Guild Wars 2

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/news/Guild-Wars-2-Forum-Specialists-Program/first#post4600059

I don’t know if anyone has seen this yet, but I know we have a bunch of people here in this forum that are VERY knowledgeable about the lore surrounding the Guild Wars universe. We need those people to become forum specialists. We already have several that are considered “Go-to” people (i.e Konig Des Todes) who need to apply for these. You already do so much awesome and amazing work, and I think that many people would like to see you guys in a more “offical” capacity.

That sounds like a lot of unpaid work. I’m also not a fan of having players selecting or filtering feedback instead of someone either working on the content reading it or someone with a professional background in community relations (and the accountability that comes with that).

Mostly I’m concerned about valuable users who write good posts being consumed by this project and spending their time doing what I assumed was the community team’s job instead of posting enjoyable or informative posts on the forums. I also worry that people with an official (unpaid) position will censor their posts or hold back their views to maintain their privileged position, compromising the candid discussions they are able to participate in without this program (kind of like how an embedded reporter is often considered to be unreliable to be unbiased about the community they are embedded with).

On top of that, rule 2 states they shouldn’t use the position to advance their personal interests but that’s pretty much the primary appeal of the position (one degree closer to the developer’s ears) and it’s naive to think that kind of thing won’t happen (I’m sure it already happens to some extent with professionals at ArenaNet – it’s human nature). I don’t think there are many people in the GW2 forum community that I would trust to fairly filter feedback and highlight discussions without giving light to certain topics more than others based on their own beliefs (or ignoring some outight).

I think are loremaster would benefit ArenaNet most on an Alpha Testing (or QA) team. That would give them advanced access to content possibly early enough to catch lore inconsistencies before it’s too late to change them. That kind of role benefits from lore knowledge without all the flaws of subjectivity. A an example regardless of how you feel about the sylvari race and their perceived prominence in the story, someone thoroughly familiar with the lore would likely have picked up the “first to die” issue in the latest release.

While I can kind of agree, especially in such areas of the game as PvP and WvW, but having at least a couple of people in the lore sub-forum who can keep track of whats going on, related that to the devs would do wonders to help things stay consistant. There are only a few areas that are somewhat controversial, most of the time its questions about why this is that way, or /tinfiol hat speculation. Some times gets shut down, but others remain in a healthy discusssion.

At the very least we do need someone who is able to communicate with the devs about such lore issues, things that are unclear, retconed, etc. While it may be alot of extra work, I think those who would apply would think it a fun challenge.

I most certainly will not be applying, but as little as I like that we’re apparently being asked to do what I thought ANet was already doing, it would at least let us know that the job is being done. This program potentially could make certain ANet here’s our complaints about lore issues (albeit too late to fix them, so it’d be of limited value), and would hopefully see some more posts by Angel, Scott, or whoever is doing the loremaster position there now resolving the small, non-plot-point questions we so often have.

My concern is their request to see “community leadership”- by most standard definitions, I don’t feel ours has leaders. We have people who know what they’re talking about, and have developed a reputation for it, but those also tend to be the people most active in our arguments, which typically would be considered points against leadership.

Even if I wanted to apply it’s for US-residents only. Besides I agree with Shiren, it could lead people stop providing their own commentary and instead developing into Anets speaker.

As a side note: Not sure if you can edit the title of a thread, but it’s “Meister” not “Miester”. “Ei” is pronounced like the english [i], “ie” would be a long [e] like in “seed”.

That’s basically forum moderators with a special (pointlessly) title. I was moderator for Guru/Guru2’s lore forum for a while. It’s a thankless, and sometimes stressful job where you’re painted more as the villain despite maintaining order and trying to make things simple.

Without pay, I’m not interested in starting that up again. And this just sounds like a bad idea to me, player moderation of official forums will give them a spotlight that can easily get to their head, make people think they’re more important than others, etc. etc.

And to be honest, I don’t think a move is really helpful given how terrible the forum organization is. Even the most committed moderators (I will not call them “specialists”) can only make a dent in the mayhem and in all honesty for the lore forum the only help they’d make is to merge like-minded threads together.

All that aside, I’ve had a bad brush with certain members of Anet the past few months due to my rather adamant criticism about their continuous lore continuity errors that continue regardless of pointing out that they’re making them (can I use any more variations of the word continue!?!). As such, I doubt that they’d accept me anyways.

BuddhaKeks.4857:

Even if I wanted to apply it’s for US-residents only. Besides I agree with Shiren, it could lead people stop providing their own commentary and instead developing into Anets speaker.

As a side note: Not sure if you can edit the title of a thread, but it’s “Meister” not “Miester”. “Ei” is pronounced like the english [i], “ie” would be a long [e] like in “seed”.

Yeah, cursed dyslexia….I’ll edit it. Thanks!

Konig Des Todes.2086:

That’s basically forum moderators with a special (pointlessly) title. I was moderator for Guru/Guru2’s lore forum for a while. It’s a thankless, and sometimes stressful job where you’re painted more as the villain despite maintaining order and trying to make things simple.

Without pay, I’m not interested in starting that up again. And this just sounds like a bad idea to me, player moderation of official forums will give them a spotlight that can easily get to their head, make people think they’re more important than others, etc. etc.

And to be honest, I don’t think a move is really helpful given how terrible the forum organization is. Even the most committed moderators (I will not call them “specialists”) can only make a dent in the mayhem and in all honesty for the lore forum the only help they’d make is to merge like-minded threads together.

