sheltered place. I'm nice here (relatively speaking). Most other people are a whole lot nicer. The real world ... is not.
Now relax, calm down, mellow out, take a chill pill, and go have a chocolate chip cookie. Then come back and read over this thread again, looking at it from a totally objective viewpoint. I think you'll see it differently.
The golden age: it's not the game, it's you ⋆ Why Minecraft should not be harder ⋆ Spelling hints
...or red. It makes my think box hurt.
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Retired StaffOr that. Though red is at least endurable. The guy with the cyan, I have to select his whole post to even read it. Half the time I don't even bother. If he has something worthwhile to say, someone else will probably quote it.
It all comes down to the idea of communications protocols, really. One would never throw a malformed TCP packet out on the 'net and expect whatever's on the other end to make sense of it. It's obvious that if it doesn't follow the standard, it's just gibberish to the receiver. Yet people seem to think that everything they've ever learned about writing a clear, understandable English sentence is "just for school." They don't understand that the basic rules of writing (you start a sentence with a capital letter, you end it with a period, "they're" is not the same word as "their", etc.) exist for the exact same reason as the formatting for any other communications protocol: so that the recipient can make sense of what you transmitted.
And this is not just stuff someone invented last week. Take the whole matter of hard-to-read text colors: Black on white has long been a standard for a very good reason, and that reason is contrast. There's a reason books aren't printed in pale-colored ink on unbleached paper, and that reason isn't that bleaching the paper and making dark ink is somehow cheaper; it's not. It's that more people can read them if they're printed that way. That's been the case since the first scribe wrote on a papyrus scroll instead of damp clay.
I think part of it is the incredibly self-centered nature of a lot of people today. "My stuff is so important that people will try harder than average to read it." Except, of course, it's not. It's no more important than any other forum post, and if you post it in a hard-to-read color, or reduce the font size, or write like a semi-literate grade-schooler, or use words that just kind of sound like the ones you want, but don't mean anything of the kind, people aren't going to make that extra effort because you're not that special (for any relevant value of "you"). These are the kids who come from "competitions" where everybody gets a prize, and schools that teach them that expressing themselves (something, I should point out, that my cat can do very well when someone steps on his tail) is more important than being understood. They think they're the most important person in the world (after all, their parents keep telling them that) and they're going to crash headlong into millions of other people who also feel like the most important person in the world. That isn't going to be a good thing. As a wiser person than I once said, if you're one in a million, then there are 8 people just like you in New York City.
There are websites that do this. They don't tend to last long. If a site doesn't have what Vincent Flanders calls "heroin content" -- the kind of thing that people will crawl through swamps full of alligators to see -- then nobody is going to bother with its low-contrast text, or its eye-tearing background, or its strange navigation system, or whatever else someone thinks makes their website "different." They'll just move on. Forum posts are the same thing: if your post isn't overwhelmingly important to everyone else, they're not going to go to any extra work. Around here, that means anything that isn't signed "4JSteve".
What's interesting is that by trying to make their posts distinctive and memorable (at least I think that's what they're trying to do!) people like the OP of this thread mostly get ignored instead.
Now, my posts stand out for their sheer, overwhelming length. This isn't actually intended -- I do try to edit them down to a less intimidating size. Imagine what they'd be if I didn't! But I'm not writing Great Walls of Text just to make my posts stand out in some way; rather, it's that I have a lot to say, and I do tend to be long-winded in how I say it. What I do try to make distinctive and memorable, though, is the ease of reading. I know I'm not the most important person in your world; you are (for every "you" in this forum). So I have to write in a way that maximizes the reward it provides per unit time spent reading it.
To pick on the post that started this thread, for instance, it actually provided nothing useful to the reader: it told us what Minecraft was like ... duh! It told us a few things about the poster ... frankly, nobody cares; they already know everything there is to know about the most interesting person in the world (themselves!). Content-wise, it was a null. And in order to figure this out, the reader had to not just read it but decode it. So it totally failed in the effort:reward evaluation. As a counter-example, take pretty much any good seed post from that board. They provide the seed, a list of important things nearby (spawners, etc.), possibly information about the biomes, and they do this in a way that anyone who's interested can read quickly and easily. "The seed is this, I can find good things here and there, etc." Valuable content, minimal effort. They come out much higher on that effort:reward ratio.
If you're trying to communicate with other people, you have to make it easy for them to understand you and give them a reason to want to read it. There are a distressing number of people (and far from just here) who don't seem to get either one.
Ah, well ... I guess I ought to write this up for my widely-ignored blog, rather than filling up forum space with it.
The golden age: it's not the game, it's you ⋆ Why Minecraft should not be harder ⋆ Spelling hints
Yeah you need too Learn to live with this, if you stay, honestly it gets to me sometimes. A few tips: punctuation, proper capitalization, NO abbreviations ie. BTW, LOL, B4, TBH, and so on. Most people don't post about their opinion of the game, check out other people's posts you'll figure it out. post some thing informational or at least worth reading. The Xbox community isn't the most forgiving place in THIS forum. Wait awhile you'll get not the swing of things and you will have a bunch a rep and friends and what not. All the same good luck and welcome to the forums I hope you find your place, and don't leave.