The tone of this forum has changed in a subtle, yet disturbing way recently. These boards used to convey the feeling that we're all here because Blizzard created a wonderful thing, which we all love, and have some questions and suggestions about. Lately, it has leaned much more towards harsh criticism with the feeling that Blizzard employees should be omniscient and able to tell the future, and since they can't, they must be idiots.

My reading habits have turned from hanging on every word, to skimming 30-page threads for names and guild tags who I recognize, and skipping a lot of "filler," as it were. A pity, since I'm sure I miss good tidbits from infrequent posters, (such as myself!) but it's the only way I can keep up with the flood.

If you don't like the game, then this is not the place for you.

Any chance of a slashdot style karma points system? To the extent the readership of EJ forums continues to rise and more people begin posting, threads will become unwieldly to navigate irregardless of how polite people are in avoiding crit walls of text.

This has nothing to do with new people - and everything to do with the situation of the game at the moment. This trend is seen across almost every forum. And the forum posters here are the same ones who were praising and holding this game in high regard for the last 2 years. We're raiders, and the raid game is terrible at the moment. On our server this is manifested through a relatively large mass exodus of players - roughly around that seen in AQ40.

So its not as if the forum posters have changed - perhaps the game really has. Praetorian set off one of the most significant discussions relevant to 2.1 with his consumable usage discussion - it might be viewed as criticism and whatnot - but it sure was a useful discussion, and I doubt his intention was to call blizzard idiots. But there is a point that a lot of this stuff should be a bit more obvious (like potions for healers for instance atm).

When the game was great back in Naxx everyone was more interested in the theorycraft. Now its just - how do we get this back on track?

I think your view of something as bitching and complaining is our view of some constructive effort to figure out what is going on, and how to best fix it.

The main problem I see is that it used to be a narrow game and the people here really wanted to min/max the living shit out of it. Now the game has so many variables and every class has three different speccs to talk about that one might feel sad when every druid only seems interested in min/maxing thier feral tanking skills leaving my resto comments all alone. This can be very frustrating, but then again as Praetorian said, if no one answered the first time, they most likly won't the second time.

A key thing to a good post is to read it before posting it, getting rid of typo's and bad sentences is a sure way of getting a good reply to your post.

I would also like to add to this post that long post is not equal to constructive posts. Too long posts have a tendancy to lose their point. This is why starting with a short summary is always a good thing in long posts.

As a long time lurker, something has annoyed me about this forum for a long time, even when the discussion is healthy.

I really dont like the clustering of posts into one thread.

For example, the "Sustained DPS Thread" is now 77 pages long. It starts with Patchwork, which really isnt all that important anymore, but basicly you need an index for the thread now. Or for the longest time moderators have told forum posters to keep Karazhan topics in the "Karazhan, Already" thread. That is now 55 pages long.

How do I find information in a 55 page thread. The fact that you want to keep the signal to noise ratio low is admirable, but you already have information overload. I would like to post constructively, but if a question was already asked on page 34 on a 55 page thread that I really dont have time to read all the way through am I going to be penalized for it.

I personally prefer more specific topics with less post thus more threads overall then having broad topic with many posts thus less threads on the forum. To me, as a person who mainly uses this forum as information resource, it would make searching for specific information a lot easier.

My guild will most likely never be on the cutting edge, thus we move through the content with information of people who have done it before. Hence also why I m mainly a lurker, I havent experienced the content that is usually discussed in detail here. It also means that I dont visit this forum regularly to keep us with the long winded discussions that occurs in some of those really long threads.

To me it seems like that this is just a negative of the overall success that this forum had.

The "Search this thread" option is pretty useful in things like the Karazhan thread, but less so in Sustained DPS. In the latter case, the last fe pages tend to be the most relevant. Still, some indexing or separation as has been discussed wouldn't hurt things.