By Anni Simpson on August 7, 2013 at 10:51am
Hi-Rez, the publisher for the popular game "Tribes: Ascend", nearly lost the ability to post to the "Tribes" subreddit yesterday due to a winning combination of using abusive language in the community and thrusting the responsibility of being the "official" forum for "Tribes" onto the subreddit’s moderators (without their knowledge).
If you’re not familiar with the game, “Tribes: Ascend” is a free-to-play MMO shooter released in April 2012. The “Game of the Year Edition” was released Feb. 14. At the time, IGN gave the game a glowing “9/10,” and there is still a tight-knit community.
One of the things “Tribes: Ascend” is infamous for is managing both a great game and a great community without developer support for issues. Players have been complaining for months about problems with the game including (sometimes unplayable) server lag, FPS issues that could be improved by removing UI elements, bugs that were never patched, and a generally unbalanced game. Hi-Rez employees HiRezBart and HiRezDuke had a history of not interacting with the “Tribes” subreddit, in spite of being self-proclaimed “ambassadors” to the community.
“Tribes” essentially nailed their own coffin by taking their own forums offline and trying to give the responsibility to the Reddit community instead. Redditor Squeakopotamus theorized:
It seems like the owners are trying to pawn off responsibilities to others instead of doing it themselves like they should be.
Other users guessed that Hi-Rez was attempting to take down their forums to erase a yearlong history of official complaints with the game.
As a result, the “Tribes” subreddit hosted a poll on whether or not they wanted to ban Hi-Rez employees from posting to the community. Although the mods “have chosen to not ban Hi-Rez employee accounts,” there is not a consensus from the user base.
