Guild Wars 2

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Upcoming-Forum-Changes-to-WvW-Match-ups-Sub-forum/first#post3393146

I guess we made them kinda mad.
Please discuss why you think this is a good/bad idea and what their actual reasons for it are.

Please read:
Although I already know that much anger will be generated by an almost overreacted and (although I’m afraid to say) aggressive/accusing decision by the team I’d like everyone to keep their responses constructive and civilised, but I and I’m sure the team wants to know your real thoughts and opinion. I only hope they dont hold this against anyone here as it benefits everyone.

I will start.
I think its a bad idea because the WvW subthread is a communal tool used to bring server communities together against a common foe. The thread has developed wildly past Arena nets initial expectations, clearly as it has created it own form of micro politics between fundamental posting elements which carry enough weight to change ingame events significantly.

I am greatly displeased at the censorship of the forums as although I do not believe it is my right to demand a place on these forums, I believe it is common courtesy of the hosting company to provide its community and paying customers an effective means to communicate out of game. To which these forums and the subthread related to WvW currently are. Hence by removing such a facility we are being provided with a sub par service, to which has led me to great disgruntlement at both the administration and development of the WvW subforum.

Why’re you hurting our playful banter and communal bonds? I would much enjoy Devon Carters take on this decision and how he thinks it will effect the WvW community, and also why he thinks it has come to this action.

If you cannot afford the resources to moderate your forums, then employ player base assistant moderation for the sub-section. Or even simply cease all moderation and fit the subthread with a +18 rating and waver. Instead of deleting them.

What can be done about this heavy handedness?

~Rob, 8year Guildwars player and concerned forum poster

Update-

The semi-moderated forum website that we’re moving to is:

www.GW2WvW.net

We run it, its pure WvW with no company influence.
Hope to see you there!

It is indeed a good decision.
Especially considering that the match-up threads (which are the ones being removed) were mainly used for flaming and/or abusing people or servers.

Aw. All those guilds self-exiling themselves from the forum did so for nothing, then.

Stupid decision, Anet just trying to say they really dont give a kitten about WvW and trying to drive the community away from their game.

About the match up forum removal. The toxic environment in T1/Gold league match up threads was solely because of leagues/seasons. Players, guilds, servers got very bitter and upset about numerous reasons because of events that took place during seasons. Looking at the difference between ~3 weeks before seasons started vs any thread during there are major differences. Yes, there were a few intense discussions and some bad apples but over all nothing compared to some of the topics that took place during seasons.

Its quite obvious the WvW player base is passionate about this game mode, this “toxic environment” is being created because of the direction WvW is going. Anet has the power to clean it all up by focusing more on player input and creating a more enjoyable WvW experience.

Wait wait….

So:
-Wvw match ups threads
-wvw recruitment
-wvw discussion

Will be removed??? You cant be serious

iRock.7804:

Stupid decision, Anet just trying to say they really dont give a kitten about WvW and trying to drive the community away from their game.

By removing the match-up forum?
How does that even make sense?

People that have actually spent some time in that forum is fully aware about how often there needs to be moderator actions taken due to posts, and is it really a good idea to have them waste time on silly stuff like that rather than focusing on forums with real discussions?

Natronix.9827:

Wait wait….

So:
-Wvw match ups threads
-wvw recruitment
-wvw discussion

Will be removed??? You cant be serious

No.
WvW match-ups threads will be removed. Nothing else.

lordkrall.7241:

iRock.7804:

Stupid decision, Anet just trying to say they really dont give a kitten about WvW and trying to drive the community away from their game.

By removing the match-up forum?
How does that even make sense?

People that have actually spent some time in that forum is fully aware about how often there needs to be moderator actions taken due to posts, and is it really a good idea to have them waste time on silly stuff like that rather than focusing on forums with real discussions?

Natronix.9827:

Wait wait….

So:
-Wvw match ups threads
-wvw recruitment
-wvw discussion

Will be removed??? You cant be serious

No.
WvW match-ups threads will be removed. Nothing else.

Ah ok. Good, serves for nothing positive anyway

so where we transfer guys? Gw2guru?, subreddit will be useless we can’t talk there.
I think Gw2guru will be next best solution, we might need a separete section for wvw match there so we don’t clutter their wvw discussion session

It’s not a bad or good idea. It’s a ignorant idea.

