Official forums for Guild Wars 2?

DISCLAIMER: By no means do I wish to imply that Guru (and other unofficial forums) are doing a bad job, on the contrary, it's a miracle that they're still putting up with the incessant barrage of whining (to which I happily contribute), year after year.

Kudos.



This said, with Guild Wars 2 on the front lawn (not quite on the doorstep yet), I'd like to raise the question (again, I suppose) whether ArenaNet should establish an official forum by the time of the sequel's release.

The situation, as I see it, is as follows:



Pros:

• An official forum would be a direct connection between the customers (us) and the company (ArenaNet), while I'm sure it wouldn't mean the death of unofficial forums (just look at the unofficial Wiki, still going very strong).
  
  Official forums could also include an official auction house, solving this age-old problem without having to implement a real in-game auctioning system or relying on third party auction websites. Ideally, the game and the auction house could become linked, much like the /help command is linked to the Official Wiki. Heck, if we're allowed to keep on dreaming: an in-game browser could be implemented. But I'm going a little off-topic here.
  
  If anything, an official forum would give ArenaNet's PR department a more "professional" appearance and would save the community relations people a lot of time reading through many, many forums.

Noobs: ...sorry, I meant Cons:

• ...which leads us immediately to the problem that community relations people will have to wade through many, many, many more threads on one single forum to gather the same amount of information that they now obtain from many different forums.
  
  The problem of infrastructure also comes to mind. Having no official forum probably comes with the "No Monthly Fee" package or is simply not something ArenaNet wishes to invest time and man power in (Wild Blow in the dark here, I have no idea how ArenaNet's business model works).
  
  Both of these problems could be solved to some degree by having community-driven moderation. To avoid the inevitable power-tripping ("noob i r mod on teh anet forum i ban u"), it could operate using a digg-like system, with good threads getting bumped by the community and bad ones buried (instead of the classical system where threads get bumped for being active).

My conclusion:

I obviously believe we need an official forum. I wouldn't start a thread about it if I thought otherwise.

The community has proven that it can be an inconsolable crybaby as well as an extremely reliable source of information and constructive criticism. The Official Wiki, which is mostly made up of user-provided content, is the prime example of the latter.

There are numerous problems to be solved (mainly infrastructural), but these can be solved by embracing novel approaches to user-controlled content moderation (as I said, have a look at how digg handles things).

Sure, without some goodwill it could all be for nothing faster than you can say "Web 2.0", but hey, it's a brave new world.



All in all, I think it would work in everyone's advantage, including the unofficial forums. These would become more of a meeting place for people to share ideas rather than a speaker's corner where everyone tries his best to shout hard enough to be heard by ArenaNet.



What say you?

Eh.

Maybe a technical forum, but other than that no. The forums would be filled with so much shit that it would take ages to dig through it all and get through the actual concerns.

Nah, the official Wiki will do just as well.

Don't have a strong opinion one way or another about an official GW2 forum since I don't particularly care about the game, but regardless I would say it'd be nice to have a separate GW2 forum here on guru to keep the GW2 speculation from cluttering up the GW1 fora.

Yes, but this is where a digg-like system would help tremendously.

"Shit" would disappear very fast while constructive threads would be bumped for quality, rather than activity.

This also saves quite a bit of actual moderation (although real people moderating will always be needed to some degree).



I find the Wikimedia software to be extremely bad for running an actual forum. It was never designed for such a purpose.

Just have a look at this:

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/User_...iah_Cartwright

I agree there should be an offical forum, even though i love this one!

An offical forums links EVERYONE who uses a forum together, so instead of all the forum users being spread among 3 or 4 like they are now, they are all linked, meaning that everything is a lot more efficient, suggested ideas tweaked etc.

The hardest bit about having a offical form is of course the moderating, if it wasn't for that i would question why there isn't one already.

A major problem the (sorry to do this) WoW forums have is that on the weekdays everything is fine but on the weekends when the offical mods are not online everything can go a bit crazy until the mods are back and bannings begin.

I agree there should be offical forums, no doubt about that, and that maybe the moderators could be the ones from the already existing amazing unofficial forums that already exist.

Well what if people start "dig"ing shit? The threads on the WoW forums are usually the ones that have the biggest flamefests and/or are the most pointless, do I don't think that even that would work.

People will still want to make fan forums though, so that won't work as well in theory.

I don't think Anet should waste their time and money making an official forum. It just doesn't seem like a good idea when places like guru will probably just do a better job.

Now im not saying guru would die but unofficial wiki lives because its got so much more content and better information then official wiki not to mention pvxwiki.

I still would love to see official forums it would mean there would be one big forum rather then 2 or 3 smaller ones.

/notsigned. It would be one giant cesspool of bitch. Gross....

Indeed.

12 chars

Still, if threads are sorted by quality instead of activity, a pointless flamefest could get plenty of bad ratings and move off the front page.

If a flamefest does turn into a megathread on the front page, it will be because people give it a good rating, not because it's active. A good example would be the ongoing discussion concerning Ursan Blessing, where many people have different opinions on the matter and it often does turn into a flamefest, although the argument is constructive.

But, as always, there needs to be some goodwill involved. When I see what the community has accomplished with the Wikis, I do hold some hope.

Neg, and Anet has no interest in doing so.

I would have to agree, I think official forums would be a good idea. While there seems to be a lot of flaming and a lot of immaturity, overall I can't see any official forums that Anet would put together being any worse than what we have on the fansite forums.

I think the pros outweigh the cons. While it might be the biggest cesspool of complaint the internet has ever seen, it would simply be all the fansite forums wrapped into one, so we would be able to look at all the complaints without having to go to three or four different sites.

And... What cost is there to operate a forum? The multigaming componenet of my guild has a set of forums, of which I am a moderator on, and there is no cost incured. The site administrator is the leader of the group, and the server owner is a friend of his so we get our services for free. However, it is still applicable to Arenanet. Arenanet already has servers and probably a huge load of bandwidth, so it's not like they would need to upgrade those. Heck, it would probably be cheaper and more effective for them becuase they would only have to pay Gaile and Andrew to visit one forum for 2-3 hours as opposed to three or four forums for 5+ hours.

I'm not terribly worried about community driven moderator abuse either; if people are having problems with a moderator they report them to an admin (hopefully a paid community relations person from Anet) and the moderator gets their power stripped and/or banned from the forum.

And, by the way, I love the idea of the integrated auction system like GWGuru has being implimented and possibly integrated into the game.

I am all for official forums.

Sure, we know from other games that their official forums suck big time, too. But bitching and a in general very negative tone is also present on the current fan forums. I am also against too much fan-control over forums, most mods are often from the same guilds and same stock, does not always work out well.

and the difference here is?

As a player I wouldn't care either way, although for their sake I think their policy of just not having one is the right choice. A browser-based auction house is no replacement for an in-game one though.

/agreed
OP /not signed

Wiki should fill that need for information.

The reason there are no official forums is that ArenaNet has to pay moderators for the forums.

Imagine Guru, with 10x people.

Obviously ArenaNet can't fit that into their budget.