Now I’d like to take a moment to remind you about how awesome the rest of the announced changes are!
Players will have the ability to rate up or rate down posts so that great topics and replies stand out from the not-so-great; low-rated posts will appear dimmer to show that the community feels that they don’t contribute effectively to the conversation, and Blizzard’s community team will be able to quickly and easily locate highly rated posts to participate in or to highlight discussions that players find worthwhile.
This, alone, is going to make a huge difference. It’s been a long time coming, and will address a large portion of trolling.
Individual topics will be threaded by context, meaning replies to specific posts will be grouped together, making it easier for players to keep track of multiple conversations within a thread. We’re also adding a way for Blizzard posters to “broadcast” important messages forums-wide , to help communicate breaking news to the community in a clear and timely fashion. Beyond that, we’re improving our forum search function to make locating interesting topics easier and help lower the number of redundant threads, and we have more planned as well.
This will make everything more readable.
Honestly, with the exception of their reversed decision to force gamers to use their real names, this was an amazing announcement! Now that they’ve given us what we asked for, we can start focusing on the good parts of the announcement. And resubscribing, right Gnomeaggedon? :P
So aside from community voting and threading, what other ideas do you guys have that would make the forums a better place? Off the top of my head, I suspect forcing people to choose a single character that will show on all their posts would be a good first step. No more anonymous level 1 alts from another server bashing recruitment threads. Additionally, I’d like to see a PM system, maybe integrated with in-game mail.
Euripides
jurgwena
lemli
eidotrope
pherra
femaledwarf
People should be forced to pick a main, and that’s the toon they post from. If you change your main, you can only do so once a month. If you are found guilty of trolling, you get a 1 month forum privileges suspension. Second time, full account ban. That will end it in short order.
Maybe they could make it so that your current character of choice, as well as the last 3 you picked, showed up. Or they could let you choose several characters from which to post on.
As a dodgy old magician with more illusion than power, I fear I smell sleight of hand.
However, the resub is as clear a sign as the cancel, so yes, I will resubscribe, but as many, many people have pointed out, there is more to this change that simply a forum ID change.
I note that Mike’s response was very measured, very specific about the forums, yet still very vague about all the other things we are now pretty sure will come.
I’m in agreement with many who say you get to pick a toon and that’s the only one you can use to post. I’m not all that computer savvy, but I’m told this can be linked to not only your account but also your ISP. If you want to troll, you’d need not only another account but another ISP.
I don’t believe the vote up or vote down system is a true measure of a comment’s validity. I know people who routinely vote down all the comments in a thread just because.
I think one of the problems is Blizzard/Activision’s unwillingness to hire the help that they need to moderate forums, handle Customer Service and be GMs. They are hoping their new policies will make the forums almost self-policing. It doesn’t.
Instead of harping about the trolls on the forums, they should be dealing with account security and spamming. Anyone else get the “illegal character transfer” email today?
For your point about voting- have you seen the very simple voting system on wow.com? It’s basically exactly what Blizzard plans on implementing. I’ve seen it abused, but more often than not, when something’s voted down, it’s stupid.
One person voting a bunch of comments down would have no effect- no single vote really matters. The comment is only darkened out when there’s a large number of down votes.