All that aside, I’ve had a bad brush with certain members of Anet the past few months due to my rather adamant criticism about their continuous lore continuity errors that continue regardless of pointing out that they’re making them (can I use any more variations of the word continue!?!). As such, I doubt that they’d accept me anyways.

Thats really sad. But I get where you are coming from. Either way you have been a great source of information concerning all things lore, and your opinion is highly valued.

It’s actually way more than simply forum moderator.
It’s also asking you to be a forum communicator, which adds a whole new page of stress and work to it. That’s a second job right there. You’d basically be an unpaid spokesperson for Anet.
While it’s voluntarily, this announcement leaves a really, really bad taste in my mouth.

It reminds me of certain MMO publishers that baited their community with their ingame currency (which was like what, 20 bucks?) to do very large amounts of translations they couldn’t be bothered to do themselves anymore due to lack of resources or whatever… which of course would cost them with a professional translator 10x more. However the common person doesn’t know the value of translation work so a lot of people went for it. It’s nothing short of an exploit wrapped up in a gift box. :/

This should be the job of a paid Anet person, not something to push onto the community.

If anything, they can bother to do a voluntary project involving forum members in helper positions or as bridges between community and developers once they’ve got enough of the forum covered by their forum team, not before.
I’m sorry, but this just looks really really bad to me.

Non-US resident here, so I’m already ineligible. :/ I’m more of a General Specialist anyway; you might have seen me post in just about every single forum here.

I wouldn’t mind doing it, and if this was for Guild Wars 1, I’d probably jump on it! But I don’t feel like I know enough about Guild Wars 2 lore to do it. Most of my submissions in this forum are questions, and not answers, so that’s a good sign I don’t know enough. But someone should do it. It’s probably stressful, and people are mean online, but I think it’s a nice idea.

Again, non-US resident, so…

Even without that, though, I don’t think it’s appropriate for a lot of reasons. First, it’s hard to be objective (or, at least, to avoid the accusation of subjectivity) while still informing people on lore issues – as soon as you start trying to tell people why their pet theory is wrong, they’ll often start accusing you of subjectivity (and short of having ArenaNet’s lore bible in your hands, you can’t always be sure they’re wrong, and we’ve seen enough inconsistencies that even that might not help). This gets particularly bad when in a moderator-like position – my practise for a while on the Guru forum was to have another moderator who could step in on any discussion I’m involved in to try to avoid the impression of power abuse, and even then I had plenty of accusations of such even though I tolerated much more when it was directed at me than at anyone else.

More importantly, reading between the lines, I don’t think they’re looking for lore specialists, but specialists on the gameplay aspects. They’re looking for the people who know the meta back to front and who can give a point-by-point description of why warriors are rarely seen in tpvp but considered a must-have for level 40+ fractals (to give one example which may not be current) and so on.

Basically, as someone said above, a layer between the general base and the community reps (who, let’s face it, aren’t experts at all levels of the game – Rubi, for instance, is about as much of a neophyte in tpvp as I am) who can filter out the chaff and the “I haven’t figured out how to counter X please nerf” crybabies and give concrete information on the real issues. As long as they can remain objective and avoid the temptation to buff their preferred professions and beat the others into the ground (or, conversely, overcompensate the other way) it’s probably a great idea – because let’s face it, the people who make the game are generally not the people who have the time to become the absolute best players.

But I don’t think the same thing would be what they’re looking for when it comes to lore people. A similar program might be worthwhile, but I think it would be run under very different lines.

Well my country of birth leaves me ineligible (discrimination! :P )… also… I’m not a lore meister… wish I was though. Also is there much of a need for the a Forum Specialist on the lore forum?

I’d made a thread of my own inquiring about this, before having this thread brought to my attention. Sometimes it’s best to drink all the coffee before posting.

Anyway, here I am now, and am pondering this. I see it as Anet’s attempt to improve interaction with the community, but then I’m a “glass half-full” sort of person. I know the game’s treatment of the lore has been—erratic—but I also know retconning, game mechanics, and budget concerns play a heavy role in a lot of decisions made by game studios.

However, without knowing a little more, I probably won’t apply, at least not yet. As drax says, it would be hard to be an authoritative voice here without “Anet’s lore bible” (have they even got one?) to refer to, and even those are subject to retconning. Suppose the “lore bible” states that the DSD’s name is the Kraken, and at the last minute some dev decides it’s going to be Cthulhu Jr. Imagine the confusion.

Also, like others, I’ve done some moderation and yes, it’s tough. Arguments break out. People who are militant supporters/enemies of some particular aspect of the game are going to bring it into every single conversation whether it belongs there or not. Sleepy forum users are going to make duplicate threads in the Lore forum about the forum specialist program without checking to see if one’s been made yet. It can rattle ya.

So for now, I think I’ll just sit back and see how this transpires. I sincerely hope that it takes off and succeeds, though.

They do have one, but it’s evidently incomplete. I suspect it might focus more on big-picture stuff that we largely don’t know rather than the nitty-gritty that we keep pulling them up on.

CureForLiving.5360:

Is there much of a need for the a Forum Specialist on the lore forum?

If we were able to gather all our thoughts, concerns and questions into one strong spokesperson, yes. I think it would benefit all parties.

It has to be someone who got a certain passion for politics though. And mind you: “speaking on behalf of the people” you don’t necessarily have to be a lore master. If we were able to channel our communication to ArenaNet; decrease range of opinions but increase power – it might increase the number of responses and attention we get back.