I am going to separate my feedback between general discussion, topics and forum interaction and another different use for the forums which is looking for a guild and guild recruitment.
The new changes to try to create a more interactive forum community for feedback and discussion while putting in measures to detract from and limit trolling and harassment of players is to be commended. The levels of trust help minimize some of these features. I applaud the approach even if I think the levels of trust requirements are on the high side. For example, the soonest anybody would be able to have a trust level 3 would be in 2019 and in the 10 years I have been playing this game I am certain I haven’t even come close to reading 20,000 posts, but most of the ‘perks’ of that trust level will not prevent people from still participating in the conversation.
Until you get to recruitment and guild/community activities
And this is where my some of my objections come into play.
These are some examples of things I will no longer be able to do
- Post a recruitment thread that directs them to our guild website
- Post a google document on information about our community guild
- Share a twitch stream for a community or server wide community event
- Post on different characters as one is an officer in Death Jesters and another is an Officer in Zeroes to Heroes as it is my understanding to get ‘Trust Level 3’ the requirements would have to be met on both characters
- Post a link to a recent kill video on Youtube
- Edit a post that was posted and migrated to the new forums that has a link.
- Update a post so that people can see we are looking (could potentially fall under the spam flag) Not sure if a new post would need to be created or replying to the existing thread and how frequently would be considered spam or bumping? And if either happen - then based on the guide lines Trust Level 3 would never happen.
Now while I can make adjustments to some of those things like change the link to something like if you would just Google Death Jesters you should be able to find our guild website because we aren’t at a Trust Level 3 to be able to post links - it certainly will require more thinking outside of the box and clever use of “Forum Mechanics” to be able to do so. I haven’t tested yet, but would even websites like wowprogress be accepted? The trust levels change what information we will be able to provide and although I am sure we can still get our recruitment posts out there we will have to come up with good ways for players to be able to reach out to us besides the forums.
With the premise that general discussion and things like Guild Recruitment have different expectations and needs. Do these limitations impact a guild or player from sharing information with others? How do you envision us getting our information to the player base or a player looking for a guild to do the same. Does it help the flow of ‘new posts’ to have all the recruitment posts in the discussion posts? That is a specific topic that when I come to the forums unless I am looking for a guild or as a guild looking for a player I wouldn’t necessarily want to see in the ‘latest posts’ thread. Is it something that should be separate?
I double checked the recruitment forums to see if there was a pin explaining new guidelines and didn’t find one, sadly I missed out on an opportunity to get 1/20,000 posts read
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and suggestions.