No paranoia... it's just a fact. Where do you think the idea for "Viral" videos came from? The people who ran ads on television and radio did it for years via telephone, street survey, and other methods - Finding out what you like and how you like it so that they could further streamline the cattle herd into their business ventures - same with gaming. It's HUGE business to know the mind of a gamer today... the world has changed and people are devoting more time to the Internet than they do to their own families nowadays, so the people who used to do their marketing studies elsewhere have come here now to pick our consumer minds.
Certain elements of the business community with no scruples have taken it a step further and just started "placing ads" via forums like this one. It's pretty easy to find a guy with nothing to do and a connection these days (consider the source of this post: I must have a PANT-LOAD of free time, right?), so you pay him to sit here and either post about your product excitedly in order to artificially inflate the title's "importance" to the waiting consumer base, or he harvests responses from a "Your Favorite Game" or "What Do You Play The Most" topic threads.
Not ALL of the posts are suspect, and heck some of them are fun to reply to, and it doesn't HURT anyone per-se, it's just an evolution of the survey process. They can't get your interest or attention on the telephone, television, or at study groups at the mall anymore, so they come here. It's essentially the same reason why the major networks have begun offering their programming online through hulu.com or fox.com, because studies have shown that people are surfing the 'Net more hours than they're surfing their cable box anymore, so they have brought he programming online to try and steal your time back from whatever websites you dedicate television time to (like this one, for example), to try and get the ad dollar back. Ads only work if you watch them.
Don't be paranoid, some of these fact-gatherers might actually listen to a thing or two we say and bring about the changes to the media that we would like to see... as a Godzilla fan I can tell you that the only way we in the USA finally got anamorphic prints of those films with original Japanese language tracks and subtitles instead of accepting the horrid prints and bad dubbing was through forums. Toho executives finally saw the market exsisted BECAUSE we as fans made such a repeated pain of ourselves asking over and over, wondering aloud to the world why our money wasn't good. People surfing our conversations about their products like King Henry walking disguised amongst his troops in order to properly gauge their spirit & minds is not an inherently nefarious thing...
... I just get my dander up about it sometimes because it chokes the boards and it can get to be maddening, like when someone points out that if you listen you can hear flourecent lighting hum (yeah, it does, and you're welcome for that being pointed out in advance - it'll make you NUTS now).
We as a community are much more intelligent than to just sit here and endlessly ask "What's Your Fav", and that's really not how all this got started in the first place. It was a troll (who again, hasn't posted here since it started the thread) who read a lot of posts recently talking about the proliferation of online cheaters and decided (as tiny-minded thugs do) to try and get a rise out of people by posting an innocent fire-starter... I posted that the troll knows better and Tails asked me not to be dark and pesimistic (which, BTW, he is correct essentially in doing). I just didn't want this oh-so-obvious trolling to get out of hand... and even though I have spent a bunch of time sitting here and typing this out to you-all I still don't feel like it was the intended time-bomb the poster wanted to create. Sure, it's probably getting a laugh out of the fact that this has gone on as long as it has, but then the sound of a fart or a shiny object would probably provide the same amount of entertainment to said tiny-brained wipers of other people's bottoms.
I have imparted some much-needed information to you and now you will be a more vigilant poster and hence a better member of this online community.
We have a lot more to discuss about our favorite hobby than to provide market feedback or flame-baiting. Let's try it.
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