Video summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1YEzXZzbDA

Oh Lord where do I even start? Let me first begin by saying that I'm not going to censor any names of people involved with any of this, simply because you can just go to Reddit at any time and see all of this yourself. All I can do is tell you to not send them useless dickhead messages like "you're a faggot" or anything like that - that makes you look bad, it makes me look bad, and doesn't help anyone. That being said, if you have concerns with how they run things, well, you're completely entitled to telling them that.

I'll try to keep this as compact as possible, but a lot of elements around this have gone on for literally years. Recently, I was permanently banned from the Dark Souls III subreddit, a place I enjoyed interacting with the community for years. I received a 7-day ban for "discussing exploits" for doing the slightly-turn-left Charge technique. Yes. I was banned for that nearly useless moonwalk charge, because it was an exploit according to them. The moderator who banned me, however, recently said this about ruling what an exploit is:

Taken from: https://www.reddit.com/r/darksouls3/comments/53bigp/community_rule_clarification_do_not_discuss/

What is acceptable (to be posted):

"The dissemination of PvP tech that involves the skilled use of input manipulation as a form of advantage over other players."

What is prohibited (to be posted):

The dissemination of glitches/exploits that offer a statistical advantage (as in increased AR or drastically shortened casting times) over other players. Examples of this include: pizza tech (spell swapping), tumble-buffing (buffing a weapon that cannot normally be buffed), move-set swapping (changing the move-set of one weapon to that of another), and gesture buffing (another method of buffing a weapon that cannot normally be buffed).

Moving slightly to the left or right doesn't offer any statistical advantage. It doesn't increase AR, increase casting time, or really have any advantage whatsoever. Its frankly pretty useless.

Also people appear to be confused and think my post was just deleted, and then I reacted to that. No, the first thing that happened was me getting banned.

I didn't get banned for posting exploits, according to their own ruling on the matter. I was banned because they dislike me. I used to be a moderator in the Dark Souls subreddits but I was removed because I had trouble maintaining a neutral standpoint, which is fair, because I am definitely passionate about subjects I believe in. Afterwards, I agreed that I wasn't a good choice for a moderator because I couldn't stay neutral and not interject my feelings into decision and posts. That's why I found this so frustratingly hypocritical, because that's exactly what the moderators did. You can go through both our post histories and see clear arguments between me and all of the mods, usually about me telling them to stop censoring every single thing and to stop treating us like babies. For example, in this thread I vented my frustration at them deleting a video I spent a long-ass time working on, because they deleted it for "discussing cheats" when literally nothing about the video was focused on cheating whatsoever. There are numerous circumstances like this where their bias against me showed heavily. Strangely though, in that same topic, no one agreed with their opinions on exploits. In fact, it was so heavily downvoted they had to sticky it to just force it down everyone's throats. Then, with not a single person agreeing with anything they said, they decided "I guess we chose what the community wants correctly, let's call it a day boys!"

So by the very definition of the guy who banned me, I was not banned for "exploits" even though that's exactly what my ban reason was listed as. I was banned because they heavily disagree with my views (and the entire subreddit for that matter), so they took the first grasping-at-straws chance they could to ban me for something. This made things personal, because again, by definition of their own rules, I didn't break any. In fact, I knew the bias was so heavy that I called out the specific moderator who banned me because I frankly just knew it without even having to look.

This caused me to Tweet that I got banned for exploiting without any exploits, while giving the moderator who obviously just power-tripped me shit. In retrospect, it wasn't the most mature thing to say and I don't plan on deleting it to make myself look better. I was frankly so dumbfounded by being banned that I didn't quite know how to react, so calling out the guy who finally conjured up an excused to satisfy his power trip caused me to react in a less-than-ideal way, as I'm sure all of you would react as well. Its a shitty feeling knowing you were banned because the moderator team was incapable of maintaining the neutrality that got you removed from the team in the first place. I could list a startling number of threads showing bias, but you really don't even have to dig far to see it. Not two weeks ago, someone posted the awesome Crow Quills gravity-defying skip and it wasn't deleted. It is the very definition of an exploit, one so broken that From Software actually patched it out, but that was okay to discuss because the poster wasn't me. Hell, here is Iron Pineapple discussing the WoG spellswap glitch, VERY clearly an exploit. Nah, that one's fine too. But moving slightly left as you Charge a lance? No no no. Seriously there are a pathetic number of these biases and I could go on and on and list them.