PvP breeds rivalries. Smack talking occurs on the forums, so what. That’s what gets people pumped up to log on and fight. It makes people want to hunt down that guild that claims to be the best.

They thought closing threads, infracting people, and banning them would stop people from trash talking, it didn’t. They think this will stop people? It won’t.

Carebear wars 2

All those T1 bickering threads were because people cared. The fact you don’t see them anymore is because people don’t care anymore.

Let’s remove all the heart and soul from WvW, speed up it’s demise quicker.

Just another bad decision in a long line of bad decisions....

My response from a similar thread.

This is simply an attempt by Anet to reduce workload on CC (Customer Care) team because quite frankly, they’re sick and tired of all of the trash, toxic postings, and outright abusive behavior that those threads devolve into. Most of them can start with good intentions, but they’ve typically turned into the most abusive areas evidenced on the forums.
That said, I’m not in agreement with the decision to outright close any thread that derails, gets troll-baited, etc…it sounds way too easy to get a player’s thread with an opposing view to your own, closed. There are certainly people out there who would do such a thing (hell, they even do it now).
IMO, CC team can’t just strip away the matchup forums without replacing it with some alternative.

Once again Anet shows how far away from reality they are, making yet another bad call regarding WvW and the community. If you didnt know any better you would have thought that GW2 were made by people that never played a pvp mmo mmo before..

Wake the kitten up Anet, you are not doing anything good. If you are serious about this game, listen to your community.

Have people posting in this thread even read the post we are discussion?
Based on many of the post it does seem quite unlikely.

Here are some interesting counter-points to the Anet post:

- The ‘inordinate’ amount of time spent on the forum by staff might have something to do with it seeming to be one of the most active sub-forums on the site, if not the most. Review the concept of proportionality.

- The accusations brought up in the forum were done so due to exploits/hacks which have been ignored for over a year, and likely reported hundreds if not thousands of times. If you ignore it, you expect what to happen?

- A lot of the animosity you observe in the forums is directly related to frustrations within the community about population imbalances you have not addressed, and yet acknowledge as a problem.

To act like you had no hand in how it devolved in your perception, and express disappointment with us……is disappointing, to say the least.

WvW right now is more politic based, server pride, drama etc. The subforum in official forum fits really well. You need this kind of “toxic” to drive WvW. Removing the wvw matchup is yet another bad call on Anet.

It’s not the end of the world though. Alternatively we are going to revive gw2guru forum i guess. Although it show how Anet really care less about WvW. Anet, you’re wrong. The more you screw WvW population, the faster this game going downhill. WvW is the only reason that large mass population still fight on and keep intach with this game.

I personally view the situation as ANET’s own fault and they are oblivious to it.

The over-zealous moderation made a mockery of the importance of an infraction. Is there any active poster that has not received an infraction that made you scratch your head?

The bigger issue is that players have figured out that all you need to do is report any borderline post and not only will the post be removed but the person be given an infraction. Players are using the reporting system as a tool that has nothing to do with reporting inappropriate posts.

Tajz.9826:

WvW right now is more politic based, server pride, drama etc. The subforum in official forum fits really well. You need this kind of “toxic” to drive WvW. Removing the wvw matchup is yet another bad call on Anet.

It’s not the end of the world though. Alternatively we are going to revive gw2guru forum i guess. Although it show how Anet really care less about WvW. Anet, you’re wrong. The more you screw WvW population, the faster this game going downhill. WvW is the only reason that large mass population still fight on and keep intach with this game.

Should probably quote this.

Just slap a 18+ rating on the match-up forum and let it go without moderation or something.

No comment

The funny thing is ANet barely moderates it anyway.

The threads have calmed down since Season 1, which ANet didn’t moderate during at all. So it’s funny they decided now is the best time to deem too unsavoury.

The good thing is that it seems people are starting to care as little about WvW as ANet does. We might not need that forum anyway!

To me it seems like they care less about the fact that it’s toxic per se, and more that the fact that they have to do a lot of moderation work because it’s toxic. (This based on the fact that they suggest we take these discussions elsewhere.)

zoombi.1498:

maybe buygate can pay them to change policy?

Not even being a member of Blackgate, it’s posts like this that bait people into a shouting match, which does nothing but hurt the thread and leave both shouters out of air.

Malchior.5042:

zoombi.1498:

maybe buygate can pay them to change policy?

