Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Please moderate the Steam forums

Definitely WIS, it's essentially a perception check

Emotional perception would be insight then I suppose.

Steam forums are a lost cause unfortunately. Now since you can get stuff with the steam point system its just hordes of neverending troll/bait posts to farm the steam "jester" award.

Ok I'll admit, I'm one of those trolls that has so far collected 2 x 1 day bans on the BG3 steam forum.

What did I do to deserve it? I am gay and on steam forums openly horny, and asked for options for romancing slugs and frogs and such.

My comments were too sexual for steam rules, even though the BG3 community is marked 18+ mature / nsfw.

Why would I do or say such a thing? It started when a steam mod decided to punish me and delete all my naughty screenshots for Coming Out On Top, even though its literally a gay porn game.

Any time an anti sexual Christian troll makes a thread, I feel an uncontrollable dark urge to post all about graphic gay sex in their threads.

Steam is a playground for lulz, I stopped taking it seriously because Steam mods themselves are openly homophobic and no one cares.

Yes but when you let someone pull you down to their level you end up both covered in mud. You are also feeding them the attention that they desperately want.

There is only one solution, and that is to Ban them - because they lead to this sort of multiplication and then we have to Ban you as well because you are now at their level.

Also, If you want to really piss off a troll call what they are saying boring and unoriginal and then ignore them. They hold a conception in their mind of exceptionality - they are superior to all those "snowflakes" that get upset about x/y/z.

Although again, ideally they should be removed but if the Mods are failing at their jobs then calling them "basic" and ignoring them will counter them.

WHile I don't think, trolling around is the right way to express yourself, I agree, that what mods there are, are heavily biased. There were some rightwing dudes literally giving out deaththreats to everyone confessing to being LGBTQ+, when I called them out (normally, like I would do here) , I got a warning and my post was removed, while those death trheats are still there for everyone to see, despite people saying, they had reported them for hate speech. As far as I know, none of the 'woke' threads were closed, no one talking against LGBTQ+, women or PoC negatively did get any form of telloff in any form. So yeah, those forums are just garbage for the people, who will get banned instantly in any forum with standards (like this one )

This is not the first time I have heard this. Thats deeply disturbing that the mods on the steam forums are promoting hate speech. GIGO

Yeah, I was shocked too. And I mean, you know, how I write here, so the only reason to give me a warning is, ebcause someone didn't liked, that I called a hater out (in that case it was hating on women and LGBTQ+ - in game and IRL). And there were some really bad hate speeches, I won't repeat them here, because they were disturbing as hell.
I look into the Steam forums now from time to time, but mostly engage with the few normal topics.

This is wrong.

You actually expect larian to be responsible for the actions of others on a website that they don't own and don't control. You are not on the side of the angels here. You expect a business to go around policing thought, that is not good.

People are going to say, rude, offensive and inappropriate things. It shows the measure of a person's maturity to IGNORE them. If you let others dictate your mood by their speech you will be in a state of perpetual misery because people are always going to be disrespectful, rude, disagree, take the opposite position as yourself, cross your moral lines.

Let me give you an example I find the last panel from hell has something that I found offensive, bestiality. I didn't find the joke funny and I wish I never watched it. I found it in bad taste. You know what i didn't do? Tell people to regulate Larian studios so they couldn't add this, I didn't state on social media how offended I was either. I let the incident pass by. For numerous reasons...

1) I wasn't going to let a joke ruin my mood.

2) I don't believe in telling strangers what morals they should have

3) I don't believe in virtue signaling my morals. It has been my experience in life that virtue is self evident, virtuous people don't need to tell others of their virtue because it is self evident. The only people who actually need to signal their virtue are people who are not virtuous and hold dark secrets they don't want others to know so tend to announce their "virtue" to deflect and distract from their own failings.

4) It was a joke and even distasteful jokes should not be viewed in the same light. Jokes are not actually dog whistles as much as authoritarians claim they are.

5) I am in control of myself. My actions are not dictated by others, so i wont react to every slight, insult or offensive thing in my life. My time, mental health and joy are not worth self righteous indignation towards others. I will simply not engage as many of these posts you were offended by, will be by people who don't actually agree with the statements posted but will write said statements to anger people and ruin their day. Why? I don't know, trolls seem to get pleasure from the misery of others and the best way to punish a troll is ignore the post.

6) I take a stoic look on life, there will ALWAYS be hardships, disappointment, pain and there will ALWAYS be things beyond your control when it comes to these negative aspects of life. So if you can not control them, why allow them to ruin your life? The more you are exposed to negative aspects of life and don't let these things ruin your peace the less power negative things have over you. Cognitive behavior therapy is incredibly effect in managing our ability to deal with the negative. So this has actual psychological practice that is beyond the philosophical and into the practical.

7) I believe that individuals should have the freedom to be offensive. No one should be able to ban larian from expressing art or opinions that are offensive. Because if offensive is the metric then all of us are guilty because all of use have opinions that are offensive to others.

8) By not making the video a big deal and not becoming "offended" by it. It doesn't occupy my mind, it doesn't live rent free in my head bothering me. This is the most i have thought about it since the video and now it occupies a positive point of my mind because i can use it to illustrate an example. After this post it will fade away back into obscurity in my mind, not able to make my life worse.

9) Never let people tell you others that disagree with you are lesser. That they should be punished for thought. That their opinions makes them evil. This is the process of othering and every time this has been done in history unchecked, as far back as we can go, this ends in blood. This is not the path to a better society it is the path to ruin.


Words are not actual violence. If you don't believe me then think on this. If you have a choice to have five people say mean things for you for 1 minute or 5 people would punch and kick you as hard as they could for 1 minute, which would you take? Because i know for a fact that every person who picked the 5 people saying mean things about you would survive and would not need to go to the hospital. I also know that some people would die if 5 people beat them up as hard as they could for 1 minute. You can kill people very quickly with actual violence you can't with words. Do not lets words control you.

Nope. Creating an online community where healthy discussion can be held without being subject to trolls deliberately trying to derail every conversation by saying the most mean spirited garbage that pops into their heads requires moderation. Just ignore the trolls is not a solution. Without moderation, online communities turn into 4chan. You can’t ignore the trolls on 4chan. It’s all trolls.

In your opinion.

To be clear, I don't think Larian should get involved in moderating Steam forums. The waste of employee time isn't worth the benefit. Valve, however, should be doing a much better job of it.

When it comes to GOVERNMENT regulation of speech, I'm a free speech absolutist. But if I were running a private forum such as Steam, why would I want people in my community spewing hate and advocating violence? It's a potential legal liability, it's unpleasant, and fostering an environment in which groups of people feel threatened is bad for business.

I'm here purely because the BG3 Steam forum is so full of trash political posts that it's almost useless as a resource for exchanging information about the game. That's just stupid.

Theres nothing you can you can do about it when the Steam mods side with the alt right opinion. Its like the entire moderation is run by China / Russia. Even when I was only posting in the communities for 18+ LGBT games I still got reported and banned. Appealing does nothing, messaging Steam support does nothing, so I proceeded to troll like the rest of them.

And technically this is an 18+ game marked with sexual content and nsfw tags, so sexual discussion should be ok but ofc steam ban it regardless, so might as well just make it as extreme as possible.

Steam is happy with their forums. Laruan is happy with theirs. That's life.

Whining about another forum is just a waste of time.

Actually it's not.

Various parts of the Steam Community are moderated by a combination of official Valve staff, community moderators, and representatives of the game developers and publishers. - from the Steamworks partners page.

The rest of your argument is self-aggrandizing nonsense and also invalid. So I won't respond to it except to say that if you think a game developer doesn't have an interest in protecting the brand they are selling on another platform then you should probably not involve yourself in business - your personal diatribe notwithstanding.

Some known trolls already banned, hopefully permanent. Since steam forum is an open ground and Steam never done a good job banning literal Nazis (Yes, I've seen a lot of literal hitlerjunge aspirant profiles with swastika and nazism jargons). I'm gonna start telling people that genuinely seeking help with their game to Lar forum.

Finally making an account here but yes the steam forums are just bloody awful. They're usually always pretty bad and filled with the usual 'gamer' types or incredibly dumb people who can't follow installation instructions to save their life - but man the fact that BG3 features so many bisexual romance options feels like it just ticked off the 'gamer' crowd and has set the place on fire for the past week. I've taken a fair share of laughs though because you can pretty easily tell the people with zero familiarity of D&D culture, Baldur's Gate, or RPG's. My favorite one was a special user ranting about how the game was incredibly woke and deviated from BG 1 and 2 by being turn based and how this wasn't accurate to the source material.

Ultimately I would always stay away from steam discussions unless you just woke up and chose violence this morning and go looking for an idiot to argue with.

I appreciate that some folk are finding these forums more to their taste, but I'm going to suggest that if we start using insulting language in our posts here then we're going to make them a less pleasant place to be. Calling folk "incredibly dumb", for example, just seems to be asking for argument, and in any case here we try to avoid insults whether or not the people we're insulting are active forum members!

Measured critiques of the Steam moderation policies or explanations of why we personally find the Steam forums uncomfortable are of course fine.

Its amazing to me the number of people that FREAK on a BLOATED online global playground such as Steam. Steam heads are not in business to remove anyone. They know that <10% ever use their chat system, and they dont care about someone being dissatisfied with ONE game... actually, they're HAPPY about that because they know that ANGRY PEOPLE either keep playing that game OR move to the next game, and Steam profiting again. Angry = money in Steam's World. Value = HOW MANY GAMES you play (purchased).

Larian on the other hand, WANTS YOU to be happy in BG3, and all other LARIAN GAMES.

In a nutshell, Steam forums should not be thought of as a negative for PR for any game, its literally the same BS in any game thats marked 18+ with sex scenes, these games are easy targets for the alt right to spam their nonsense, and as previously pointed out, Steam policies and moderation align heavily with pleasing Russia and China so they let this continue.

The best you can hope for is you actually play any 18+ NSFW game and decide to upload nude screenshots or discuss anything sexual in the communities for those games, you don't get reported, and initially people aren't going to be aware that discussing sex on the forum for even porn novel games would get you in trouble, but if reported it does.

I have trouble understanding. In fairness, I accept that I'm pretty dumb, and I've only briefly looked at the steam forums, skimming through a couple of the posts just prior to full release.

But what's there to argue about? Some people don't like the bisexual content? Shrug. If they don't like something in the game, that seems like reasonable feedback.

Meanwhile, if someone else does like bisexual content, they can say they do like it, equally giving feedback. This doesn't seem like it has to escalate into an argument. No one's going to convince someone else to like something they don't like, anymore than someone else is going to convince them to suddenly not appreciate the content in question.

It doesn't make any sense to me, and I mean that sincerely. It's just this never-ending culture war stuff. I can't be the only person who thinks it's grown tiresome.