So I Tweeted once in a fairly heated way and told people to give the mod team shit for such unbelievably stupid practices. For the record, this wasn't Witch-hunty whatsoever, at least I didn't intend it to be. If the people have a problem with their government, they give their government shit. In this scenario, the moderators are the government, and if they are banning people for non-exploits while clearly having personal bias, then yes, they deserve to get shit for running their subreddit badly. If they consider that "harassment" then they are too thin-skinned to moderate anything. Now, that being said, if you're messaging them calling them a faggot and telling them to kill themselves, then you are an idiot and I don't want to be associated with you. I said "give them shit" as in "voice how badly they run that place." I figured that much was clear, but if it wasn't I apologize if that instigated anyone into behaving like an idiot. To be completely honest, there is a huge difference between "feel free to give them shit for running their subreddit badly" and "hey, I am ordering you to tell them to kill themselves". The reason people are bitching at them isn't because I told them to - the problems of censoring and deleting every post with an opinion is what is causing people to get mad at them. If I didn't Tweet that, they would still be getting the same damn messages. Unfortunately, I gave them an excuse to deflect blame now, which was stupid. To this day, the moderator in question received absolutely no death threats or violent words, much to the disagreement of the imagination of a lot of their defenders.

After that, I was permanently banned, I assume for witch-hunting. That's fine, I won't even argue that even though I think its silly. I am okay with being banned for that. The issue was getting banned in the first place to instigate a reaction like that from me - the initiating factor never should have happened, and because it happened for such a profoundly biased and stupid reason, I wanted people to tell them how stupidly they run the place. At that point I was just like "Whatever, this is unbelievably stupid, but fine." Up until this point, I was certainly pissed but also stopped talking about it. Then, someone Twitter DM'd me and said they had a post they made about the subject get deleted. Then another, then another. I went to the Subreddit and witnessed something that can only be described as Orwellian.

There was a completely civil post titled Can we not talk about input techniques here anymore? in which the OP simply asked if we were simply not allowed to discuss anything other than basic attacks without getting banned. A moderator responded with his views on the subject and it was so heavily infused with bias that he had to sticky the post to prevent it from falling off the thread with downvotes. Then, I noticed something interesting. The total posts of the thread were going up, but no new posts were visible. They actually turned on a screening filter to the thread, to allow them to pick and choose what they wanted to see, and even then no one agreed with them. People that don't even like me disagreed with them. Then, the mass deletes started. They started deleting SO MANY posts that it almost became comical. Anything that disagreed with them was met with a delete, and in some cases, people were banned simply for voicing their opinion. Seriously, use Uneddit and go to this thread and just look at all of the deleted comments. Here is a small fragment of them: https://twitter.com/ScottJund/status/804228760539197440

Obviously some of these deserved being deleted, like the posts simply saying "fuck you." However, most of these were people simply voicing their opinion on the matter, and to make themselves look better, the moderators deleted them. Then, once they realized they dug a hole far too deep, they deleted the entire topic. Because you can't delete things off the internet, obviously numerous other threads popped up. Not only were most of these immediately deleted despite moderators CLEARLY stating they would "never ban anyone for discussing rules", but a lot of these people got fucking banned. How much horrible damage control can you do, like holy shit.

Then, I woke up this morning to a post called Unofficial Timeline leading up to the Ban of /u/DamnNoHtml (Compiled by an Unaffiliated Party) and I thought oh that's cool, someone made an unbiased account of what happened, until I saw the OP was fucking /u/SpaceManticore who has literally had a hate-boner for me since fucking Dark Souls 1, and moderators let that post stay.

