GypsyComet said:
What's ironic is that four of five loudest would make a really kickin team of writers. They happen to combine the right types of talent, and have all contributed large documents to the TML or other lists in the past. Combining a dreamer/mechanist, a hard-analysing technical writer, and a top-notch creative writer, and adding a reasonable generalist to buffer the mix, could be a recipe for success. Will they try? Probably not.
I doubt that they have much talent between them at all actually - all I see are gigantic egos, a lot of noise, and no useful signal at all.
They're certainly not contributing anything useful to Traveller by ranting and railing about MGT. We get the hint, they don't like it and they don't like the direction it's going in. Well... if they don't like it then they can either ante up and negotiate for their own license with Marc Miller (good luck with that), or they can get off their arses and actually be constructive and do something under the OGL. But then that would distract them from their bile-spewing, and we can't have that now can we.
But I think it really is a case of "Lead, Follow, or get the hell out of the way" - and right now they're very much "in the way", albeit just as an incredibly annoying distraction and a gaping black hole of useless negativity.
The funny thing is that a while back a whole bunch of threads were locked on that forum's MGT board for being too "negative" (though the impression I got was that it was done under duress). But yet again, the nay-sayers and haters are using that MGT board as a soapbox, and of course the moderators do nothing about it (but then that's not surprising when two of the moderators have admitted to disliking MGT, and so seem to think it's OK to allow others to slag it off there). I'm surprised that the Mongoose folks tolerate it, to be honest.
I guess it's self-reinforcing though. The naysayers drive away anyone who wants anything useful to do with MGT (to here, most likely), and their "community" becomes ever more insular, hatefilled, resentful, and paranoid as a result. It's become the internet equivalent of a
Rafflesia, stinking of rotten meat and attracting only flies. And maybe that's a good thing, so long as everyone else just ignores them and gets on with it. Let them rot in their hate, as far as I'm concerned - nobody's going to persuade them to stop anyway so it's better for all concerned to spend time doing something more useful and constructive.