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Notice from the Staff team regarding recent spoiler policy

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Hello everyone,

We hope you're all enjoying Scarlet and Violet! We wanted to make a short notice regarding our spoiler policies across our platforms in recent weeks.

We initially set out out these policies with the intention of ensuring that everyone could explore Paldea for the first time on an equal footing, whether they picked up the games on release or had to wait until Christmas. However, upon reflection we now appreciate that these policies were probably too stringent and lasted for too long; after all, we are a Pokémon community and it did not always feel right to be issuing infractions to users who found our spoiler rules unintuitive and made honest mistakes when trying to discuss their favourite new species or aspects of the games.

We would like to apologise to our users and provide reassurance that we will be reviewing these policies for future game instalments. As a show of good faith and evidence of the discussions we've been having among Staff, here's a summary of the conclusions we arrived at following frank conversations:


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As ever, please do continue to provide the Staff team with feedback, and thank you all for being such a great community!
 
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Frankly, I think it's excessive to have a spoiler moratorium in the first place. Enforce something like that prerelease against leaks except in designated threads, sure, I get that, but once a game is released it should be fair game to discuss anything and everything that's in it. This sort of thing feels like a relic of an earlier period of the internet.
 
Spoiler moratoriums on pre-release material are their own beast and I think it's mostly common sense how to manage them.

As for spoiler moratoriums on post-release material, in other communities I'm at we do implement them for fairness reasons: I dunno if for example it's common for some people to have money grow on trees and get the games on Day 1, but even people who can get it on Day 1 still need to juggle job, life, etc., and would prefer to engage with the games at their own pace without having to disengage from the community. After all, Pokémon (and any franchise, really) is bigger than merely its latest release material.

How long should a post-release moratorium be? No idea honestly, I guess it depends on the case: Pokken plays completely different than Legends: Arceus and require two different kinds of engagement. But if anything, narrative stuff like plot points, plot twists or character reveals can stay in moratorium for about one or two weeks without any important damage in most cases.
 
I actually had no idea that Bulbagarden implemented spoiler policies, but as a staff member of a Kingdom Hearts fan site I have been involved in developing spoiler policies that are upheld for no longer than 2 months after the Japan releases.

Kingdom Hearts is a far heavier plot and lore-based franchise than Pokemon and the games are longer but the main factor that is used to decide the amount of time, is how long will it reasonably take for the majority of the community to obtain and get through the game?

With November releases which are a common case for Pokemon, I wish list it and then wait Christmas out to see if I receive it and if I don't, I'll buy it myself in January with any gift cards I receive. Most of the time I do receive it for Christmas.

Legends Arceus and BDSP were a unique case because their releases were so close together therefore since the games are so expensive most people probably had to buy just one around the release time and save the others for later. I know I had to. I chose Legends Arceus and JUST got my hands on BD.

To be blunt, however, apart from a spoiler warning in thread titles, I don't agree with spoiler policies.
If someone wants to avoid spoilers it's their responsibility to be careful what they browse and if that means parting from the community for a time, I say so be it. Repressing the community's freedom of speech is what's truly unfair.
I don't see why they are needed in a forum such as this where there is a clearly designated section for the newest games that you just have to stay out of.
 
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To be blunt, however, apart from a spoiler warning in thread titles, I don't agree with spoiler policies.
If someone wants to avoid spoilers it's their responsibility to be careful what they browse and if that means parting from the community for a time, I say so be it. Repressing the community's freedom of speech is what's truly unfair.
I don't see why they are needed in a forum such as this where there is a clearly designated section for the newest games that you just have to stay out of.
I agree with this 100%. I think it's far more fair and equitable to just implement an at-your-own-risk policy around the relevant forums.
 
Hello everyone,

I wanted to thank everyone who shared their thoughts here; as is hopefully obvious from the OP, we also had a variety of perspectives on the Staff team and yours will join this mix to inform our approach next time. We can't promise that where we end up will exactly match any single person's ideal, but I think we will be closer to a happy medium in future.

For now I'll be locking this thread so that the Staff announcement doesn't transform into a prolonged discussion, but please hit us up in our DMs if you have anything further to pass on to us. :)

Again - thanks all!
 
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