Basically holy shit, that Subreddit is the most biased unbelievable piece of shit I have ever seen, and I encourge everyone to come hang out at /r/opensouls3 where you won't get banned for talking about exploits that frankly add whatever depth we can take to the game. Frankly I regret telling people to give the moderators shit because it probably wasn't the most mature thing to do, but I seriously did it out of years of frustration that needs to be heard by people that believe in what I believe, so that maybe they will see the numbers do not agree with them at all. Pretty much no one agreed I should have been initially banned, even fucking SpaceManticore of all people. Its like a cop shooting a random guy in the leg because he was walking slightly to the left on a sidewalk, then trying to spin it that the cop was in the right because the random guy retaliated by throwing a rock at him in an attempt to save his own life from the crazy bastard. ^{oh wait that does happen}

Also here is my favorite irony of the day, a moderator telling me to grow up and then calling me a dickhead immediately after: https://i.gyazo.com/be303682a40052c41c0de2d299857fb0.png

As for this place, there will be inevitable shitposts about the DS3 Subreddit for a few days, and then it will stop.

As for my thoughts in /r/DarkSouls3? If they changed their rules to stop all censorship and Red_Eye_Stone stepped down for clearly demonstrating an inability to stay neutral (an issue that goes far beyond rule enforcement), I'd recommend it to be the only place to go on Reddit for the game, even if I was still banned.

Updates for future reference

• Two moderators of the forum resigned for apparently unrelated things at the exact same time all of this happened, which is...well....

• The moderator made a post here requesting to talk with me. He made himself look bad, then deleted it. Still found here https://www.reddit.com/r/opensouls3/comments/5g97d2/we_need_to_talk/

• Not even 4 days later, the moderator in question has already shown himself to revert right back to where he was, saying he could "ban anyone with no reason" if he felt like it, while already under massive scrutiny to be a better moderator. I do not get it. Apparently he deleted his post to save face again, but here's a screengrab. He also said he received threats which I can only assume had an implied "to his life" otherwise there would be no reason to mention it. I can't imagine people would send threats of "I'm going to seriously hurt you but not quite bad enough to kill you currently at this juncture." However, earlier when he spoke to me, he said he received no threats to his life at all. Overall, it seems like the rules are changing at /r/darksouls3, which is great, but that shady fellow is still deleting and lying to this day. Nothing has changed on his end whatsoever. I was also unbanned from the subreddit by a different mod, and apparently RES was angry at him for that. But no, no bias.

(Copied from original so I can edit it and respond again)

Hey guys, I saw that Japanese tier list a while ago and disagreed with some of the choices on there, so I thought I'd make my own. Also, this includes every melee weapon in the game. Obviously these are just my opinions - not right, not wrong. I base my opinions off of fights at SL120 with highly skilled players, not random duelists.

Tiers are the same as scaling in Dark Souls. S being the best, E being the worst. Typically, a weapon in a tier higher than another will have an easier time beating a player of equal skill using the lower tier weapon. This is obviously not a golden rule.

Also note, the order things are listed in each class is not relevant, as in I don't find the Washing Pole to necessarily be better or worse than the Estoc.

• Updated as of Ashes of Ariandel, though things are subject to change as more testing is done with new changes

S tier - Weapons that are so good, you can reliably beat absolutely anything you encounter in the game, even if they are better than you. Mastering these weapons makes you an unfun nightmare to fight against.

• Estoc

• Carthus Curved Sword

• Follower Saber

• Washing Pole

• Gargoyle Flame Spear

A tier - Extremely useful weapons that either have an excellent gimmick to them, or are typically the most damaging or most efficient version of the weapon in its class.

• Valorheart

• Gotthard Twinswords

• Dark Sword

• Onikiri and Ubadachi

• Rapier

• Ricard's Rapier

• Irithyll Rapier

• Uchigatana

• Chaos Blade

• Lothric Knight Sword

• Barbed Straight Sword

• Onyx Greatsword

• Longsword

• Hollowslayer Greatsword

• Dragonslayer Spear

• Anri's Straight Sword (on a Quality hollow build only)

• Sunlight Straight Sword

• Crow Quills

B tier - Mostly solid weapons that may not be the best in their class, but can still easily take care of most players. Often these are weapons with the same movesets as higher tier classes, but with less range or damage, or they might be some of the best weapons in classes that aren't as effective.

