I think that that's why they don't moderate the WoW forums, they're scared to really enforce it. The reasoning is probably that some people consider it part of their subscription to post on the forums, and they don't want people to get upset because their joke/troll post got them moderated in some way. I don't think that many people quit because the state of the general forum is terrible, but some of the idiots there might quit because of efforts on Blizzard's part to clean it up.

That's exactly it. If your only effective tool is permanently banning a paying customer, that tool is only used in the most extreme situations. In a threshold based system, the offending posts can simply be moderated down and nobody would read them unless they wanted to. No hard feelings, and signal/noise improves.

Hell, I've been saying this since the Whineplay days.

Not full account bans. They have the ability to ban an account from posting on the WoW forums without affecting anything else.

What Trouble said is true. Furthermore, they should willingly sacrifice the huge numbers of blithering idiots posting on the WoW forums -- even if it means them cancelling their subscriptions forever -- in order to improve the state of their community.

The WoW forums are fine. No, they aren't the best source of information on a lot of subjects but it's good retarded fun. It is a game, after all, and no one forces you to read posts. I enjoy reading EJ forums and I enjoy reading and making smart ass posts on WoW forums. Sometimes you just don't feel like discussing the finer points of a moonkin dps spreadsheet.

Ah, it's nice to be utopian but this is a business and if it meant they really would cancel their subscriptions forever they'd be incredibly stupid to do it.

The problem is that the so-called 'community' over there isn't conducive to players asking questions about things they don't understand. Look at posts where people ask for help, clearly new players, and they get flamed up and down for it.

The UI forum is one where moderation seems to actually be working, you see very few cases of anything inappropriate there.

I freely admit that I am on a damn fool idealistic crusade. On a purely pragmatic basis though, there is definitely something to be said for losing Y number of customers to improve the quality of life for X other customers -- especially since the X customers are the kind you want being part of a quality online community, and the Y are not.

These beautifully focused boards are a product of strong moderation and the fact that people have to be curious enough to go find this. General board population is far more - for lack of a better word - general. For example there's loads of illiterate people that don't type the way they do so it makes them feel special; and they are paying customers too who are told by GMs where to go ask people how to continue the quest to kill pigs in the barrens.

I honestly doubt the moderation required of the general boards to get them to a high standard would be worth the price of the moderators. Blizzard's other viable alternative would be to provide no boards at all; thereby forcing the community to create, maintain, moderate, and so on their own boards. And it would've definitely worked, I'm sure every server has an IRC channel and it doesn't have anything to do with blizzard. I've at least seen some people attempt move away off the general boards to a privately moderated one, but I never seen it succeed just because the blizzard ones are there really [edit: I meant as a server, obviously every guild has their own forums and such]

Going back to the original post, I think a lot of what people may not realize is that developers just don't want to take suggestions from people. They are not like this because they are mean, but to them the game is their 'baby', and they don't want anyone telling them how to raise their kids. If they accept suggestions from people, then they fear they will lose their creativity, since they won't really be responsible for the changes made.

As a long time beta tester it's hard to accept that developers really don't want advice on how to do their job. Sure they love to get FEEDBACK on stuff they create, but you are giving feedback on what THEY have created, whereas using suggestions means the person who made the suggestion is the one who will ultimately get the credit for it.

The other factor to keep in mind is that this game is huge, and it is tightly managed to make sure there is no threat to the massive cash-flow. Everything that is done is carefully planned so as to not annoy a large portion of players if at all possible. While a change may look good on paper, if it will cause an uproar in the game the benefit to the game is outweighed by the disturbance it would cause to the players.

In the end, I usually find it easier just to enjoy the ride, since it can get very depressing to have a great idea that you try to get heard only to find out the developers don't want to hear it.

True. But a lot of those people get flamed because they don't even bother to put in a few seconds of searching before they rush to ask a question. This happens on the priest forums all of the time with the same questions over and over (at least regarding shadow priests):

* How much +hit do I need?
* What gear is good?
* What is a good 'spell rotation?'
* Battlecast or Spellstrike?

And so on, and so forth. Pretty much every question like this is answered in stickies or pre-existing posts which no one bothers to read... so, yes... people that ask those questions are going to get flamed. Quite frankly, they wouldn't receive much different treatment here as there are no shortage of hall monitors that have their trigger fingers on the report button where it will quickly end up in the Banhammer or Dungheap.

Now, you might say: 'But these are new players who don't know any better.' Well, there is a clearly marked 'Welcome to WoW' forum and most stickies are fairly obvious considering they are 'stuck' at the top of forums. People are just lazy.

I hate answering an OP post after 3 pages of discussion but I couldn't help but noticing that nobody has mentioned devastate yet in this thread.
A few patches ago devastate was going to be changed in such a way that it would allow prot warriors in full dps gear to do quite great damage, to an extend of making x/x/devastate a hybdrid tanking/dps spec.
Untill some EJ forum posters started figuring out how godly the change was and posted some evidence here, and in the final patch notes, appearing only a few days after the testing, devastate got nerfed.
To me this is the best proof that these forums do have quite a big effect (as far as forums go) on the game.

Unfortunately Devastate is still pretty trashy as a tanking skill and highly limited as a DPS skill; hopefully the forums have some positive effects rather than restrictive ones!

That's silly. For the most part Blizzard aren't hardcore raiders, or trail-blazing masters of new balance memes. If you are designing a game to accomodate something you cannot physically test/perfect in-house you had better listen to the people that do.

