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This site needs a GW sub forum under the discussion section. There are several recurring thread topics that constantly keep popping up and the same old tired arguments are trotted out over and over and over and over again.

These threads do not really contribute to discussion in a meaningful way and generate a lot of negativity that new gamers find perplexing and off putting. I ask the mods this question, Would a GW subforum be good or bad for the Dakka community?

I think it would be good because:

1 It would keep a lot of spammy threads in one place and not dilute the other threads in the discussion section

2 There are people with strong pro and anti opinions about GW and there is a hell of a lot of trolling, innuendo and insults in the threads that violate the Dakka rules. There are more than a few posters that just blatantly troll and insult one another but their posts are never deleted, I suppose because the proliferation of these posts make them hard to moderate among all the other heavy traffic the site has.

3 More importantly it would lead people to frame their discussion threads a little bit more intelligently instead of the knee jerk reaction GW is evil, GW is dying, every time their is some little tidbit of news about GW

4 It would give the GW haters a place to battle the so called white knights in a place that is in not quite so prominent a place in the Dakka hierarchy. At the same time it would help prevent new users from being alienated from wargaming. New users want useful information and all the bitterness and bile that people spew on about increases the negativity of Dakka. Sure their are a lot of policies that we disagree with but the level of vitriol is just seriously out of whack with reality.

Many of the people that are strident critics of GW have self identified as not even playing GW games anymore, they are just embittered former fans that have left the game.


Therefore I suggest a GW General Discussion subforum that has pinned threads for the following topics:

GW Pricing

White Dwarf criticism and review

GW Intellectual Property enforcement and Infringement

GW Retail, Wholesale & Distribution Policies

GW Financial News and Analysis

The GW Sky Is Falling: News and Opinion Heralding the Imminent Death of GW

JWhex wrote:
1 It would keep a lot of spammy threads in one place and not dilute the other threads in the discussion section

We see this sort of claim for just about every topic that people want a sub-forum for. Ultimately, if you're seeing topics that you don't want to read, it's not too hard to just not open those threads.

2 There are people with strong pro and anti opinions about GW and there is a hell of a lot of trolling, innuendo and insults in the threads that violate the Dakka rules. There are more than a few posters that just blatantly troll and insult one another but their posts are never deleted, I suppose because the proliferation of these posts make them hard to moderate among all the other heavy traffic the site has.

The moderators don't read every thread. Even if they have checked in on or posted in a thread to begin with, they're not necessarily going to see later posts in that thread unless someone reports them. If you see posts that break the rules, the answer is to report them so that they can be dealt with as appropriate.
If a post breaks the site's rules, it will be just as rules-breaking in a subforum.

3 More importantly it would lead people to frame their discussion threads a little bit more intelligently instead of the knee jerk reaction GW is evil, GW is dying, every time their is some little tidbit of news about GW

I'm not seeing how having posts in a different section would encourage people to think harder about what they are posting.

4 It would give the GW haters a place to battle the so called white knights in a place that is in not quite so prominent a place in the Dakka hierarchy. At the same time it would help prevent new users from being alienated from wargaming. New users want useful information and all the bitterness and bile that people spew on about increases the negativity of Dakka. Sure their are a lot of policies that we disagree with but the level of vitriol is just seriously out of whack with reality.

If a large enough number of people have issues with GW for it to be a big enough problem to warrant setting up an entire sub-forum for it, you don't think that's the sort of thing it would be useful for new gamers to know about before they get too set on one particular system?

Not liking GW does not equal not liking wargaming.

A stickied thread might be better, but they do vary wildly in topic. I don't think any more subforums are needed.

JWhex wrote:

I think it would be good because:

1 It would keep a lot of spammy threads in one place and not dilute the other threads in the discussion section

Most of your post is already covered above by insaniak so I'll just address this minor point. You can't force people to use the scroll buttons on their mouse or keyboard nor the search function and some people simply won't look anywhere beyond the initial screen they see when posting. YMDC will always have some people asking the same rules questions despite concrete answers for that exact question posted the week before, someone in the US or Canada will always accidentally select Australian prices and think the mother of all price raises happened, people who got dinged on sportmanship will post whiney thread about how it's the most evil thing in the world, and customers who just recently took off their rose colored glasses and started disliking GW will think that the survival of the company depends on their own private patronage of it and therefore post about its impending doom. If you see a spammy thread, find the old one and include the link to it your report of the thread.

