At this point there's really no reason for anyone to keep on using the GameSpot forums to discuss the editorial content of the site. Dissenting opinions are stamped out almost as quickly as they'd be on GameFAQs or Soviet Russia's official BBS. This story begins much earlier though. My Total Access (read: paying customer) GS account has been banned from the game specific forums on GS due to a GameFAQs moderation (the GameFAQs moderation staff is made up of teenage volunteers with no accountability, but that's another discussion) for an "offensive" comment. What was this offensive comment? I had promised someone my old 360 faceplate, and I called him a "nagger" after he made a third topic asking me when I would send it. Note: this was before that episode of South Park. So now a service I pay for is cut off from me, due to the incompetence of a volunteer assigned to police another website's forums. GameSpot claims they "can't" overturn or appeal GameFAQs moderations. This is obvious BS. Of course they can, they just either A.) have a policy against doing so, and B.) don't want to. It doesn't stop at GameSpot not wanting to put a stop to the ridiculous policies of the shared boards over at the one proud (see: SegaSages link'd days) GameFAQs, but now GameSpot's own mods have joined in on the fun. Just today I was moderated (with point loss zomg) for responding to a question about why Gears of War 2 wasn't nominated for GOTY by pointing out Epic's relative small size and lack of a hype machine. This was considered "trolling." Trolling is defined as a response intended solely to offend or annoy other posters - who would've been offended or annoyed by this comment? An offensive or annoying comment would've been something like "OMG GOW2 SUXX SO MUCH." You know what else would be offensive? All those replies saying it wasn't nominated because it just wasn't as good as all the other games; because based on review scores from GS and across the board that just doesn't add up, and it's an insult to readers' intelligence. Let's pretend for a moment all the other websites with cnet as a parent company, including cnet.com itself, don't have boards with much less strict ToS and reprisal systems. Ignoring all the hypocrisy and the fact that cnet's own sites prove this system to be superfluous - who is even supposed to be benefiting from this kind of crackdown on customers?

Gaming review sites have no qualms ripping games apart in their reviews (provided they're not published by big ad money spenders) but have you ever noticed they always seem impressed and awed by those very same games in preview pieces and event interviews?
The best example I can think of is Gamespot's e3 coverage of Sonic Unleashed, which no one expected to be good (surprise surprise they were right). Some poor guy just doing his job had to sit through a demo of one of the early levels clearly showcasing the imprecise platforming, unwieldy controls and overall unimpressive technical/artistic s tyle of the game only to nod and pretend to be brimming with anticipation for the upcoming release. It's nonsense, no one thinks guys working in gaming journalism are excited about every game - they can obviously tell when an upcoming game will suck; but every preview story, every early developer interview, everything before the actual review is always positive. WHY? Why can't they call out developers and publishers pushing a shoddy product before it hits the market? Now I know there are exceptions to this, most notably the **** storm after an early build of Too Human was ripped after a demo a while back (though that game wasn't horrible) , but these occurences are few and far between.