• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

[NEXT LEVEL lames™] ResetEra sold to M.O.B.A. Network for USD$4.55 million

Status
Not open for further replies.

Maiden Voyage

Gold™ Member
I was just browsing during the breakup, to me it looked like the Resetera site was ready before the exodus. It seem to happen very quickly for a new site.
I was on the Discord server. It was something like 3 days to get the site up & open to registrations. There are screen caps of the Discord floating around too.

Why would you want to stop the sell though? You stop the sell and give them something to unite behind. They feel like THEY did something to prevent the forums from going to the evil company.
Let the sell happen. Let them react and handle their own stuff.
With the above action, you are actually probably helping the problem people on that forum.
charlie day wildcard GIF by It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
 

killatopak

Member
Why would you want to stop the sell though? You stop the sell and give them something to unite behind. They feel like THEY did something to prevent the forums from going to the evil company.
Let the sell happen. Let them react and handle their own stuff.
With the above action, you are actually probably helping the problem people on that forum.
Choice between fucking over Era or Cerium.

Hard choice ngl.
 

Sosokrates

Report me if I continue to console war
Has Cerium got the money yet?

You would of thought that there must be plenty of fine print on a deal of this magnitude. If this sale causes an exodus, you would think it would void the deal.

Its like buying a car and then when you drive out the dealership the wheels fall off.
 
Has Cerium got the money yet?

You would of thought that there must be plenty of fine print on a deal of this magnitude. If this sale causes an exodus, you would think it would void the deal.

Its like buying a car and then when you drive out the dealership the wheels fall off.
With the information out there it sounds like he has gotten around 3 mil already and will get the last mil by the end of the year. But yeah, I think there’s more going on because all the mods are putting on happy faces for the community. Well, happy might be questionable but you now what I mean. I think the mods have a stake in this as well, be it just a reasonable payday. I think the team are playing the members as well. Just my 2c.
 

Sosokrates

Report me if I continue to console war
With the information out there it sounds like he has gotten around 3 mil already and will get the last mil by the end of the year. But yeah, I think there’s more going on because all the mods are putting on happy faces for the community. Well, happy might be questionable but you now what I mean. I think the mods have a stake in this as well, be it just a reasonable payday. I think the team are playing the members as well. Just my 2c.

How many mods are there?

About 25?

If cerium gave them 50k each, plus they got paid by MOBA. That would likely buy there loyalty.
 

rob305

Member
Why would you want to stop the sell though? You stop the sell and give them something to unite behind. They feel like THEY did something to prevent the forums from going to the evil company.
Let the sell happen. Let them react and handle their own stuff.
With the above action, you are actually probably helping the problem people on that forum.
The sale already happened, theres no reversing it. They might however change the approach and change the rules around the site if they think shit is hitting the fan. If they have the feeling the place is out of control they might replace the current moderation team with some of their own from the sister sites, which then in return will yield us a bunch of high quality entertainment
 

nush

Member
Love this topic! Used to be active here and went to resetera when things crashed down. But, I always walked on eggshells over there, because I could not share my opinion on anything. I just knew the banhammer was waving above me if I spoke out with my true opinions. That's why I quit posting there and just lurk the gaming forums.

Long story short: if you'll have me, I gladly return here GAF, I missed you guys.
BoldMarvelousFlea-size_restricted.gif
 

SZips

Member
A bit weird with the date because I was one of the late to create an account there and my account was created on Oct 25.

So on Oct 25 the site was already pretty active with GAFers.
I also created my account on the 25th. We were part of the group allowed to register early. The 27th is when they apparently "opened the doors" to the general public, IE: those that weren't in the Discord.

that seems like an incredibly short amount of time to make a website and have servers and everything that are prepared to take that much population, no? i dont know how long that stuff normally takes, but it seems like itd be longer than a few days. more like weeks or months. so im still pretty skeptical that they didnt ave all this set up and ready to go. and with cerium's latest actions, it would appear he planned this from the start.

at any rate, they stole everything from GAF, from their theme to the layout and how everything is organized. hell all they did was make a new logo and change the colors, practically.
In a very general sense, it's super easy to get a message board site up and running. You buy hosting, you pay for the forum software, and you install it. It takes roughly a few hours without much customization depending on what hosting they use. Given that they had a "team" working on things, some aspects probably went a lot faster than an individual doing it.

