Lol ok fine the "newcomers" then. Er... I guess it's pretty safe to blame them then. Dx

At least the people who posts those sparkly pictures have more sincerity. x_x

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can't argue with that I think...
I guess it depends on the amount of copy-pasta

Stardale, I know, I saw shaz's post.

Wolfie, copy-pasta? Really?

yeah, as some people do copy-paste some comments from cottage to cottage, and from this place to that in this site.

@Ivana: Sparkly pictures? What? Where? What does it have to do with any of these spam-posts?

(Slightly off-topic)@ryuzaki: My avvie? It IS meant to be like the llama song

Uh, they're still spam, but in 'picture form', get it?

Well, over all I don't have a problem with one word comments, or sparkly signatures unless they take up half a page. The only problem I have is the obvious spammers pushing their commercial stuff using the cottages. I don't like the 'us' and 'them' feeling that seems to have emerged here, and I am sorry to see it. Like everything else it will blow over soon, I hope.

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You, as an individual, might not. But look at it from the wider perspective: a person who spams one-word comments on all cottages, collegium posts, and game pages earns 1,000 in an obscenely short amount of time, when the high price is for the users to get to know the community and vice versa before being admitted into guilds etc, where they will now be eligible to be beta testers. Usually people who take the easy way out are lazy and irresponsible (indeed, there are cases where speedily guilded members simply drop off the face of AM until a testing roll call, as I've mentioned a few pages ago) - do you truly want these people to become beta testers? Risk the quality of subsequent games? Let them hang onto other hardworking testers playing the game over and over again just to chase all the bugs away so that YOU, the end users, can have a relatively bug-free and enjoyable game?

Besides, you might enjoy seeing that one comment on your cottage, but when you see them across 100 cottages, all with the same message which was probably posted without actually looking at the cottage content... well, how sincere was the compliment in the first place?

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Sure, when the site users don't spam anymore. But human nature is as such, there will always be those who can't resist getting quick gold. Same thing in real life, not to mention a lot more dangerous. It's just too bad that we can't set out a sting for these get-rich-quick people here.

So the point of the high price is for members to hang around and get to know people. I never knew that. I just thought it was expensive for the heck of it.

I remember that I used to be very inactive in the forum. I probably still am not really active, though I practically haunt Amaranthia (I log in about every other 5 minutes or so) these days. That's why it took me more than a year to get guilded and half of the post counts comes from Collegium submissions and replying to the comments there.

Misty: yep. It's a noun.

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You can call it 'us and them' but what it boils down to is that 'them' are essentially circumventing the thousand gold standard by breaking forum rules without getting caught, because there is nowhere that C&C posts are tracked.
So it's not really an 'us and them' question, but a challenge to rules enforcement.
Anyway, on the regular forums, 'them' would have been banned long ago anyway.



incidentally, wasn't there a cooldown time between posts on the purple forum? I wonder if something like that could be implemented on the cottages without too much PHP. . .? (or by copy-pasting code & changing var. names perhaps)

Well the whole gold thing is skewed towards certain forums... for myself, whose primary hangouts are the spam forum (where nothing counts) and the hungry boar tavern (where my posts are fewer but longer) even though I've been here for a year and have been reasonably active throughout that time, I'm still nowhere close to 1000- at this rate I'd be a guildie in a few years?

But somehow I had assumed that was how it is for everyone (...I also didn't realize that collegium and cottage comments even counted for gold. Seriously?)

I hate those short posts and comments- they're usually only used to get more gold. While I have no cottage and I don't post in the Collegium very much, I'm on Fanfiction.net a lot, and it seriously annoys me when I get reviews like "omg that's cool." I go to the length of typing a story for you- and that's all you'll say? And they don't even have a gold system thingy on there.

@Blurble: Yeah, apparently you do get gold for cottage and colelgium posts. That's where half my gold came from. Collegium posts...

@burythecastle: on the other hand, on fanfiction.net (where there isn't the ulterior motive of gold) a tiny comment is sometimes what a reader leaves when they feel that they should at least express appreciation for the story but don't have much else to say. Which is to say that you say "I go to the length of typing a story for you- and that's all you'll say?" but at least they aren't like the- countless- readers that will read your story and not comment at all...

Even small comments let you know that someone out there is bothering to read it and enjoyed it enough to say so.

@agas: lol it makes complete sense for that to be the source of all your gold. =D

@Blurble: It is better than the countless readers who don't review- I have story with 130- something views and 2 reviews- but it's the tiny ones that irritate me. Just a bit of a pet peeve of mine, I guess.

@Blurb: I've gotten around to being more active in other parts of the forum though. I mean, I got guilded June last year and I've somehow accumulated 2000+ gold since then.

Blurb: I got mine slowly too. Took 3 years or more, was across 2 server crashes (well, 1 crash and 1 "we're changing the system so all the data gets lost" and never had 1000 gold or 1000 post count (which was the system before gold was implemented) at any one time and here I am guilded anyway. I wonder if they messed up. XP

the moral is...
even if you have 800 gold and sth happens that makes it disappear people (eg admins) will still remember & be nice & give you a discount when you get far enough that it's clear you've had 1000

soo take your time.


(yeah, this was just an excuse to share a story. I'm like some old guy... no offense to old people. those stories are awesome. =P )

The 800 gold idea is great but the requirement of 800 is too high. I have been here for over an year but still only have around 500 gold.
There is another spamming area and that is the HBT area where people repeat the same praises for all the stories which gets a bit annoying.
Guildship at 1000 seems ok but only the writers of the story or the painters of the artwork should probably get gold in collegium and cottages should be like spam haven.

I agree. 800 gold IS too high. Maybe should just make it 300 so it's not too low, but they still have to be an active member. I did like the idea of posting cottage comments because it made me feel welcome, but I dislike the "welcome to the neighborhood" comments now. Now I realize they are too short. Some people do those comments for the gold, others do it because they like to welcome people. It's hard for people to understand because the concept is confusing. I believe getting gold should be disabled in cottages, and that people can still post in them, but they won't get gold. That will drive away most of the spammies, atleast from cottages. If people have something to say to the person, that's what the PM button is for.

Yeah, having college-comments not get gold would solve the problem to an extent, wouldn't it?

(Well, okay, I'm not someone who by nature goes around commenting on cottages- unless they belong to a friend or something brings them to my attention- so maybe I'm unfairly biased)