The new forum format

The new forum format will succeed in doing two things. It will strongly bias the forum to "popular" ideas. Also, it will uplift posts that are complimentary to ANET.That will certainly make the experience of the forums more positive for ANET employees.

This comes at a price though. The purpose of a forum is to allow players to "speak truth to power." Under the present format, that ability is much reduced. Ignoring or "down voting" negatives will not make them go away.In the words of Ventari "Never leave a wrong to ripen into evil or sorrow."

@Ithilwen.1529 said:The new forum format will succeed in doing two things. It will strongly bias the forum to "popular" ideas. Also, it will uplift posts that are complimentary to ANET.That will certainly make the experience of the forums more positive for ANET employees.

May I know the basis of your assertion? Unlike Reddit or the official League of Legends forums, the Thumbs Up/Down feature does not reorder posts. Posts also do not get culled due to excessive Thumbs Down. Lastly, what is the basis of your assumption that the new forum features will necessarily "uplift posts that are complimentary to ANET." Have you seen similar forums that have flipped overnight to become one that only shows positive comments towards the developers after implementing a similar system?

This is my impression. It is based primarily on the fact that the Reddit forums got far more dev response than the old forums. Helseth publicly complained that his suggestions vis-à-vis PVP were down voted and buried on the Reddit forum.

@Ithilwen.1529 said:This is my impression. It is based primarily on the fact that the Reddit forums got far more dev response than the old forums. Helseth publicly complained that his suggestions vis-à-vis PVP were down voted and buried on the Reddit forum.

It's not a "fact" that there were more dev responses on Reddit than in the old forums. Sometimes the forums get more attention & sometimes it's Reddit. A lot of the dev responses there are to "fluff", i.e. the equivalent of "liking" another cute kitten post.

Helseth getting buried on Reddit has more to do with Helseth's rhetoric than on the specific format or website. Regardless, because of his stature, I'm sure folks on the PvP team will sometimes look up his posts, so it doesn't really matter if they move off of r/guildwars2 quickly. (I'm mostly sure because that's what I do from time to time, even though I don't PvP competitively -- I still learn from reading his highly-opinionated, egocentric, hyperbolic posts.)

Not only that, but on these forums, down-voting nor up-voting has any influence on where a thread ends up. No one can 'bury' a thread or post by down-voting it. The only way to bury a post/thread is to ignore it, just like on the old forums.

@Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:Not only that, but on these forums, down-voting nor up-voting has any influence on where a thread ends up. No one can 'bury' a thread or post by down-voting it. The only way to bury a post/thread is to ignore it, just like on the old forums.

I think that's what happens on the BattleNet forums, if you did downvote something enough, the person(s) comment/thread would get buried or unhighlighted when you clicked the article.

I don't think this system has been added here as it is a different forum; and I've yet to see threads buried due to massive downvoting.

We could go to town with the down votes and see what happens. I volunteer this post! Failing that, the opening post already has four so we can keep going there. I don't think anything will happen, though. The guy who has trouble fighting thieves with his Guardian has been down voted to hell and that thread is still going.

Edit: nice to see kitten is still here.

@Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:Not only that, but on these forums, down-voting nor up-voting has any influence on where a thread ends up. No one can 'bury' a thread or post by down-voting it. The only way to bury a post/thread is to ignore it, just like on the old forums.

Exactly this. The forums isn't like reddit where the most up-voted posts go high up and the down-voted ones disappear

@"Illconceived Was Na.9781" said:It's not a "fact" that there were more dev responses on Reddit than in the old forums. Sometimes the forums get more attention & sometimes it's Reddit. A lot of the dev responses there are to "fluff", i.e. the equivalent of "liking" another cute kitten post.

The devs really only started using reddit since HoT, at which point they did start to use reddit more than the forums. Not only do they post more on reddit, but there are also more devs posting there. It's not surprising considering they can post unofficially, whereas here they have to act accordingly, plus posting anywhere else is better for advertising. As for fluff, yes that's a lot of their responses on reddit, but that's also keeping up appearances, whereas the equivalent here is them locking posts.

I cache both the forums and reddit, here's some numbers I compiled a few months ago.

@Healix.5819 said:

@"Illconceived Was Na.9781" said:It's not a "fact" that there were more dev responses on Reddit than in the old forums. Sometimes the forums get more attention & sometimes it's Reddit. A lot of the dev responses there are to "fluff", i.e. the equivalent of "liking" another cute kitten post.

I believe what you are checking there includes the "Ask Me Anything" seasons they do on Reddit which naturally have loads of developer posts, from multiple different developers as well. And an AMA can't possibly happen on the forums unfortunately. I wonder how reddit posts would compare to the forum posts if you removed the AMA threads.

@maddoctor.2738 said:I wonder how reddit posts would compare to the forum posts if you removed the AMA threads.

Here's the last AMAs done by Mike-OBrien-ArenaNet with the number of ArenaNet posts:

105, 2017-07-25: One Path Ends158, 2017-05-02: Flashpoint173, 2017-02-08: The Head of the Snake159, 2016-11-21: A Crack in the Ice171, 2016-09-20: Rising Flames217, 2016-07-26: Out of the Shadows211, 2016-04-19: Spring Quarterly Update309, 2016-03-04: I'm Mike O'Brien, AMA!

That pretty much covers the difference, since reddit posts are roughly 300 more per quarter.

It is possible that I misunderstood the new format. I'll wait and see how it turns out.