Like you would have to be highly incompetent to take multiple days to set up something like that.
 

IntentionalPun

Ask me about my wife's perfect butthole
In a very general sense, it's super easy to get a message board site up and running. You buy hosting, you pay for the forum software, and you install it. It takes roughly a few hours without much customization depending on what hosting they use. Given that they had a "team" working on things, some aspects probably went a lot faster than an individual doing it.

Like you would have to be highly incompetent to take multiple days to set up something like that.

I once setup a VB 4.0 forum by the end of my work day when around lunch time a big site had a freakout where users immediately wanted to do an exodus. We had like 1000 users by the end of the night lol That was over 10 years ago, things were even easier by the time the lame GAF exodus happened.

I was endlessly accused of a conspiracy as well.. much smaller stakes than Gaf -> Resetera, but it is a bit silly to think anyone orchestrated anything more than "hey lets take advantage of the angry mob."
 
Last edited:

BreakOut

Member
All hilarity of the situation aside, I think we shouldn't be poking fun at this particular user. No matter their attachment to resetera or our disdain for it, they raised a lot of points that are 100% legit. For the moderation to kill off all his lines of thought this quickly, and being no-no on additional threads covering the topic or entertaining the idea of another exodus just seems really, really fishy at this point.

Let me recap the events and run down the important takeaways:

  • Cerium announcing the ownership change out of the blue
    It came as a surprise to most if not all standard users, in no small part due to the fact that Cerium's role in Resetera's ownership was very, very unclear to everybody. The reception of this news changed radically when people found out that the deal was over 4 million USD, all going into one single person's pocket. Somehow, moderation team successfully steered away discussion from this extremely fishy aspect of the deal. After some time, it came to light that the moderation team knew about these developments well in advance.

  • Users feel betrayed
    From the revisionist history on the inception of Resetera, to the discussion of one person gaining all the net winnings of a lot of people's unpaid work, to the kind of other communities that MOBA owns and don't really seem to align with RE's political perspectives at all, people feel like their values about community and moderation transparency, about politics and economics, specifically capitalism, have been betrayed. Moderation was also swift to discuss all these legit concerns away.

  • Mods are somehow extremely chill about it all
    Despite their stance against unpaid labor, against capitalism, against being right-wing adjacent, there doesn't seem to be a single person on the entire mod team who thinks it's kinda uncool that they've been sold out for a ridiculous amount of money to a corporation for the benefit of a single owner.

  • Don't worry, nothing to see here, please move on
    Despite evidence to the contrary, consisting of logic and clear thinking first and foremost, moderation acts as if no changes whatsoever are gonna happen at RE, or that nothing will have an impact on anything (despite it being pretty clear that mods and admins can only make empty promises because they don't have a say in anything anymore at this point, and it being pretty obvious that MOBA is going to want to cash in on their investment sooner rather than later). And if the community doesn't like what is likely going to happen, they could easily migrate to another forum, because they've done it before. And despite this...

  • No discussion of a new exodus being allowed
    They've already begun strategically shutting down discussions about another possible exodus from ResetEra. Threads drawing extra-attention to this issue have been closed, members trying to gain people's attention had their thread making privileges revoked and/or banned, and they openly said that they won't allow mere discussion of a possible exodus in a dedicated thread at this point (which would obviously be the most pressing and best point in time to do so). This not only feels like MOBA pulling the strings and protecting their heavy investment, but it also directly contradicts Nepenthe's, for example, statements about caring so much about the community. If Nep cared so much about the users, why not allow a thread to discuss how the community as a whole wants to move on after these events? Why not a simple poll asking the users if they are okay with these changes and would rather stay or leave? Nope, it's been decided by the team that everything's alright, there's nothing to see here, and they steered valid discussions away and silenced a lot of people in the process.

