Question: Purpose of this Forum

#0 - April 24, 2009, 12:44 a.m.

Truly I'm finding it harder and harder to believe that this forum is really any different from any other class forum complaining about something, except, you have all of them in the same room, which of course brings the big angry mob.

Really, my question for you GC, and in all seriousness here, is why keep this forum going? It just seems to me that nothing productive really ever gets done, rather then maybe some one saying "Oh hey, there's a bug." Other then that I just see a bunch of QQ posts.

I mean, I've played my fair share of MMOs, and one that stood out the most was Star Wars Galaxies, and they started listening to the player base a little bit too much, which personally I think led to the game being where it is now. Personally I would rather you guys NOT listen to these forums mainly for the fact of all none sense that gets posted. (Example GC promised me a pony)

So really, and yet again, not asking this out of spite, but on good measure, what is there really to gain about the QQ posts, etc from these forums?

Ghostcrawler

#2 - April 24, 2009, 4:24 a.m.

In some ways, we like the big angry mob.

In a typical class forum you'd see stuff like "Our mana is the worst," or "Our dps is the worst," or "We don't scale," followed by 10 pages of high-fives. If another class comes in they get told "Your forum is that way ->".

Here you have to justify your claims in the face of other classes. Sure there will be players of a more coarse variety who think that intelligent argument includes insulting the poster's spec or outlining the history of abuse they've suffered at the hands of the developers or what their cousin's friend told them about their raiding experience. But there are intelligent, insightful posters too who have what's best for the game at heart and that makes it worth while.

I'll explain it like this: These forums are not for the community to get together and vote on what changes we make. This is not like an open source project where we're all working together to balance the game. However, it is an opportunity to know without a doubt that the people actually working on the game will see your feedback. Imagine after you saw a movie, the director walked in and you got to tell him (or her) what you thought. That doesn't mean he (or she) is going to go change everything to please you. (And since the whole theater won't agree, really how could he?) That doesn't mean every person in the crowded theater gets to ask a lot of questions that the director will answer or pitch ideas that the director will respond to. But you might get him to think about something in a different way. He might even change something when he realizes something wasn't working. Once in awhile, an idea might really grab him. You have not become the director. But you are having an influence on the movie's direction.