Updated Forum Rules and Proposed Forum Changes
By
afocks,
Posted on: 2011-09-22 18:22 in News, Events and Announcement Discussion
I also think merging the AT forums is a horrible horrible HORRIBLE idea.
So yeah
*leaves thread*
"I have ridden the mighty moon worm!"
-Al Gore
Fiery Aura is only good for farming, I'm cereal
@Caucasiafro
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No. Why? because they are not confusing. They match what you find in the game. As a new player I had absolutely no trouble nor was I intimidated by the way the archetype area is set up. MOF, I was thankful to find out a lot of information I had never known before and enjoyed reading through posts that were sometimes years old.
| The current Archetype and Powers forums can seem very intimidating to a new user/some current users. In some cases these forums also are not the most active. A tactic I have found to be successful in the past is to group these forums into playstyle or role type, transferring over the most relevant and current posts. The division would go something like this: |
Forgot one thing in my previous post:
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I think it's redundant to say that trolling is a form of trolling. Looks like an old mistake carried without change into the new rules. Sentence was probably meant to be: "Accusing someone of being a troll is also a form of trolling..."
| Trolling or accusing someone of being a troll is also a form of trolling and is not permitted. |
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A clear and obvious 'No, don't do that' from the masses. Met with a 'what if we still did it anyways?' response.|
Originally Posted by Zwillinger
While I certainly appreciate your viewpoint:
What if we provided guidelines so that posts were easily identifiable within each forum? I don't particularly view it as pigeonholing, simply as...well...simplifying. There's a rather large amount of forums to sift through here on our boards, and to a new, or even veteran player who hasn't spent time on the forums, it's a bit confusing. Forums should be easy to understand at a glance. |
Methinks the forums are already slated to be merged, and Zwillinger got stuck with the lame task of making it look like we have a say. If I turn out to be wrong, and look like an idiot if they don't merge them, small price to pay.
Echo of the countless obvious reasons merging the Archetypes would be bad here.
As for other areas of the board, I took a quick peek and beyond making it more obvious that Bug Reports are in Development as opposed to Player Help (That often throws me off), I can't think of any good reason to change the thread structure.
Clearly, we need more lasers.
There are way too many boards on that I'd completely agree - I'd lay odds that this is part of the unholy mess that includes the logout bug - but merging the AT boards is going to result in chaos as others have said.
Also, change the software from vBulletin to XenForo. That is all
Thelonious Monk
Probably already said a million times over, but I'm adding my thoughts:
I dislike the idea of merging the AT forums. If you think they're unruly now, just wait until users have to wade through thread after thread about ATs they're not playing to try to find the good threads. For example, if you put Blaster/Corruptor/Dominator in one big forum, I'm going to have to wade through endless blaster build and dominator build threads to find anything worthwhile for a Corruptor.
Additionally, jamming these ATs together according to type does an extreme disservice to those ATs. Again looking at Blaster/Corruptor/Dominator in "ranged DPS", and then comparing them to the game's own definitions:
Blasters are heavy ranged DPS, but the game itself says they're strong in melee as well. How does that translate to being in a forum called "ranged DPS" when people could play either ranged or blapper melee/ranged hybrid?
Corruptors are moderate ranged DPS, but moderate to strong support, not just ranged DPS. Yet they're only going to be listed in the ranged DPS category? I've solo healed near every blueside task force on my DP/Kin, so just cramming it into "ranged DPS" without consideration for their support roles make Corruptors seem like Blaster-lite rather than their actual role of a hybrid blaster/controller.
Dominators, by game definition and power sets, are both ranged AND melee. Almost no Dominator build can be purely ranged. And they're equal parts damage and support/control. They really shouldn't be in a "ranged DPS" forum, at all.
TL;DR: In short, this game's ATs do not fit neatly into the Tank/DPS/Healer trifecta. It's bad enough the ATs got crammed together into 'categories', which IMHO, are often misleading, in the game itself. By trying to force them to fit into set categories you're losing the spirit of each AT, especially the villain side hybrids. I can't see how having separate forums for each AT is overwhelming or intimidating to new players. When each forum is for 2-3 ATs, the forums will be a bigger mess than they are now.