Not even being a member of Blackgate, it’s posts like this that bait people into a shouting match, which does nothing but hurt the thread and leave both shouters out of air.

What? Posts like that are the the only reason the forums are worth coming to.

Agreed

UnrepentantProcrastinator.7420:

The funny thing is ANet barely moderates it anyway.

The threads have calmed down since Season 1, which ANet didn’t moderate during at all. So it’s funny they decided now is the best time to deem too unsavoury.

The good thing is that it seems people are starting to care as little about WvW as ANet does. We might not need that forum anyway!

OP Here

What I know (I believe and have speculated), please feel free for anyone to correct me:
The moderation is split between Arena net and NCsoft staff, this causes problems within itself as one staff set tend to disregard certain types of posts while the other set runs a more Viacom like system (If you are unaware of Viacom then you can look at websites such as Neopets and Penguin Hotel) which is essentially for children and unsuitable for any adult environment.

Now the Community team got together just before seasons and decided to permanently ban everyone who had totalled up past a certain level of infractions. This was without appeal and within their right of course.

This was their first measure to combat the result of a competitive environment in WvW subthreads. As after all their job isn’t to make the game enjoyable and retain community figures, its to keep everyone in line.

Which is where I believe the fatal flaw in the forum system lies and saddens me greatly. Although staff may turn around and disagree that this isn’t their agenda, it does indeed appear to be the lasting impression and I would indeed like to know the reason for this decision as its evidently unclear if this isn’t what they have been intending for months.

Seasons created competition which I believe was the developers intent, many people enjoyed it and eagerly shook their fist at their competition on the forums. And then they were infracted because of it. Some were suspended. Others banned and the threads locked.
Now, does that make sense? No. What it sounds like is a lack of communication between departments and an inability of flex company policy to encompass a living organism in which the company itself is fuelling.
Rigging the elections and then complaining that they were unfair is simply counter productive, a designer creates the world around him and its been within developments control to work with the community to find a solution to their problems.

I point no fingers, these are just my observations. But I would also like to simply draw everyones attention to the sheer about of views a weekly matchup thread receives in comparison to something like the Discussion subthread or Linksville.
A 5 day thread in matchup absolutely destroys a month old thread in these other subsections, what does that tell me? That tells me someone has made a horrific mistake in trying to gut the core community of the forums. But that is my honest opinion.

Without the hate between guilds and servers we will have nothing to fight for. Its the tears of opposing teams that keep real players in wvw and gw2. Without the matchup forums where do people boost their ego? Next new game maybe? GG anet

the forums are in direct relation to the game. happy well balanced game = pleasant forums….so IMO that’s where the problem lies. wvw is out of balance in so many ways the anger carries over to here.

The censorship Anet is implementing in their forums is sign the game is going bad. When WoW started it, their numbers went down soon after, when AoC started, the numbers went way down, when SW:ToR did the same, they went free to play. I am not sure I’ll stay with a game that manages a community like North Korea; well it’s why I don’t play the above games anymore, I guess you all will be better off without me.

-shrug- I find the posts in the Match-up thread somewhat amusing, but it won’t bother me to see it go. If players want to smack-talk, they’ll find somewhere else to do it, like Reddit or Guru. It’s ANet’s house, so it’s their rules. I don’t think it makes any difference in the long-run if trash talking occurs here or on fansites.

Wow, I’m going to lose my homepage now.

I could prolly build and host something before the new year. Guru is pretty full of ads these days, reddit might be an option but it’s be a tough one to manage. If people are interested i could put something together in fairly short order… We would still need some moderation, but certainly nothing as strict as we have here. It would most likely be IPB based so there could be some cross server logins for the servers that run IPB software (like guru does). Food for thought.

How this will work:

• Anet removes Matchup thread subsection

• Everyone is confused for like 30seconds

• New matchup threads created in WvW Discussion Subthread

• Trolling continues as usual

• Either they ban half of their community or they bring back our subthread and leave us alone.

But I mean, does a game really need dedicated players? Pfft nah lets just get more casuals.

welp, guess they just dont wanna deal with players smack talkin each other in their authoritative piece of internet real estate. and theyre shoving us off to anywhere else that just isnt here.

seems like a bad move. super tight government control is almost never a good thing. people like being rebellious, or ignoring autocrats when other options exist.

i bet post volume gets cut by 50% when this subforum/topics get banned.