I don't know about you all, but to me, it definitely feels like Cerium and/or MOBA has the team in their pocket one way or another. Maybe the admins and mods do get a share of the deal after all. All they have to do is keep the ship on course and keep people in line so that another mass exodus doesn't happen, and in a few weeks or months down the line they can even come out and say: "Hey look, folks, y'all asking for mods to be paid and treated better in this deal have been heard, we got our stimulus check from this event which we totally didn't expect to get! ACAB!"
No way the mods aren’t getting some money. At least the ones in on the scam. No one would be this “Meh” about this is they weren’t involved somehow.
 

SZips

Member
I once setup a VB 4.0 forum by the end of my work day when around lunch time a big site had a freakout where users immediately wanted to do an exodus. We had like 1000 users by the end of the night lol That was over 10 years ago, things were even easier by the time the lame GAF exodus happened.

I was endlessly accused of a conspiracy as well.. much smaller stakes than Gaf -> Resetera, but it is a bit silly to think anyone orchestrated anything more than "hey lets take advantage of the angry mob."
Exactly. There are even a lot of hosting solutions that have one-click installs for a lot of commonly used software.

The only hurdle I could possibly see is if they are running on Linux, had no GUI to use, and none of the multiple people that set things up initially knew how to do literally anything via command line. But even then, a lot of solutions are just a quick search away. It's how I mostly taught myself how to do a lot of the backend stuff on my own site over the years.

So there's a thread titled 'What do you like about video game forum ResetEra dot com?'.
EC0mB6j.jpg


Strange timing for a thread like that to pop up.
How blame space hasn't been struck by the banhammer yet there is actually incredible. Either the mods are waiting until things quiet down more to get him or he's got dirt on them all. Godspeed to him.
 
Last edited:
Why would you want to stop the sell though? You stop the sell and give them something to unite behind. They feel like THEY did something to prevent the forums from going to the evil company.
Let the sell happen. Let them react and handle their own stuff.
With the above action, you are actually probably helping the problem people on that forum.
That ship has sailed apparently.....and to be honest having them in the one contained place is entertainment
but it would be great to see some of them held accountable for some of the bad shit they have done in the community

Update
Got a similar reply back from Carl Niring....he is an Auditor on the board...he even left his email for anything further
carl.niring@se.gt.com

im guessing this guy is some sort of consultant

Edit
Thanks for the Gold Gift
 
Last edited:

cheststrongwell

my cake, fuck off
Exactly. There are even a lot of hosting solutions that have one-click installs for a lot of commonly used software.

The only hurdle I could possibly see is if they are running on Linux, had no GUI to use, and none of the multiple people that set things up initially knew how to do literally anything via command line. But even then, a lot of solutions are just a quick search away. It's how I mostly taught myself how to do a lot of the backend stuff on my own site over the years.


How blame space hasn't been struck by the banhammer yet there is actually incredible. Either the mods are waiting until things quiet down more to get him or he's got dirt on them all. Godspeed to him.
I could have sworn he was permabanned in the Moba thread.
 

MrA

Banned
I think it would not work unless the admins get a nice 🍒.

Hell.. cerium could give them 100k each and still have $3.3million and never have to work another day in his life (as long as hes not foolish with his money)

yeah but these are resetera mods, according to them 4.5 million is middle-class money, not incredibly rich money not a 4 percent return would get you 6 figures money, I'd swear these people sound like they need like 200k a year and then they'd feel like they were only doing just ok
 

OmegaSupreme

advanced basic bitch
I got a reply back from one in LinkedIn (one of the board members) …she replied back in English and just said she will pass it onto someone who can give me more detailed info

I basically went in and said I was a shareholder and was asking why the company was purchasing a site that is being run by people that allow users to attack people they don’t like on the internet and bully others to suicide and I linked some of the Hecht (admin) promoting doxxing and some of their greatest hits threads wishing death to politicians/celebrities in quiet a long message

I also mentioned they ban discussion of some of the games they promote and was debating selling my shares as I don’t support helping people with these sorts of views/behaviours

I’m guessing she has an assistant who replies back for all communications as it was a different name but as I said…board members generally reply back to emails/messages with people …I’ll post back the official response I get

they all have LinkedIns…get cracking people
Holy shit. This is awesome. Keep us updated!
 