I have sympathy for Blizzard and realize they can't self-fund multiple hardcore raiding guilds by themselves and that it would not be a justifiable expenditure to explain to the parent company, and I do not expect that from them. In return, I think its reasonable to expect some dialogue and humility, from both sides, about the capabilities and expertise of the others.

If I have a daughter and she wants to learn ballet, am I going to train her myself based on my observations and assumptions through life? Hell no, I will support her as a father and provide a moral guide for her to follow, but I'm not going to pretend that makes me an expert about her every aspect.

Doesn't that actually indicate a larger problem in the development cycle?

I'd like to chime in here, as someone who trolls the UI and macro forums like it's my job.

I would be very surprised if the UI/Macros forum was heavily moderated, or that its moderation is the reason why the forum is so helpful. Rather, I think it's an issue of self-selection.

On any given day there are probably 10-15 threads asking if model switching is against the ToS. Usually people just say "Yes" and go on their way. Some people, like Jelly or Cogwheel, might give players a hard time for asking such a question. Usually if someone is a dick they'll get smacked around by forum regulars.

There is a surprising amount of stupid in that forum, but people seem to be more willing to help. My guess is that people literally have NO IDEA what they're talking about, and are less willing to stick their necks out there; whereas people in the class forums feel some sense of propriety in their knowledge since they've played the class first-hand (in some cases).

The stupidest crowd in the UI/Macros forum is the "fanboi" crowd (usually localized around Discord or Ace2) and those people get shut down VERY fast. It's surprising how quickly people will retreat when it's made apparent that they very little knowledge on a particular subject.

I'm yet to see it work in a 'positive' way (and by positive i mean buff, not whether it's a positive for the game), but maybe i'm cynical playing a priest. There was the original shadow 41 point talent, the shadow-heal, alot of shadow priests complained about it being against the idea of the class, and many others complained it would be OP, and it was changed pretty quickly. However COH and lightwell are still seen as mediocre at best even by the devs (blizzcon) yet very little is done.

From the devs point of view (and a cynics), it's fairly simple maths as to why. Buff 1 class too much till they're OP, you make 1 class of players happy/uncaring, and 8 pissed off. Nerf 1 till it's a bit underpowered, you make 8 classes happy/uncaring, and 1 pissed off. I would imagine that you also destabilise raiding and PVP alot more by having an OP class you can bring in than if there is 1 underpowered class that you can't take to raids much or PVP with.

I wonder how many people are actually on the PTR doing testing. Could that be one problem with this patch in particular? With no "advance preview" of new content, where's the incentive for people to log to the PTR and actually test stuff? I'm not actually seeing almost any useful feedback going via the PTR forums. One or two crash dumps, and that's it. If the amount of in-game reporting from the PTRs is similarly minuscule, that could explain why the testing is taking so long.

I transferred my mage and a pre-made mage to the PvE test realm. When I logged on the pre-made character I appeared to be in an area where I was PvP flagged and could turn it off. It took at least 30 minutes to escape with repeated corpse runs and spirit healer resses due to the amount of Horde camping the location. I imagine the Horde had it no better wherever they spawned (or was it the same place?). I can't really see how this was in any way conducive to testing.

As it was I didn't do anything other than my own personal spec/gem testing this time but on previous PTRs I have made extensive use of the reporting options for bugs and oddities I've encountered. I don't think there was any special in game feedback/reporting tools on early PTRs so the forum was useful, however now you can bring up a feedback/reporting screen for pretty much any object in game on the PTR so there is less need to use the forum.

If the devs get seen to take player suggestions too often you get a million posts, which basically amount to buff my class, and expectations for changes spirral to unrealistic levels. That said if you don't think the devs read this board and act on the info I doubt you've been reading it for that long. Obviously a lot of stuff that people ask for would annoy plenty of other people, or be tons of work but if the community is nearly unanimous on anything normally it changes.

Potion costs spiralling out of control, only 1 entry level 25 man encounter were both adresssed very soon after huge threads on this forum sprang up, and a bunch of little things like the previously mentioned devastate changes. I'm sure some of these changes would have been made anyway but it happens too often to be complete coincidence.

Obviously they don't do everything that Gurg complains about (although when I see shaman healing at nearly double mine on several fights, I'm not so sure ).

If the devs get seen to take player suggestions too often you get a million posts, which basically amount to buff my class, and expectations for changes spirral to unrealistic levels. That said if you don't think the devs read this board and act on the info I doubt you've been reading it for that long. Obviously a lot of stuff that people ask for would annoy plenty of other people, or be tons of work but if the community is nearly unanimous on anything normally it changes.

Potion costs spiralling out of control, only 1 entry level 25 man encounter were both adresssed very soon after huge threads on this forum sprang up, and a bunch of little things like the previously mentioned devastate changes. I'm sure some of these changes would have been made anyway but it happens too often to be complete coincidence.

Obviously they don't do everything that Gurg complains about (although when I see shaman healing at nearly double mine on several fights, I'm not so sure ).

No matter how much money you throw at a Development cycle, no matter how many QA testers you have - players will figure things out that aren't supposed to happen a certain way, and exploit it to their advantage. The player population is just too large. Developers have accepted this, and seem to roll with the punches pretty well - patching the largest issues, and just slowly limping along with those they can't hotfix and announcing a fix later (see: JoL proc'ing for 400+, wizard oils working in arena if you unequip your weapon, etc.)