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And yet, the in-game descriptions of each AT disagrees with you. Blasters and Dominators have high melee ratings on the description when one chooses a new AT to play. Blasters have a melee rating of 7/10 - that's only 3 points shy of the actual melee ATs and 3 points shy of their own ranged rating; I can't remember, off hand, what Dominators have.|
Originally Posted by Xanatos
[Blasters & Dominators are] largely a ranged ATs.
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Blasters aren't "the mages" of CoH; They're more dynamic than that. Throwing them into one category called "ranged DPS" makes them seem like they are.
ATs should have never been jammed together by category. Not in game and not on the forums. If I were a new player, I would much rather be able to read about all of the ATs up front when making a new character instead of having to go through a "category" view only to find out that my "ranged DPS" choice has half a SPP of melee attacks because they have a strong melee rating.
Partial Character List:
LENINA 198-DELTA - 50+3 DP/Kin Corruptor (Main) / Captiosus - 50+3 Energy/Energy Blaster
Highlands.Hellraiser - 50+1 DS/Fire Tanker / SpazRat - 50 Claw/SR Stalker
Col. Gregor Aktaybr - 45 Robots/Time MM
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You've obviously never been to CHVC, if you think merging it into Forum Games is anywhere near a good idea. It's a distinct community that would have zero benefit from that. Merging with FG would (probably) be the final nail in the coffin for those of us left.|
Originally Posted by Mr_Wilkinson
Comic and Hero/Vilian Culture, Roleplaying, Screenshots & Fan Creations, Forum Games. These should all be combined into just "Fun Stuff".
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Now, can we just out-and-out dispense with the fiction that other games don't exist? That stupid rule change last year lost us a LOT of people from CHVC. The forum is a shadow of its former self.
I can understand the, "Hey, <x> game does <y>! COH needs to do <x> as well!", not being around, but was the Gamertag exchange thread all that disruptive? We existed for quite a while with being able to talk about other games, with a thriving community in there, but once that rule change went into effect, the number of distinct posters went down quite a bit.
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100% not the case. My response is a for instance, and nothing is slated for anything. |
Originally Posted by LaserAddict
A clear and obvious 'No, don't do that' from the masses. Met with a 'what if we still did it anyways?' response.
Methinks the forums are already slated to be merged, and Zwillinger got stuck with the lame task of making it look like we have a say. If I turn out to be wrong, and look like an idiot if they don't merge them, small price to pay. |
I'm doing this odd thing called engaging the Community in a discussion and taking into account their considerations before making a decision about the forums that many of the people here spend a sizable portion of their day on.
Andy Belford
Community Manager
Paragon Studios
I agree with most folks that merging the AT forums would be a mistake but I also see a lot of suggestions to remove the Archetypes and Powers General Discussion forum and I completely disagree with this.
The general comment made is that the threads there could go to the appropriate AT forum - but many of the threads are NOT specific to AT's. Take the threads on stealth powers (all stealth powers, not just stealth), spring attack, group fly and fly/afterburner - these are all pool powers and definitely don't belong to a specific AT. Then there are the threads on specific powersets, like the current poison or kinetic melee thread - while those COULD go in an AT forum, which one do you pick as the threads are discussing the powerset as it is for ALL AT's that have it.
At most maybe 10% of these threads could be moved to a specific AT forum (yes, I pulled that number out of thin air - but its likely pretty close, if not an overestimation). The general discussion forum also has the most active discussions of any of the AT forums other than the scrapper forum, which is only so busy because its uber-build central - even brute players end up there asking about build advice.
I firmly believe that the last place on the forums that should be touched at all is the entire Archetypes and Powers section - while there are some forums with low post counts and activity, its not because the threads could go somewhere else, its mostly due to smaller counts of those AT types being played. These forums are the ones most specific to the game and are all the easiest to use now - I almost never see anyone starting a thread off with "I was not sure where to post this' in any of the AT forums, where other places I see that a lot.