I've been looking at some other gaming websites the past couple of days and too many subforums is a REALLY bad thing, in my mind.

It just fragments the population and seems to really diminish the amount of cross-pollination of discussion.

EG, if I just lived in a GW sub-forum, the chances of my finding out about mantic might have decreased a fair bit. However, I would also have never found out about a load of other stuff like Raging Heroes, or All Quiet on the Martian Front.

For all the people who want more forums, I suggest you check out Bell of Lost Souls and Warseer's forums. I'm not badmouthing either site, they're both great... but I think the level of subforumming they have done has seriously hampered their navigability. Seriously, look at them both, and ask - is this layout better than Dakka? In my opinion, it is not.

I wish we had a subforums where people could keep the same spammy requests about a GW subforum so that I don't have to look at them...

Why would you expect people to search and see if an anti-GW thread already exists when you didn't search for the "we need an anti-GW" thread

 d-usa wrote:
I wish we had a subforums where people could keep the same spammy requests about a GW subforum so that I don't have to look at them...

When enough people request something, does it become less of a desired feature?

Why would you expect people to search and see if an anti-GW thread already exists when you didn't search for the "we need an anti-GW" thread

I gotta agree with this. We can't even get people to read the stickies at the top of subforums.

We have had a few people request special forums. I was one of them in the past for the Infinity sub-forum.

But I think that there is a pretty good difference between a group of people going "we are really passionate about something, can we get our own dedicated sub-forum" and then helping to build the traffic that goes there and "We are tired of looking at X, please make it go away in a sub-forum".

 daedalus wrote:
When enough people request something, does it become less of a desired feature?

It's more that the number of people requesting a sub-forum is not one of the more important criteria when determining if one is needed. It's more about number of posts and traffic than how much noise people make about it.

 insaniak wrote:

 daedalus wrote:
When enough people request something, does it become less of a desired feature?

It's more that the number of people requesting a sub-forum is not one of the more important criteria when determining if one is needed. It's more about number of posts and traffic than how much noise people make about it.

Don't get me wrong, I wasn't trying to challenge the mod say on this. I understand the circumstances, and, even if the mods acquiesced on this, there's no guarantee anyone would actually USE it. Willfully dumping your post into the hate tank, anti-gw forum, complaint forum, or whatever you want to call it does kind of undermine the legitimacy of your claim.

I see the same type of threads come up. It reminds me to take a break from looking at the forum and go outside for a walk. Except the yearly price increase one. That one is my favorite.

I want GW to do sth. positive so we could get a "Thanks GW! thread going :(

 Sigvatr wrote:
I want GW to do sth. positive so we could get a "Thanks GW! thread going :(

They have.

People complained about how out of date their armies were. They started providing more regular codex and faq updates. People complained that they were shoveling content.

People complained about pewter models. They invented Finecast. People (rightfully, this time) complained about quality. They improved quality. People continued complaining, though the joke is officially stale enough to make it to the late show. They started making plastic character kits. People complained about the price.

They're damned if they do, damned if they don't.

 daedalus wrote:
People complained about how out of date their armies were. They started providing more regular codex and faq updates. People complained that they were shoveling content.

note that the complaints started when the Dark Angels codex, which had supposedly been finished for a year, was released alongside a 14-volume compendium of errata...

People complained about pewter models. They invented Finecast. People (rightfully, this time) complained about quality. They improved quality. People continued complaining, though the joke is officially stale enough to make it to the late show. They started making plastic character kits. People complained about the price.

They're damned if they do, damned if they don't.

This isn't a case of 'damned if they do, damned if they don't'... it's a case of 'damned if they produce something crap, damned if they replace it with something else crap...'

It's worth noting though that complaints tend to be directly proportional to customer perception of a company. A company that is generally well regarded by their customer base will tend to be cut a lot more slack. We see this with Privateer Press, and a lot of the smaller companies that have popped up over the last 5 years or so.

GW tends to ignore this. They've burnt a lot of bridges in the last few years, and have tried very hard to shut down any avenue for customers to actually feel like they are communicating with the company... and so people get more cranky about every negative thing that they see. At this point, they're going to continue to get escalating complaints until they do something to fix that customer perception of them.

I think it is also a case of having been around for longer. And, of course, GW has always gotten this kind of attention.

Give PP 20 more years and we'll be there.