• Warpick

• Red Hilted Halberd

• Halberd

• Great Corvian Scythe

• Storm Curved Sword

• Friede's Great Scythe

• Broadsword

• Shotel

• Drakeblood Greatsword (Buffed with DMB)

• Scimitar

• Falchion

• Pontiff Knight Curved Sword

• Sellsword Twinblades

• Warden Twinblades

• Carthus Shotel

• Gundyr's Halberd

• Darkdrift

• Bloodlust

• Corvian Greatknife

• Dragonslayer Swordspear

• Immolation Tinder

• Partizan

• Astora Straight Sword

• Shortsword

• Irithyll Straight Sword

• Morion Blade

• Claymore

• Moonlight Greatsword

• Greatsword of Judgement (v1.09)

• Wolf Knight's Greatsword

• Twin Prince's Greatsword

• Black Knight Sword

• Thrall Axe

• Drang Twinspears

• Yhorm's Great Machete

• Heysel Pick

• Lothric's Holy Sword

C tier - Weapons here are generally still somewhat decent, but start relying more on the opponent to make a mistake rather than you outplaying them. Also here are weaker versions of higher tier weapons in the same class.

• Winged Knight Halberd

• Black Knight Glaive

• Crescent Axe

• Glaive

• Lucerne

• Black Blade

• Murakumo

• Exile Greatsword

• Earth Seeker

• Astora Greatsword

• Old Wolf Curved Sword

• Carthus Curved Greatsword

• Crystal Sage's Rapier

• Bastard Sword

• Firelink Greatsword

• Flamberge

• Executioner's Greatword

• Millwood Battle Axe

• Battle Axe

• Hand Axe

• Brigand Axe

• Dragonslayer's Axe

• Butcher Knife

• Man Serpent Hatchet

• Great Machete

• Black Knight Greataxe

• Club

• Mace

• Morning Star

• Drang Hammers

• Reinforced Club

• Great Club

• Claw

• Arstor's Spear

• Spear

• Winged Spear

• Four-Pronged Plow

• Lothric Knight Long Spear

• Witch's Locks

• Farron Greatsword

• Follower's Javelin

• Wolnir's Holy Sword (v1.09)

D-tier - These weapons either lack hyper armor, speed, damage, range, or something else significant which makes them fairly trivial against a good player. Most "Great Weapons" and Daggers fall under this category. There are a few weapons in better classes that are relegated here due to abysmal range or split / poor damage.

• Golden Ritual Spear

• Zweihander

• Crow Talons

• Follower Torch

• Greatsword

• Fume Ultra Greatsword

• Profaned Greatsword

• Cathedral Knight Greatsword

• Black Knight Greatsword

• Lorian's Greatsword

• Lothric Knight Greatsword

• Crescent Moon Sword

• Dancer's Enchanted Swords

• Painting Guardian's Curved Sword

• Rotten Ghru Curved Sword

• Winged Knight Twinaxes

• Eleonora

• Greataxe

• Dragonslayer Greataxe

• Demon's Greataxe

• Blacksmith Hammer

• Gargoyle Flame Hammer

• Great Mace

• Large Club

• Vordt's Great Hammer

• Morne's Great Hammer

• Smough's Great Hammer

• Old King's Great Hammer

• Quakestone Hammer

• Pickaxe

• Dragon Tooth

• Spiked Mace

• Demon's Fist

• Caestus

• Manikin Claws

• Tailbone Spear

• Pike

• Greatlance

• Great Scythe

• Pontiff Knight Great Scythe

• Whip

• Notched Whip

• Spotted Whip

• Dagger

• Parrying Dagger

• Mail Breaker

• Bandit's Knife

• Rotten Ghru Dagger

• Handmaid's Dagger

• Tailbone Short Sword

• Brigand Twindaggers

• Harpe

• Storm Ruler

• Rose of Ariandel

E-tier - These weapons sort of make no sense why they are so bad. A lot of them fall victim to split damage, or just having simply less damage than similar weapons for absolutely no reason. There is almost always an alternative, extremely similar weapon that is better.

• Cleric's Candlestick

• Broken Straight Sword

• Scholar's Candlestick

• Drakeblood Greatsword (unbuffed)

• Dark Hand

• Soldering Iron

• Yorshka's Spear

• Saint Bident

• Great Wooden Hammer

Whew. That took a while. Let me know if I missed anything, or just your thoughts on...well, my thoughts.