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Be sure to not say anything even remotely bad about SMS or the game on the WMD forum or else you might get banned there ;)
http://www.nogripracing.com/forum/showthread.php?t=275944

Sorry but that is utter nonsense!

Nobody gets banned from the forum for voicing criticism, it’s quite the other way around, members are asked to point out what’s wrong and what need to be improved all the time! That’s actually one of the major advantages of the WMD concept that there are thousands of testers that uncover every weakness that need to be improved.

If you read through the topic you´ll see that the reason for the refund wasn’t what was said but rather how it was said. The forum is very big and the developers take their time to read everything that is being voiced. To make that possible, a certain level of decency in the communication needs to be maintained, throwing tantrums or accusing the team of being cheats is not what membership on WMD is about.

This really isn’t much of an issue at all, even though the forum is very large the atmosphere is very pleasant and constructive. That’s why the tolerance for people who want to stir up trouble is very low, we can’t have a few people ruin the experience for everyone.

Again, the notion that there’s some kind of censorship going on is very misleading. There’s even an entire subforum where members are invited to freely discuss other sim racing titles, i don’t think you`ll find many developers that encourage their community to discuss competitor products.

Indeed,  I was on the Shift 2 dev forums and its a whole different environment to a typical sim-racing forum.  
It’s much more professional to start with.  It’s orderly and everyone is respectful and helpful.
Criticism or comments can and should be said with the correct degree of diplomacy. You can’t just go charging in like a bull in a china shop with a negative attitude.  Then you just get chaos.

Same applies for the WMD forums imo.  They need comments that help the process of the development of the title.   It’s all about how you say it but with so many members I suppose you are bound to get people who will treat it like a regular forum and criticise it like they would other games titles instead of realising that it’s a developers forum and some of the things they are complaining about may either be wip or not a priority at this early stage.

If weeds grow in the SMS garden and it’s hindering the growth of the tree then you gotta get rid of the weeds.    OK not the best analogy but you get my drift :)

All I can say is that my first problem got solved within minutes,
shortly after the first build was released. I was the one who couldn’t
log in due to the “ö” in my last name. And even though it got hectic
because the first build was just available, after pointing out the
possibility with people not being able to log in in their client when
having umlauts in their username I got solved within minutes. A friendly post and I was able to test the build. Never expected this to be solved so fast.

There is indeed censorship in the WMD forums. I’ve been a member since day one. The amount of censorship is directly related to your membership level (your financial investment).

Senior and Manager members are allowed to be rude, flame, ridicule, and belittle other members without any action taken. I know this because I’ve been the victim of this. It went on for weeks. So I’ve stopped posting there altogether, but I do still read the forums.

Although I haven’t seen them be rude to the Devs, they are definitely allowed to be rude to other (lower) members.

My problem with the banning is that WMD is not a regular forum. These people are paying customers, not just “members”. Yes, there money was returned, but there were never warned they might be banned. That’s not how you treat customers. Anyone who has worked in the service industry knows you have to deal with difficult customers. It’s a daily fact of life.

If they had been warned, they might have changed their attitude. But they weren’t.

The WMD forums remind of the George Orwell novel “Animal Farm”: Every member is equal, but some are more equal than others.

weeds…….lol
needless to say how the physics turned out in shift 2  :)

It’s precisely because they are paying customers that they should behave accordingly. There are real people working their ass off on the other side of the forum, and they have the right not to be insulted by immature customers, even if they paid. And btw, they are not customers, but investors…

We loose far too much time already on public forums with trolls, I for one haven’t given my money to SMS to read the same non sense that many so called sim-racers can’t stop shouting everywhere.

Also, it is stated in the rules of EVERY SINGLE COMMUNITY on the web : show disrespect and you will be banned. Warnings are for people that can’t even read.

I  saw post about this  new game CARS why involved more people then only the ones that doing the  games ?

More cooks, the worse

The thing that is alienating me from the formums at the moment is that there is so much noise and chatter, you feel like there is no way your feedback is going to be heard.  I’m starting to suffer from a “why bother” syndrome.

It gives them more of their target audience to sample the game before it’s finished. It probably also makes testing easier, as it gives them a wide variety of computer systems to see how it works on aswell.

Blame it on EA, that’s what happens when you need funding and things are rushed. For example, Shift had worst input lag when it was released (and still has) than pCARS in pre-alpha. Everything can be fixed, you just need someone to point out what’s wrong (that is us), time and money (us again).

Honesty and humility will get you ‘far’.

Three things of human behaviour that often cause varying degrees of grief:
1) Taking things personally
2) Expectations (especially the preconceived factless/baseless ones)
3) Assumptions

It is not what you know, or how much you know, but your approach.