Server Specific Forum Information Distribution

[Kevin]

The philosophy of this site is not a guild site and I think pretty much everyone has a solid understanding of that and appreciates the reasoning behind it. I don't want to revist a bunch of what occured when some of the in game guild structure changes happened on Stormrage. A lot of this information isn't necessarily guild specific but it isn't strategy specific and it's a bit more in depth than just a hey wanna go to uldaman at 7 server time on Stormrage. The server guilds are also helpful when considering organization of the information. So I'm gonna mention guilds but it is really more server specific though, the guilds just feel like a convient way to do some of it. This post is gonna get long and I'll do my best to organize it for readability.

What information?
Since the game itself lacks mechanisms for many information distribution related things and since Stormrage and Terenas have a meaningful guild/Lurker populations, I've started to wonder about a way to use the forums to provide Lurkers with some guild/server specific information and if we want to do this. This has come about because of comments that happen in guild chat and in some threads in the Crossroads forum. My personal preference is that everything that I'm going to discuss here would have some in game mechanism to handle it, but I doubt I'll see in game stuff for any of it, even if they put in guild housing and even then you wouldn't be able to get the information to non guilded members.

A thread was already made about what quests and such do you need on Stormrage. The intent was mainly for high level 5 man content as I read it, and I liked the idea. There was a further suggestions that maybe this could be a stickied thread and people would only post in it once and update as things happen. I liked that idea as well, and things like that are what I'm getting after with this post. Organizing information to make it easier for forum goers to hook-up or help each other out.

There was some crafting discussion going on on Stormrage last night. We are becoming a pretty self sustaining group as far as crafting goes. Guild chat works quite well if someone needs some odds and ends items for crafting. However it came up that there are guild members who are hording lots of rarer crafting components that they don't need anymore or will never need because their professions don't use them. They asked for a list from people of what stuff they were looking for so they could ship it out or keep an eye out etc. Quite a few lurkers do hold onto lots of crafting stuff and are heppy to freely move it around. Several of us have our own personal hand written or electronic lists of this person can use leather or herbs, etc. But there isn't a good way to organize this information in game. So this is another type of information that I'm starting to think might be good to have on the forums.

Specialty professions is another area where better organization of information would be nice. Many of us put this in our public notes, however with limited space there and the desire/need to have the forum handle in that space too, it is inefficient to search. It also means that unless they are maintaining the information on their own non guild members won't know about it. We would either need to standardize format on the public note or have the information organized out of game. Knowing that, for example, the character Hykim is the only Tribal leatherworker would let you know that might be a good place to send spare ironfeathers and who to ask if you find a pattern drop that has requires tribal leatherworking on it, or who to contact if want to comission some tribal leather items. Forum information could potentially include a list of rare ingreidients and formulas/patterns that you are still looking for.

I don't think we would want or need information on what an armorsmith or a macecrafter or an elemental leatherworker could make, most of that is easy to find on other site lists. The exception would be items that are commonly wanted and that are in the range for a crafter to make and get skill-ups from. This is why I made my post about mithril spurs. They are commonly wanted and since I'm getting skill-ups from making them it seemed like a nice win win situation. Just mentioning it in guild chat isn't going to get the information out to all the players who may want them. A more formal thread would allow me to indicate when they go green or gray for me and if there is another smith who has the recipe as an orange as yellow people could see that and it would allow them to know it's better to contact them for the item as it helps that person out more. The game for me is more when I get to integrate crafting into it (I still wish there was a lot more crafting options), and it gets even better when I can craft and help out a fellow lurker.

How can you use the forums for this stuff?
So now that I've given examples of the type of information I'm talking about I'm going to get into the organization and presentation discussion. I see a couple of options but I'm not sure I can fully evaluate if they may be the first step onto a slippery slope. I don't want us to be a guild site I don't want to see a lot of guild specific stuff. I don't want the site over run with help me with this quest, I can make this item. However part of the enjoyment of the game is building and helping the community. I get a warm fuzzy when I make mithril spurs for a stranger, I get a much bigger warm fuzzy when I make mithril spurs for a fellow lurker. I just want a way to better organize and present information that can help enhance enjoyment of Lurkers in playing the game.

So as I see it there are a couple of ways to set things up. One is to have a few sticky threads in the Crossroads set-up with specific content and structure requirements that can be discussed in the this thread (or other threads). I liked LochnarITB's post on how to improve the utility of the thread about what people needed for quests. I like the idea of organizing and sharing that type of content better. It's just a list of information that other Lurkers can use to help them get to together and play with other lurkers. A slightly more formal declaration of the content and usage of that thread and sticky status takes care of it. Similar things can be done for the crafting related threads, we have some discussion threads we figure out what we want and the threads to hold that information are created and stickied.

The other option is server specific forums. Doing that we could be looser on what types of stuff are posted on those, it would offload the admittedly currently light load, or posts about meetings for instances and raids. It could contain sticky threads about the information I have discussed already. It has the advantage of better organization. It has the disadvantage of more maintenance, how to decide what servers get their own forums and potentially puts a foot on a slippery slope.