Maiden Voyage

Gold™ Member
Can someone give a TLDR of what’s happens so far in the land of RE?
See below:

All hilarity of the situation aside, I think we shouldn't be poking fun at this particular user. No matter their attachment to resetera or our disdain for it, they raised a lot of points that are 100% legit. For the moderation to kill off all his lines of thought this quickly, and being no-no on additional threads covering the topic or entertaining the idea of another exodus just seems really, really fishy at this point.

Let me recap the events and run down the important takeaways:

  • Cerium announcing the ownership change out of the blue
    It came as a surprise to most if not all standard users, in no small part due to the fact that Cerium's role in Resetera's ownership was very, very unclear to everybody. The reception of this news changed radically when people found out that the deal was over 4 million USD, all going into one single person's pocket. Somehow, moderation team successfully steered away discussion from this extremely fishy aspect of the deal. After some time, it came to light that the moderation team knew about these developments well in advance.

  • Users feel betrayed
    From the revisionist history on the inception of Resetera, to the discussion of one person gaining all the net winnings of a lot of people's unpaid work, to the kind of other communities that MOBA owns and don't really seem to align with RE's political perspectives at all, people feel like their values about community and moderation transparency, about politics and economics, specifically capitalism, have been betrayed. Moderation was also swift to discuss all these legit concerns away.

  • Mods are somehow extremely chill about it all
    Despite their stance against unpaid labor, against capitalism, against being right-wing adjacent, there doesn't seem to be a single person on the entire mod team who thinks it's kinda uncool that they've been sold out for a ridiculous amount of money to a corporation for the benefit of a single owner.

  • Don't worry, nothing to see here, please move on
    Despite evidence to the contrary, consisting of logic and clear thinking first and foremost, moderation acts as if no changes whatsoever are gonna happen at RE, or that nothing will have an impact on anything (despite it being pretty clear that mods and admins can only make empty promises because they don't have a say in anything anymore at this point, and it being pretty obvious that MOBA is going to want to cash in on their investment sooner rather than later). And if the community doesn't like what is likely going to happen, they could easily migrate to another forum, because they've done it before. And despite this...

  • No discussion of a new exodus being allowed
    They've already begun strategically shutting down discussions about another possible exodus from ResetEra. Threads drawing extra-attention to this issue have been closed, members trying to gain people's attention had their thread making privileges revoked and/or banned, and they openly said that they won't allow mere discussion of a possible exodus in a dedicated thread at this point (which would obviously be the most pressing and best point in time to do so). This not only feels like MOBA pulling the strings and protecting their heavy investment, but it also directly contradicts Nepenthe's, for example, statements about caring so much about the community. If Nep cared so much about the users, why not allow a thread to discuss how the community as a whole wants to move on after these events? Why not a simple poll asking the users if they are okay with these changes and would rather stay or leave? Nope, it's been decided by the team that everything's alright, there's nothing to see here, and they steered valid discussions away and silenced a lot of people in the process.

I don't know about you all, but to me, it definitely feels like Cerium and/or MOBA has the team in their pocket one way or another. Maybe the admins and mods do get a share of the deal after all. All they have to do is keep the ship on course and keep people in line so that another mass exodus doesn't happen, and in a few weeks or months down the line they can even come out and say: "Hey look, folks, y'all asking for mods to be paid and treated better in this deal have been heard, we got our stimulus check from this event which we totally didn't expect to get! ACAB!"
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom