There seems to be some confusion about what port begging is and isn't, and also about why we would discourage port begging to begin with (including taking disciplinary measures against it in some cases). Rules don't exist just for the sake of it, they're not just designed for moderators to move their numbers up the ban leaderboard. We look at rules in order to try to help structure the discussions and encourage people to contribute.
Port begging is not the act of discussing the platforms a game is or isn't coming out on, it's not discussing how different types of hardware enable or support different experiences better than others, it's not looking at market positioning of a particular game. Games get ported. Games that say they're not getting ported get ported. Exclusive games get ported. Some companies seem to scam consumers by denying all possibility of a port until just after Christmas, and then when sales have exhausted on the base platforms bring on the ports so they can get double-dipping revenue. Games get ported well after release sometimes, often if sequels are slated to be multiplatform. Sometime games get ported just to re-release the game on a platform for some passive income. It has nothing to do with what platform the person is discussing a port to or port from. These are facts of life. It's OK to discuss them.
Port begging was an issue of people going into threads, often pre-release or announcement threads, and preventing legitimate discussion by leaving one liners about how "lol not buying unless it gets released on ps3 owned" and then running away. It's people having freakouts and meltdowns because a game was announced for the wrong system. The person doing it had no interest in discussing the game, the people who did want to discuss the game can't discuss it, well-meaning people jump down the person's throat creating a derail, and the whole thing becomes a mess. Port begging isn't some magical separate rule, it's the general rule we enforce against trolling, against system wars posts, and against derailing threads. Users who want this big laundry list of legalistic rules are totally missing the point that in general all the rules boil down to "Be nice to other people and try to have good discussions with other people and not ruin their day". It's not rocket science.
Look at what's being discussed here. ZombiU is a relatively well received game. It was released as a launch title for a platform. As with any launch title, it had some limitations probably due to rushed time and diminished budget. Some of those limitations also reflected the state of the platform at launch. It hasn't been followed up with DLC, which is unusual for a title of its genre and scope. It hasn't got a sequel. It's now been 16 months, give or take. Most of Ubisoft's slate is multiplatform (the one exception being maybe Rabbids, which is multiplatform as an IP but tends to get custom instalments for each platform). Ubisoft is winding down support for Wii U. Ubisoft has admitted ZombiU did not sell as they were hoped. If you look at all of this information and think "it's absolutely fucking contemptible that anyone would be considering what ZombiU's future options might be", I think maybe you're getting a little too emotionally close to the platform.
This is not me magically blessing that everything should always be omniplatform and beg to high heavens, guys. It's not me saying that as long as you're not in the OT you get to freely port beg. It's just acknowledging that when we're a little removed from stuff, when passions aren't running hot, when there doesn't seem to be a crazy console war agenda, when it's not someone with a Halo avatar asking for Killzone to go Xbox One exclusive, I think it's fair to say that reasonable discussion can occur surrounding the issue of porting. I definitely see people in this thread who are so preposterously positive about the port being some smash hit that I can't help but wonder if they acknowledge that the game design, as well as the platform, played a role in its limited success so far--and maybe someone is going to have a Wii U more like Wii Poo meltdown in here and get themselves banned. But the discussion itself isn't unfair.
Obviously when a game is an exclusive, and especially if it's published by a first-party, then there's a degree of "suck it up and buy the hardware". I totally agree with that. It serves no purpose to sit around and be bitter that the games you want aren't on the platform you have. Tailor your hardware purchases for the games you want. And if something never gets ported, then that's great. You should probably consider buying the hardware it's on if playing it is that important to you.
Let's also maybe look at people discussing five-years-late ports to PC. They're not port begging. No one is running into an active discussion of people playing through Vanquish the first time and informing that that "720p on the PS Bomba and the Xbox Three Shitty!!!! drop this bitch up on Steamizzle yio~~!!". And in most cases it's not people who haven't played the game who are asking for the port, it's people who have played the game asking for the port. This is more about preserving the game going forward.
There are arguments against and for porting this specific game or any game in general, and we're seeing a lot of them here. Some of them focus on the degree to which the game's design matches the Wii U's design. That's totally valid. There are business arguments too.
Just a little while ago during the lag between Nintendo's catastrophic financial results and their investor's briefing, we had discussions about whether Nintendo would be likely to exit the hardware producing business. The context was that many analysts, investors, and observers suggested they either might or ought to. And you can easily argue against why they should. But it wasn't console wars to conceptually have the discussion, just as it wouldn't be about Sony or Microsoft in similar predicaments (IE "If Microsoft ends up an enterprise company, where does that leave Xbox?" "If Sony is on the verge of bankruptcy, what happens to SCE?"). It would be console wars to enter and NPD thread and announce "Lol Boned again naturally, when is M$ going to give up the ghost and stop pretending to be a good console manufacturer". It would also be console wars if, say, in response to a bad month for Sony, someone with a long-term record of getting banned for trolling against Sony were to make a thread incredulously asking why the PS4 isn't cancelled yet. We don't want "reaction" or "compensating" threads.
If you feel people are posting in such a way that requires moderation response--instead of reporting "rule breaking", try to report "bad posting that really needs an intervention because it's wrecking discussion"--just PM a mod with a quick link and an explanation. Politely, please, we hate PMs that start with "STUMPOKAPOW, ARE MODERATORS BIASED? IF NOT, HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN WHY THEY HAVEN'T ALREADY PERMED THIS POSTER? YOU ARE QUICKLY LOSING MY TRUST. <link to post>", it's very disrespectful. Just link the post, and a mod will check it out.
I hope this clarifies the issues people are having understanding why this discussion is allowed. If it doesn't, don't worry about it, just take part in the discussions you're interested in, avoid the ones you're not interested in, and we'll do our best to clean up the mess.