Globals: @Midnight Mystique/@Magik13
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Can we get an answer on this, so we know if threads about the new seasons of Game of Thrones and Walking Dead will be nuked?
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Originally Posted by Smersh
Can we have some clarification on what 'T for Teen' means in regard to the Comic and Hero/Villain Culture board?
Does that mean a total ban on all discussions of R-rated and TV-M rated material? |
Comrade Smersh, KGB Special Section 8 50 Inv/Fire, Fire/Rad, BS/WP, SD/SS, AR/EM
Other 50s: Plant/Thorn, Bots/Traps, DB/SR, MA/Regen, Rad/Dark - All on Virtue.
-Don't just rebel, build a better world, comrade!
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Excellent point. Currently I can search on "Hurricane" in the Defender forum and be very likely to get Defender stats for the power and descriptions of how Defenders use the power -- which is very different from how, say, Masterminds use it. Merge the forums and I will get everything in my searches, necessitating much more labor on my own part.|
Originally Posted by Fomsie
especially considering how poor the search function on these forums is already.
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Originally Posted by Zwillinger
While I certainly appreciate your viewpoint:
What if we provided guidelines so that posts were easily identifiable within each forum? |
Additional guidelines will need to be read, digested, and acted upon -- it will require more thought, not less.
When you lump ATs together, you are inadvertently telling players how to play -- this is especially damaging for new players, who might mistake your forum consolidation for gospel. Masterminds can do support, but were originally conceived as -- and work just fine as -- the tanking role for villains. And they're great DPS.
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Originally Posted by Zwillinger
I don't particularly view it as pigeonholing, simply as...well...simplifying.
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Originally Posted by Zwillinger
There's a rather large amount of forums to sift through here on our boards, and to a new, or even veteran player who hasn't spent time on the forums, it's a bit confusing.
Forums should be easy to understand at a glance. |
The archetype forums being separate makes clear sense to players playing archetypes. But, if you are taking suggestions, why is there so much apparent duplication in "meta" forums?
- Devs' Corner
- Devs' Digest
- Community Digest
---------------------- - Gameplay/Tech & Bugs
- Issue 21 Bugs -- bugs, bugs, bugs. Why not one forum? It's not like we need a forum for Issue 7 bugs now -- shouldn't "current" bugs all go in the same place?
---------------------- - Training Room
- Copy Tool for Training Room -- why on earth is this a "forum-level" entry?
---------------------- - Screenshots and Fan Creations -- mostly art
- Multimedia -- mostly arty cinema
---------------------- - Announcements
- (Player) Events
- News, Announcements, & Events --these three are baffling
If we are to die, let us die like men. -- Patrick Cleburne
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The rule is that they must be loved. --Jayne Fynes-Clinton, Death of an Abandoned Dog
If I were going to consolidate the AT forums my personal preference would be:
Melee (you smash things in the mouth)
Support (everybody else)
In all seriousness: I understand the desire to merge the ATs. Stalker forums are "dead," and there are plenty of "should I be a scrapper or a brute" threads that have to be cross posted. That said, still better to leave the AT forums as is, including the general AT/power discussion section.
Maybe the recruiting/player events could be eliminated as they could go into the specific servers?
I've been taking some notes:
- General consensus is, fairly obviously, don't consolidate the AT forums. Message received, loud and clear
. - Many suggestions to consolidate the PVP forums, some dissension.
- Many suggestions to do away with the Player Events section, however not the calendar functionality.
- Many suggestions to do away with the SG/VG recruitment section.
- Many suggestions to consolidate the EU/Oceanic section, however sentiment has been expressed to not completely do away with it.
- Plenty of suggestions to do away with the Mac forum, however I'm not in favor of this as there are Mac issues which are unique to the Mac client.
- I would like to take a second look at guides. I feel as though there definitely needs to be something done to encourage more guides to be produced, especially in light of all the new and returning players that will be coming into the game. I'd also like to find a way to make build sharing more visible and encourage more players to share their builds on an active basis.
