Guild Wars 2

I was watching a recent gamebreaker.tv video and they were discussing the ‘Halloween Chest’ debacle, and they happened to comment on the number of replies and views on a specfic thread.

And I thought, hold on, those numbers are not truely reflective of the issue. The problem is they include anyone just browsing, and anyone who replies, regardless of what they say/how they stand on the issue.

Thats a problem in general for this forum, we have no way of showing our feelings, or how much we agree with or disagree with the post. Instead by simply commenting on a thread regardless of the content, that thread appears to be ‘popular’.

For instance if I made a thread with the title ‘I hate GW2’ could have 500 views, 49 replies saying, ‘I disagree, I love it’ and 1 person saying ‘Yeah I hate GW2’, but it would appear to anyone skipping over that the thread was negative and had support.

Im not against people posting real problems by any means, but I am tired of logging in to the forum, and seeing the titles of all threads negative at the top, and if I want to add my voice, for or usually against, it simply bumps the thread back to the top!

It would be nice to see some kind of rating, so I can avoid troll posts

I agree that a vote option could provide additional feedback, but it would be abused very fast.

For example: if you don’t like a post now, you have to argue against it.
people than have a chnace to take your arguments for what they are: founded or not.

With a downvote option I would see many just hit that button, no arguments given.

This goes for positive posters as well, this game has a rather agressive group of white knights who would downvote even the post i’m making now if it smelled of critising the game.

About that article:

it’s a mistake if they count each post as a supportive post of the issue discussed. That is their mistake if they don’t distinguish.

But consider this as well: if a topic is so controversial that it draws so many posts and arguments, than that by itself is a clear sign that it’s considered important by both sides.

This forum is feedback for the developpers, when negative topics get so much attention, they can use that to improve the game where needed.
Don’t forget that this is a simple business: we are the customers, and they try to keep us interested in buying future content.
They have to take floads of negative posts serious, even if other players don’t agree with the complaints.

I’m more in favour of discussing things, with arguments, than introducing a voting system if it can be too easiliy abused (from both sides…)

But if the voting system is merely a way to express an opinion, without it having any effect on the posts itself, than I don’t mind.

I think if the +1 and ignore poster features actually worked, they would be enough. I think down-voting isn’t useful unless you have a crowd-moderated site like slashdot. I would prefer to not see posts by the folks that can’t stop beating the dead horse, and by the folks that can’t stop complaining about the dead horses getting beaten, but I don’t think that should affect the visibility of those posts for everyone.

Sometimes I don’t have anything to add to the discussion other than, “I like this idea”, and I’m not going to clog up the forums with a “me too” post, so I find the concept of a +1 useful. I wish it worked more similarly to the D3 forums, where when I’m logged in I can see “this post is highly rated” instead of just that I have rated it.