This game has been around a while now. The days of the leading players regularly exploring new strategies and finding screws / strong unit combos have faded.
More and more, these forums are (quite rightly) places where newcomers to the game can pose questions to the more experienced players. Quite often these are questions that have been asked before, but that is the nature of things and to be embraced.
But I have a real concern about the amount of junk that is written in response to a lot of queries from newcomers. Specifically I'm not talking about someone posting a new thread and making an error in their suppositions etc... nothing wrong with that... I'm talking about the increasing number of rookie players who respond to newcomers with poorly thought out responses, but state them boldly as if they are fact.
Although it would help me to emphasise my point, I'm not going to give actual, linked, examples as I'm not looking to single people out here or start any kind of flame war etc... but as an indication of the 1) If someone asks whether chickens are huntables the same as say zebras etc. - don't answer if you're not sure you know! 2) If you're not sure whether spreading villies across temples increases favor gathering rate - don't answer if you don't know! 3) If someone asks the best way to repel a Loki rush - they are basically asking the question to people who can do this at a decent competitive level (say 1700+)... they aren't really asking someone who has managed it once against a 1570 Loki player by massing hippikons and MUs. Yet inevitably the answer will come: "lol - the best way to r0xx0rz Loki is to use cav & myth. btw I am 19++ (honest but if you ask 4 an ESO nick I'll mumble and then vanish)". So there's my moan - now here are my suggestions to help all of us forummers lift our games here: 1) Unless you're 100% sure you have the answer to a posted question, try qualifying your response a little or phrasing it as a question, eg: "Well I'm not a Loki player, but I'm fairly confident that you can utilise ranged MU such as trolls and centaurs to help you repel hersirs - you just have to micro them well. Any comments?" rather than "Use centaurs against a Loki rush". 2) And if you really don't know the answer, just don't post a crappy guess and please don't phrase it like it's emphatically true. 3) To a lot of players here - honestly, 1600-1700 is a perfectly good rating... could people stop claiming to be several hundred points higher than they are? It's painfully obvious to all concerned and we'd still listen to 16++ people! 4) The mods do a great job here, and I know that they are kept absurdly busy by flamers and gibberish posters... But is there perhaps room for a "Technical" moderator on the General and Strategy forums? By this I mean someone who most would recognise as a trustworthy exponent of the game (such as Pug or, prior to his leaving, Johnny_Deppig) - who would correct the more glaringly wrong and bad technical advice that regulary crops up? For example, if someone were to state "massed hippikon beat all atlantean combos" (it's only a matter of time!) then this mod would be responsible for stating that this isn't true, and newcomers would trust their opinion rather than getting into a fruitless flame-ridden debate. 5) This might not be technically possible here - however many forums allow other forummers to rate their peers on a 5 star rating system. So the better or more reliable posters will gradually pick up four or five stars under their name on posts, and we'd know who to trust. Obviously post-counts are redundant information (too many spammers!) so no need for this to be added. Well, just my rant for the day - perhaps it'll strike a chord with some of you. We need to stop misleading the newcomers to the game. And speaking personally, I've always been a staunch defender of AOMH, sometimes travelling over to AOTS to do it - but if we can't do something to raise our game here then it might be time for me to "go green" along with most of the other moderate-to-good players.
Yes sir, there's plenty of this type of thing on these forums at the moment, and it's a poor thing indeed to mislead newcomers to the game. Not that it's being done deliberately - it's just that MOST OF YOU PEOPLE DON'T KNOW THIS GAME AS WELL AS YOU THINK THAT YOU DO.