- Some general suggestions on reorganization of the forums so that the structure makes sense.
Thanks for the continued discussion all. We're paying attention and appreciate you working with us to improve the forum Feng Shui.
Andy Belford
Community Manager
Paragon Studios
ok I'm gonna be slightly philosophical here but this point bothers me a lot:
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I'm pretty sure a lot of EU forumites will agree with me when I say we had to make a lot of noise to get heard and our actions (mine especially) could have easily been considered to fall foul of this rule. I will very gladly point out that to my knowledge nobody was ever warned that we were it does concern me that an overly zealous mod could have snipped those voices very succinctly when we were raising a legitimate point and were not getting much redname feedback. | Do not engage in Lobbying on the Official Forums. Lobbying is continually bringing up the same topic repeatedly in numerous different threads or as an off-topic post in official threads to get developer attention. This form of posting is not permitted. We recognize you may be passionate about a specific subject, however this sort of posting is non-constructive and will not be tolerated. |
It does strike me that it's potentially a gagging clause - but I'll happily add the caveat that I've no experience of it being used that way.
Something to think about maybe?
Thelonious Monk
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The intent of this is not to quell your voices from being heard. Moreso to prevent players from doing things like spamming forums, posting in *every* *single* *thread* with the same message, or otherwise post in a way that's non constructive.
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Originally Posted by Scarlet Shocker
ok I'm gonna be slightly philosophical here but this point bothers me a lot:
I'm pretty sure a lot of EU forumites will agree with me when I say we had to make a lot of noise to get heard and our actions (mine especially) could have easily been considered to fall foul of this rule. I will very gladly point out that to my knowledge nobody was ever warned that we were it does concern me that an overly zealous mod could have snipped those voices very succinctly when we were raising a legitimate point and were not getting much redname feedback. It does strike me that it's potentially a gagging clause - but I'll happily add the caveat that I've no experience of it being used that way. Something to think about maybe? |
Andy Belford
Community Manager
Paragon Studios
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Originally Posted by Zwillinger
I've been taking some notes:
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Ideas for this:
Promotion of guides on the City of Heroes website. Maybe a good guide in the forum has the chance to go up in a guide section of the website?
Promotion of the guides forum section, and if created the guides website section, in game.
Some kind of little guide award? Even if it's just a costume power code given, or some game time.
Guide challenges. A Red name says 'hey, let's see your best x guides!'. Could work in addition with the above.
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You're talking to a guy who has his forum preferences set to 500 posts-per-page.|
Originally Posted by Zwillinger
1. Less is better: The less you have to scroll down the page, the fewer forums there are, the simpler it's going to be for a new user/someone unfamiliar with the forums.
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I'd rather scroll through than have to click through.
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| 2. Less clicks is better: Creating more parent/child forums isn't the solution. Things need to be one click away (Web Design 101 IMO). |
It's better to have your forums clearly delineated than to have a mush of multiple forums and rely on some sort of "suggested formatting" to organize it. That's essentially what some of these forum merges (in the AT areas specifically) would accomplish. You'd be pushing the job of organizing the forum off onto the user instead of organizing it yourself.
In my experience running forums of this sort, my advice would be STOP NOW. Expecting the users, no matter how cool and self-organizing they are to be responsible for keeping organization in YOUR forums is a recipe for fustercluck.
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| 3. The purpose of improvement is to grow our forum Community and to make the experience better for everyone, overall. |
Additionally, if this is merely some attempt to give an artificial appearance of "busier" forums, don't. Just...don't.
Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.
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Agreed on everything above. And were the forums refactored to look like this, I'd be on board.
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Originally Posted by Commander
This is what I have to far as a way to reduce clutter. I know vBulletin can handle this, as most other forums. You can consolidate all forums to make it easier to get through. Also, the CSS is another reason that the site looks so bloated. Have someone tinker around with the values of cell and table sizes. Also, font size is a killer too.
 You can keep all the existing forums, just have them available inside each parent category instead of bloating the frontpage. |
Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.
