can only speak for me, but it's when valid criticism is dismissed in an unreasonable way. of course this describes opinions, not people, but posters that do that systematically end appearing themselves as white knights. extreme cases of whiteknightism not only deny criticism but are unable to even tolerate it, thus feel compelled to supress it. it is common for them to flock together to reinforce each other and use common trolling and mobbing tactics to owerwhelm the opinion, dreail the thread and ideally get it closed. it is also common to repeat untrue statements or facts in order to have them picked up by less informed readers and promote them to truths.
they key factor here is 'unreasonable'. ymmv, but here are some common traits:
1. lack of knowledge in specific domains (networking, game development, game industry)
2. unmerited or exagerated acclaim to frontier (usually based on #1) pretending it magically compensates the issue
3. plain irrational or selfish arguments
some example silly typical arguments:
in response to complaints about bugs or bug management in general
- do you know how difficult it is to build a game at this scale (with scale not bearing any meaning in this context)
- the game is complex (yeah and roses are red, but it's still commercial software)
- they patch bugs constantly (plain denial)
in response to criticism of p2p or networking support in general
- p2p is best suited for a game like elite (sheer nonsense)
in response to steam stats
- steam stats are unrepresentative|unreliable|untrustworthy (simply not true)
- oh another doomsayer! (even if op has not implied anything of the sort)
the sad irony of whiteknights is that senseless fighting of criticism of the game works actually against the game they seem to love so much, and in extreme instances is responsible or cause of much of the 'toxicity' they often loathe and wrongly blame the criticism for.
frontier plz fix!
