Posts with tag flaming

I was wondering when/if things would get a little hot and heavy for the new CM Zarhym on the forums, and this thread is it -- players start out asking for a date for the expansion (we all know when Wrath will come out already: "when it's done"), and when Zarhym orders up a generic answer, players start to test his limits. One snarky answer gets him to deal out a ban, and it's downhill from there -- when players start fighting with him over the fact that they want a new battleground, he gets a little snippy, and eventually, he says that putting in a new battleground would only satisfy a "small percentage" of the playerbase. And then players really get angry.

I think Zarhym handled himself pretty well -- his little snipe at players for thinking an expansion was "too soon" last year was uncalled for, especially since Blizzard told us they were actually aiming for one every year. But he's not distraught to the point of a Tseric yet, obviously. He's just not quite as smooth as, say, Drysc or Neth yet in quelling angry players.

It's too bad that, since the CMs are anonymous, we have no idea when they start of their qualifications or past experience (though of course we'd trust Blizzard to hire people who know what they're doing). But Zarhym got his official welcome to the forums -- when players start flaming you for saying the wrong thing, you know you've made it.

Here's something I'd like to hear all your thoughts on. Glue from Nagrand quotes the fact that "only a small portion of the playerbase read the forums," and he claims that those people are the most important players Blizzard has-- they care enough about the game to visit the forums and voice their opinions. But I'd like to play the devil's advocate on this one. What if (and stay with me here) Blizzard deleted the official forums completely?

Do we really need the official forums? They do help-- besides giving us all kinds of fun reads and, yes, occasional insight, they're the main link between the CMs and the player base-- patch announcements and upcoming changes all are made known mostly through the forums, and day-to-day player feedback and questions are centered there. But they don't have to be-- Mythic's Dark Age of Camelot actually runs a daily blog featuring community news and game updates and changes. And it would be just as easy for Blizzard to announce things on their own website, and get player feedback and questions from sites just like this one.

And getting rid of the forums would wipe out all of the lunacy that appears on there-- all the insensitive comments, the jeering and rickrolling, the flaming, the drama (well, actually I'm down for keeping that one), and all of the other wackiness that goes down there every day. If the CMs didn't have to deal with that stuff, wouldn't they be able to spend more time communicating player ideas to the devs? If Blizzard didn't have to pay Timbal to ban rickrollers, couldn't they use that money to come up with a new 5man, or Heroic Deadmines, or any number of other ideas they've had but couldn't carry out? If we lost the forums, wouldn't we have a better game?

Food for thought. It's highly unlikely (at the very least) that Blizzard would ever shut down the official forums. But, even though they may have been necessary in the beginning, WoW's community survives in many other places now. Are the forums really necessary?