Okay, the first part of this post will sound like an attack, but really, it's all very relevant and very important to whether or not we should have a thread like that.
Kaelik: Yeah, he's totally a victim, and you didn't come over here because of reading in a similar "Fail" thread in the Den and decide to pick a fight. To quote that fail thread (and quote uber in that thread):
"Anybody besides Kaelik want to smite JaronK? I feel we have two bad cops and need a good cop to balance it out so JaronK will stop his drivel." See, that's the thing. It's very relevant, because the "Fail" thread over there caused a heck of a lot of problems over here, most notably a few people coming over here and trying to demonstrate how much better they were than other people. Those threads cause people's egos to overinflate and encourage them to troll (also from uber:
"Well, the tier thread is fundamentally worthless. However, it is a form of entertainment." Same fail thread in the Den).
They also make it so that you get a bunch of people talking about how much "fail" is occuring in a thread that often most of the people reading haven't actually seen, leading to groupthink and whatnot, as you end up with telephoned versions of arguements, which was feeding a lot of the rediculousness in Uber's Tier thread, as he'd repeat back what he read in the Den's thread... for example, to quote Frank over there (who never debated here):
"Background: JaronK is saying that because Alter Self can be interpreted to grant you the "spellcasting" ability of a Sorcerer with more levels than you have hit dice through assuming the shape of a Sylph that classes who have Alter Self are vastly more powerful than other characters. And that therefore they deserve to be a higher tier. "Now, if he'd posted that here, I could have actually talked about why that's inaccurate (hell, I've never even mentioned Sylphs, and I only once mentioned Alter Self as being able to grant spells, but that was an accident because it was late, and was thinking of Polymorph). But instead, he says that there, Uber copies him, and puts lines about Alter Self being the most broken thing ever back in the thread. This leads to horribly inconsistant arguements because the people in the actual thread don't realize that there's a telephone game occuring between their arguement and the return comment, and that they're arguing with multiple people's opinions coming out of one account. Heck, if Uber had said this in a thread I could actually read:
"JaronK's idea with the tier system was so that people could make groups where everyone contributed in combat relatively equally." this whole thing might have been avoided (it's simply not true, and I could have addressed that to begin with, but instead it was posted in the FAIL thread of the Den). You can look through that thread over there and see that Uber was in fact being encouraged to troll and provide incohearent arguements and generally behave in a manner that I think any reasonable person would call "being a douche" by that thread.
Now, this is not all to say "Uber sucks." It's to demonstrate how the recent spat of completely inappropriate behavior was in fact spawned by a "FAIL" thread over at the Den. He just happened to be the agent of it this particular time. And you know what? We've caused equal things over at WotC... remember some of the things happening with Aelrynth? That guy may have started some fights and been quite a bastard in many ways, but having a bunch of people in a different thread band together to show how much better they were than him didn't improve things at all. Instead, it just resulted in lots of flaming against him, which does NOT improve things at all.
Do we really want to encourage such behavior? Shouldn't these boards be about discussion, and not about showing off how superior we are?
JaronK
(Edited for direct post linking since someone told me how to do that with the Den forums).