Guild Wars 2

I think it would make sense if there could be a separate symbol letting us know when a dev has actually opened up a thread to read its contents.

Arenanet says they read the forums but it’s very hard to believe when they hardly have any communication with the playerbase on it.

Currently, any threads that have a dev comment on it get marked with a big red symbol. Although they are rare, they let the forum-goers know that this thread has sparked the interest of the dev team.

I think this would help improve relations with the community, showing that the Anet, although rarely ever responding, do actually read most of the threads on the forums.

Any thoughts?

maybe. But I suspect that the Devs themselves don’t spend much time reading the forums. I think it’s more likely Ms Gray reads and passes things along, and maybe the moderators do also.

I vote a hard no. I know there will be an immediate “Oh you read it, but don’t want to comment!!”. I think Gaile reads most of everything. There just isn’t a reason to have an official response to everything.

shadowpass.4236:

Arenanet says they read the forums but it’s very hard to believe when they hardly have any communication with the playerbase on it.

I think that’s a personal issue that you’re having trusting ANet. The evidence is pretty strong that they read many more threads than they comment on.

Even if ANet agreed that it would be worth marking threads a ‘read’, there are further problems:

• The software is 3rd party, proprietary. They don’t have a budget to change to new software (and they don’t think it would be a good idea to divert from other budgets to make it happen).
• Most skeptics wouldn’t take it seriously. A subset would speculate that someone was given a dev tag just to go around marking posts and folks would say, “we can’t believe that the posts are being read, because ANet didn’t comment.”

MoarChaos.8320:

I vote a hard no. I know there will be an immediate “Oh you read it, but don’t want to comment!!”. I think Gaile reads most of everything. There just isn’t a reason to have an official response to everything.

This ^

And “some other thread about X was read but not my thread on Y. That proves ANet doesn’t care about Y.” Or. “They’ve read threads on Y but they never do anything about Y. That proves ANet doesn’t care about Y”

Just a flesh wound.3589:

MoarChaos.8320:

I vote a hard no. I know there will be an immediate “Oh you read it, but don’t want to comment!!”. I think Gaile reads most of everything. There just isn’t a reason to have an official response to everything.

This ^

And “some other thread about X was read but not my thread on Y. That proves ANet doesn’t care about Y.” Or. “They’ve read threads on Y but they never do anything about Y. That proves ANet doesn’t care about Y”

Yes, well said (and better written than what I wrote).