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To the controller forum. There's still only ONE forum for controllers. It simply has gateways from each of those sections. So someone searching based on different criteria has a couple options about how to find the forum.
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Originally Posted by Local_Man
You have Controllers in three categories! Controllers fit into three different categories . . . but not all of them, as Mind Controllers have no pets. Where the heck are folks supposed to go for advice on Controllers under this suggestion? Three different forums?
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Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.
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I don't expect anyone but the Community Team to keep organization in the forums. I do like to gather feedback before making changes. |
Originally Posted by Hyperstrike
In my experience running forums of this sort, my advice would be STOP NOW. Expecting the users, no matter how cool and self-organizing they are to be responsible for keeping organization in YOUR forums is a recipe for fustercluck.
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This is an exercise in feedback.
Andy Belford
Community Manager
Paragon Studios
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Feedback is a funny thing.|
Originally Posted by Zwillinger
I don't expect anyone but the Community Team to keep organization in the forums. I do like to gather feedback before making changes.
This is an exercise in feedback. |
When the community I was a mod/pseudo-admin for wanted to do some de-cluttering, we also solicited feedback. The result was that the board for the community actually GREW by about 20%.
Positron: "There are no bugs [in City of Heroes], just varying degrees of features."
I think a merge of the AT forums in the manner Zwill suggested is a great idea. The idea is to make the forums so you do NOT have to scroll down through a bunch of stuff. I believe what Zwill was suggesting went something like:
Main Forum
Subforum
- Tankers
Brutes/Tanks - Melee DPS
Scrappers/Stalkers - Ranged DPS
Blasters/Corruptors - Support
Defender/Controller/Dominator - HEAT/VEAT
Kheldians/Arachnos
(Yes I know, left out Masterminds, this is just an example)
Exactly HOW is this more confusing? It seems rather simple to navigate. It would be the same as before which ATs keeping their own subforums like they have now, just be divided into categories.
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:O I like this idea.|
Originally Posted by Zortel
[/LIST]
Ideas for this: Promotion of guides on the City of Heroes website. Maybe a good guide in the forum has the chance to go up in a guide section of the website? Promotion of the guides forum section, and if created the guides website section, in game. Some kind of little guide award? Even if it's just a costume power code given, or some game time. Guide challenges. A Red name says 'hey, let's see your best x guides!'. Could work in addition with the above. |
And not just because I'm almost finished with my first ever guide for CoH!:P(Soo...much...spellchecking!)
[member of NeXt Gen][Member of LEGION]
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Slight related tangent:|
Originally Posted by Zwillinger
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I'm afraid my suggestion regarding build-sharing would require a 'new system' in the game. Some way where one can 'export' the details of your current build. Say a slash command in the game like '/buildexport <filename>' and it would generate a plaintext file of the current active build using a 'standard' format of some sort. People could load this up into the text editor of their choice and cut'n'paste wherever they like (such as on the forums).
Third-party software folks could parse this standard format and present it in fancier forms. Combined with saving costumes out, and parsing those. some enterprising souls might be able to come up with a player-made 'CityVault' sort of concept site... All without stepping outside the bounds of acceptable use of the IP.
Second idea requiring even more dev resources: Leverage the Character Select screen as a character viewer, allowing one, without fully signing into the server and PLAYING, to select costume to view and view current available builds (but not change them or their contents, yet maybe be able to save costumes from here). This would, potentially put a little more load on some parts of the DB, with the benefit of players being able to access this information while not in the full game. Of course, all these features would be VIP only.
Just some thoughts that got unlocked in my head from the builds part of one of your subgoals, Z.
Too Many Characters... not enough player
Member of Alts-R-Us.
Are we just waisting our time with our suggestions, since they are just for fun?
There are no words for what this community, and the friends I have made here mean to me. Please know that I care for all of you, yes, even you. If you Twitter, I'm MrThan. If you're Unleashed, I'm dumps. I'll try and get registered on the Titan Forums as well. Peace, and thanks for the best nine years anyone could ever ask for.