IMO all that’s going to happen is that it’ll get shoved into this subforum and the mods will be busy deleting the threads from here…

So anet is finally going with the idea of making wvw finally pve?

Seriously, there is no moderator on forums nor we see them circulating the wvw forums often. Instead of this decision, do you think that name calling and the proofs of other people hacking would simply go away, why havent I seen anet make some sort of remark or stand on wvw hacks? or is it they simply tend to ignore it??

So wait as a community are we going to combat this or just give and and go else where?

We can easily make matchup threads on regular WvW forum like we used to.

Banzie.5248:

So wait as a community are we going to combat this or just give and and go else where?

I’d personally like to ditch the official forums altogether, they are pretty horrible when it comes to functionality. I’m not sure how well guru would handle the stuff that usually goes down in these threads. I think if most of us pack up our toys and leave, this entire section of WvW would be a ghost town, which prolly isn’t a bad thing.

Banzie.5248:

So wait as a community are we going to combat this or just give and and go else where?

What would the PvE community do, who always seem to get their way?
Cry about it and give reasons until they realise we’re annoyed and someone gets a dev response.

If its bad news then we continue to post our threads on the official forums somewhere anyway, then they ban us, because like seriously, lol?

Or if its good news we continue to post our threads on the official forums in a subthread with a relevant title.

Hmm I need to post this post btw or you guys cant see the previous page. Dont look at me like that, I didnt code these forums. They break ok.

Huge mistake that actually hurts Anet. People will likely go elsewhere (e.g. revive the almost completely dead guildwars2guru) for their foruming needs … that means a space that Anet’s censors can’t control.

Now Anet may not care too much about the small (relative to PvE) population of WvW players, but this could lead PvE players going outside of these forums as well. Considering how much censorship we see in the official forums — censorship that will not be as possible outside of the official site — this may end up as a negative for Anet.

This is a good opportunity for an outside site to attract some traffic and make some advertising money.

BirdSong.2541:

Banzie.5248:

So wait as a community are we going to combat this or just give and and go else where?

What would the PvE community do, who always seem to get their way?
Cry about it and give reasons until they realise we’re annoyed and someone gets a dev response.

If its bad news then we continue to post our threads on the official forums somewhere anyway, then they ban us, because like seriously, lol?

Or if its good news we continue to post our threads on the official forums in a subthread with a relevant title.

They’ll most likely keep tossing around demerits and the like. They’d be better off just keeping it the way it is and just turn a blind eye to it, or post some disclaimer on how the typical responses are “colorful” and they don’t moderate it. I’m pretty sure they don’t intend on just letting people move the convo to the wvw discussion section.

No one should be surprised it came to this. This is quite possibly the heaviest handed moderation team I’ve come across anywhere. Be that gaming, hobby, or even political forums. If people have actually read the “code of conduct” for the forums it’s pretty clear that they envison something 180 degrees removed from the typical competitive gaming community.

When a gaming company censors your posts, bans and/or suspends people for in-game trash talking, and everything else they’ve done that flies directly in the face of conventional player vs. player community idiology you have to know it’s not going to end well.

Good call.

Whoever calls this censorship must remember that the so-called freedom of speech is not a “I can say whatever I want, however I want and whenever I want” right, it has boundaries and that sub-forum was clearly trespassing most of them.

(As most forums, but this is an official gateway for Anet too, and having that sub-forum was hurting their image more than helping it. Just deal with it, and take the circlejerks elsewhere, its that simple)

Finally. Match up threads are a waste of moderation. Better if they are on an independent website.

Although the threads were full of trolling and drama, it was a pretty nice place for server communities to communicate with their opponents. I have no interest in registering on a community forum where anyone can create an account and purposely troll. Kinda hoping ArenaNet find an alternate solution for moderation and maybe set clearer guidelines on what should be posted.

Looks like this move can be chalked up as another massive failure to add to the growing list.

Simply stop using the forms and stick to reddit, or Guru or wherever. Going even slightly off topic can result in an infraction. There are a lot of rules to follow if you dislike them then it’s best to not even bother.

I am not saying I approve of name calling or the such but these forums feel a lot more restricted than many other MMO boards in the past. Just my opinion on the matter.

Instead of removal just moderate it better.

edit: As a player and a fan of this game, it feels like any time something is broken or not working the solution is to remove it. In game, in the forums, wherever. Why is this always the solution?