We need to have a family discussion. Put away the poop thread and let Vien down from the rafters; we all need to talk about this together. For the last few months, there has been a lot of lively discussion about 343i and their first game, Halo 4. We've praised it and damned it, which is perfectly normal and something you would expect to see on any forum. Unfortunately, a trend is developing in the bowels of this new beast, and it is [I]not[/I] representative of who we are as a community. In some ways, it's to be expected. There have always been those among us who feel the need to show their support for Bungie by proclaiming the superiority of their products (again, perfectly normal), and at the moment we have little to shout about. Such restlessness before the Destiny reveal is to be expected, and normally I wouldn't worry about this at all. However, I've seen this trend ruin forums before. The trend I've been referring to is the excessive, played-out, and unrelenting criticism of 343i as a company. The intrinsic notion that anything they produce is shit pervades much of this forum. It's gotten to the point that uncreative users with nothing else to say can post topics with consisting of little more than "lolol343sucksbecausex" (hashtag that if you want; I know someone will), and people will blithely reply to them with similar comments. The point at which hate on a company becomes as commonplace and accepted as "lol" is what I'm concerned about. I've recently seen another community greatly reduced by this behavior. For the community in question, the entity that was being attacked was actually the creator of the game the community was built around. It would be like if #bungiesux became the running theme of the site, which made it a little more awkward than it is in our situation. The forums became filled with 90% of the users contributing nothing more than re-bleetings of the criticisms they saw gaining attention. Soon enough, any actual discussion died off, and the forum became a cesspool of whiny entitled gits pantomiming the actions of more popular whiny entitled gits. This is what inspired me to make this thread: [I]I've seen users on [u]this[/u] forum doing similar things for attention.[/I] Now I don't think Bnet needs to worry about a similar fate. The new forum features allow us to filter content in ways I've never seen on a forum, so if things ever got to that level (which I sincerely doubt they will) [I]we[/I] would still have a way around it (maybe you can tout the new site features if you're so inclined). In addition, the portion of the community taking part in this behavior is so small to the whole, that I don't think we'd need to worry about it even if we had the old forums. That said, it doesn't make us look good. If the only way we can think of to promote the company we love is to blindly attack another, then we don't look like a community worth investing in. Soon enough Destiny will be here, and we'll have plenty to shout about. But if this blind adherence to negativity sticks, we could be stuck with it for a long time. I want you to think about the new users that will be here when Destiny picks up steam. Do you really think they'll want to stick around if all we do is spout repetitive hate? If you want to help Bungie, make this community look like something better than the rest of the forums out there. We already are of course, but some people need a little help seeing it ;) So in closing, feel free to have critical, even negative discussion of 343i, but don't make it a site meme. It's boring, tacky, and available on plenty of other sites. Thank you for your time.