Hmmm... Perhaps I can clear this up. I was one of those at the centre of the whole thing anyway. To clear things up first - I'm mrcheese, my old account was banned by an escapist moderator for commenting in this off-topic forum that the place was dead and their "integration" of the two communities had not worked well - more on that later.
Now, I used to manage the Lineage 2 Warcry site. Sadly, I did not manage it in its prime (when it was receiving close to 1 million unique hits per month) but towards the end of its life as the site shifted to a central news hub format. Now we had been aware for a while that Warcry had a sister site in the escapist - most of the warcry regulars went there once and deemed it pseudo-intellectuals and children arguing over meaningless drivel - a sort of Gaia online without the silly avatars. We promptly never returned there and pretty much forgot it existed.
The issues started when the powers that be decided that the two sites should merge their forum communities. This was done in one of the worst ways possible - by introducing a badge for posting in each site's forums, then creating a link to a random Warcry subforum on the escapist forum list and vice versa.
Now from the escapist user's point of view, this was just a new forum for them to post on - most had no clue what the forum was, any established rules, etc - they just wanted that damn badge. Luckily for the first few months the linked forums were for small, inactive warcry subforums. Then one day they linked to Lineage 2 warcry.
With the site still being pretty active, myself and the moderators were suddenly fighting a losing battle against escapist users finding a 3 year old thread and commenting "lol" on it. There were forum rules in place forbidding thread necromancy and pointless bumping posts, 99% of escapist users ignored these things and broke those rules. As a result I ended up banning several hundred escapist users permanently from the Lineage 2 forums, the forum of the week changed, the problem ended.
The real issue began when those users banned from the forum I was maintaining were unable to get their "x posts without moderator wrath" badges due to a ban existing on their account. Escapist moderators and their new "community manager" were very upset that because their users failed to heed rules and thus were ineligible to get those damn badges (i've seen the forum backend - there is no way to remove a record of a ban having existed - I myself was ineligible to recieve those same badges because I banned myself one day out of curiosity).
After a few angry PMs about this, I posted a thread enquiring why the forum merger was being forced upon us in such an odd, intrusive way. The thread was immediately locked by this community manager (whose name eludes me as I think they vanished back off to the escapist after causing these problems). At that point I said my goodbyes, it was clear no discussion would be accepted on the merger and any insinuation that it had failed would not be tolerated, so I left warcry. Soon after, a forum regular posted a thread enquiring why mine had been locked - his thread was deleted and he was banned without warning. This upset a majority of the other regulars who either left or voiced their opinions and were again banned.
Around two weeks too late, the very high ups at Themis (the company who own and operate both sites) posted a thread encouraging Warcry regulars to voice their concerns about the way this integration was happening. With most of the users who tried to voice concerns banned or gone, the thread turned into escapist regulars commenting on how mean all the warcry people were. This thread still exists here: http://www.warcry.com/forums/read/12.112018-A-Tale-of-Two-Communities-of-Thread-Necro-and-a-discussion-that-needs-to-happen
As a final word, I was angry at that escapist comminuty manager dude because I had been reprimanded for enforcing the rules of the forum I managed. I perma banned spammers and people necroing threads because that was the rule - you did that, you got banned. He was upset I wasn't giving warnings and temporary suspensions like HIS forums did. Just to ice the cake, my (rather sarcastic) thread about the great success of the community merger garnered an instant ban from this guy. Nice to know he doesn't practice what he preaches: http://www.warcry.com/forums/read/12.165208-Wow#4340743
