Ok, so I am back after having copped one of those infamous "9TF baiting" insta-bans that have been making the rounds recently.
I actually created the
thread in question, as well as the (unbeknown to me at the time) highly triggering post which earned me the ban. Here is the offensive text in question:
What kind of deranged, paranoid, headbanging console warrior would you have to be to see that perfectly boring and innocuous statement of opinion and think "Son of bitch, trying to drag down the PS5 again. REPORT!" ?. Whoever reported it also must have terrible reading comprehension, because it's obviously a broadly pro-PS5 statement (i.e. "the PS5 is so much more powerful than the Lockhart, that Microsoft really need to make it very cheap, otherwise people may as well just buy a digital PS5 instead"). If I had known that I could get away with saying that the PS5 was 10TF I would have, as that would have only helped my argument!
You would think that the mods would be warning and banning any fanboys pathetic enough to be triggered by such stupid things, but instead they encourage it by banning people who quote the "wrong" number of teraflops. This is a ban message for someone else, but similar to the one I got:
"benchmarking and tech examples"? Really? For a moderation policy that has been so light-touch and fair up until now, this just sticks out as so odd. Of all the console warring that has been raging for the past year, of all the hot takes, memes and insults that have been thrown out there, why have the mods chosen this particular, very
very specific, issue to make a stand? Why now? It's so strange!
Let me make a little confession. The 9TF PS5 number wasn't the only teraflop number I quoted in my post - I also said that the Series S would be 4TF. Do I have "benchmarking or tech examples" to back up
that figure? No. If Microsoft officially announce that the system actually has 4.7TF and not 4 (which would be a bigger difference percentage-wise than the 9TF and the preferred 10.whatever figure favoured by PS5 fanboys), will I, or someone else, sometimes still write 4TF, due to either ignorance of the latest news or just for brevity's sake? Probably. Should people be insta-banned for that? Absolutely not.
I personally don't care what the PS5 TF figure is. I'll gladly quote it as 10TF if it saves me getting a ban and keeps the console warriors' blood-pressure down (it's getting to double figures that matters right? I don't have to remember the exact decimal points, do I?). Whatever psychodrama has been going on in the Next Gen thread, I don't see why the rest of us should be affected. That thread now has over 123k replies. Of those, I think I wrote around a grand total of 3 of those, and a long time ago at that, which shows how much I care about the topic. Most of us don't have the time to keep up with every single twist and turn of the latest console wars, and shouldn't be punished for unwittingly walking into the invisible trip-wires that the console warriors have set up in their wake. There even seems to be a fair amount of ban baiting going on now, which I never thought I would see on GAF.
Rant over.