GameFAQs Message Boards

The only forum I've been to that penalizes you for your opinion and rewards you for doing nothing. The base system of the message boards is inherently flawed. On the message boards, everytime you log in, you'll get a karma point. Karma points are points that basically help you level up your account. Simple, right? It gets worse. Where on most message boards, as soon as you sign-up, you get basic features such as the ability to search for topics, or post as much as you want per day, or the ability to mark other people's topics, you can't do any of this right from the get-go. In order for you to post as decently as you would on any other message board, you must first level up your account. That means you must continually log-onto your account for about 3 months before you can have the same amount of features that you would get on a normal message board within the first day. The worst part of the basic system is that there is NO way to gain extra karma. You only earn it after you log-on the next day. You can't gain it by submitting video game reviews, guides and walkthroughs, or by submitting any other contributions to the site. You are literally stuck getting 1 karma per day. This is basically the staff of GameFAQs saying that "We don't give two shits about your contributions to the site, we only want more visitors per day." As if that wasn't bad enough, you can lose karma points for literally anything you say or do. This makes trying to get basic posting features a pain in the ass. Voicing your opinion is intolerable, and you will be modded immediately. This is because the moderators are either inept, stupid, fanboyish, corrupt, or any combination of the four. Say how disappointed you are in Nintendo on the Wii board? Nope, you're trolling. How about saying that you like Majora's Mask more than Ocarina of Time on the OoT board? You're trolling. What about saying how overrated you think Halo 3 is on the 360 board or the Halo boards? You're most certainly trolling. Some of the penalties for these so-called 'violations' are absolutely ridiculous. For example, getting your account banned because you posted a picture of a girl who had a nipslip where 1/64th of a nipple was actually showing, even though showing the area of boobage around the nipple is perfectly acceptable. So in a nutshell, you gain ONE karma per day, and one wrong post can take off anywhere from 3 to 10 karma. But it gets even worse. The moderators can't even decide on what's tolerable and what's not. This is the worst part of the moderators. Several users will get away with certain stuff, and as soon as you do the same, you will get moderated. The other users' posts will still be there for several weeks. When you contest a moderation, they even make a note of saying that mentioning how other people did it and got away with it is not an excuse. Maybe if they actually did their job instead of deciding when and when not to moderate somebody, they wouldn't even need to put that as a note. Now, admittedly, upon signing up, very few people bother to read the ToS. People expect it to be the same cookie cutter "Don't post bad things!" type of things you see in the ToS for other forums. However, after you get moderated repeatedly, you will think to actually look back at the ToS to see if there's anything you missed. You will see that even the ToS is flawed. Half of the things you can get moderated for aren't even mentioned in the ToS. You will also see that it is just full of loopholes, in the form of manipulating statements such as "this includes but is not limited to..." in their favor. They add new violations to their list everyday, but it never appears in the ToS. And finallly, the users. The morons have a lot of karma points, and intelligent users have very little. And your opinion will also be belitted because of your low karma. Both the moderators and the users seem to think their opinion is fact. Please, do not visit GameFAQs. It's nothing more than aggravation after aggravation. If you're looking for a decent video game forum, don't go here at all.