Of course I would like to see more threads in the Crossroads and strategy forums about "Hey lets go and test rage generation, here is my planned experiment." Or "Looking for data to find out if higher level seal of command procs more often, this is how you can help me get it." I'm too much of a player of the game to think about some of this stuff, but some of it is stuff that I want to know and it is the type of information that drew me to this site for D2.

So I'd like to discuss what types of information we think it would be good to share and how we could best do that. I didn't list all of the information I've been thinking about, just some of. Threaded view should make it nice to have run downs on what we think would be good for crafters or quests or items. I'm just trying to get the ball rolling. I will probably respond to myself with more specific ideas about things I've already touched on.

[LochnarITB]

I think that we do need to establish a good way to share our needs and wants. I realize people don't want the formality of a dedicated site and we can't make the LL into a guild site, but we do need to find some way to let others know what we can do and what we need. All too often, we see/make posts of "does anyone want xxxx" (where the "xxxx" might be anything, including things like "this stack of felcloth taking up bank space", "me to transmute an arcanite before I sell it" or "to 5 man MC with me") only to be met with the sound of crickets. The only players that have been given the opportunity to accept are those online at the moment and the opportunity is lost as the player will probably then go and sell the item or run off to an alt for questing.

If we can't find a way to accomplish this here, we should consider a site where we can provide a dedicated private forum solely for the purpose of sharing questing and item/crafting requests. We wouldn't want to take any discussion away from the LL, just the kind of guild matters that Bliz should be providing through guild facilities.

[Bolty]

This is Mongo's policy to set, of course, so I leave the decision to him...

That being said, I think it's not a terrifically bad idea to have server forums. Stormrage could really use one. But the problem is, how do you determine what server gets a forum? What's the criteria? If Stormrage gets a server, should Terenas? Cenarion Circle? Tichondrius? There's no point setting up a forum that will be dead 95% of the time. So what's the cutoff of activity level? And who "runs" those forums? Someone needs to, because disagreements will break out (I was involved in one tonight and someone left the guild because they didn't like my opinion).

And if we DON'T set up a forum for a server that has a high population, we risk the inevitable: that players will drift off of this site for wherever else it gets hosted. If you're actively involved in a guild matter like that, there's a good chance that the guild affairs will take precedence over the site for which it was founded. The Amazon Basin is a guild that basically broke off of a Diablo II fansite (guess which one? No, not this one :)) and became a huge entity in of itself. I'd hate to see the Lurker community get divided like that.

A lot of worms in that can, GG! :)

-Bolty

[Kevin]

This is Mongo's policy to set, of course, so I leave the decision to him...

That being said, I think it's not a terrifically bad idea to have server forums.  Stormrage could really use one.  But the problem is, how do you determine what server gets a forum?  What's the criteria?  If Stormrage gets a server, should Terenas?  Cenarion Circle?  Tichondrius?  There's no point setting up a forum that will be dead 95% of the time.  So what's the cutoff of activity level?  And who "runs" those forums?  Someone needs to, because disagreements will break out (I was involved in one tonight and someone left the guild because they didn't like my opinion).

And if we DON'T set up a forum for a server that has a high population, we risk the inevitable: that players will drift off of this site for wherever else it gets hosted.  If you're actively involved in a guild matter like that, there's a good chance that the guild affairs will take precedence over the site for which it was founded.  The Amazon Basin is a guild that basically broke off of a Diablo II fansite (guess which one?  No, not this one :)) and became a huge entity in of itself.  I'd hate to see the Lurker community get divided like that.

A lot of worms in that can, GG!  :)

-Bolty
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Oh yeah, a ton of worms. :)

I don't have the answers for all of it, I layed out most of my general thoughts and while I alluded at more specifics I never did get back on that yet and won't be with this post.

As for what servers should have a forum, yeah. Right now Stormrage and Terenas seem to be the only two with an active enough population for one. Tichondrius while it has a guild on it doesn't seem active enough for one because our heavy PvP players seem to have gotten server spread pretty thin. Seems like that happened to our European players as well. But yeah, who makes that call? Add into that mix the fact that giving a server a forum is a kind of discouragement for Lurkers on other servers as well. If I had to make a stab at it, I would say you would probably want around 10-15 active players per server before it got it's own forum. Less than that and the in game mechanisms are still good enough to track and coordinate it. As for running them I would hope you could get volunteers for it, but I know that doesn't always work. I don't think I would want to moderate one of them and I started the Terenas guild. :) However if there was a Terenas forum and something in there that was specifically guild related got out of hand, as guild leader, I would be the one who would deal with it. Of course I would hope that other lurkers not in the Lurkers guild on Terenas would be posting there so if there were issues that weren't guild issues that is the stuff that I'm not sure I would want to moderate. Does that make sense?

And yeah, once you start them, how do you keep them from making this a guild site? Well my thoughts on that are that you don't have them be guild focused. We've had people leave the Lurker guild and join others that suit their playstyle and times better. That is cool by me. However those people may still want to play with us or help us out even if they are "wearing the colors". I doubt that will be enough in itself of course. I know that as you get more people who are using this site just to read the server forum and do stuff with other people who read that forum while occasionally looking elsewhere on the site, be they wearing the same guild banner in game, that it makes it that much easier for organization of playing to over ride strategy and take the site down the guild road, even if the forum is for a server that doesn't have an "official lukers guild".

Something else to consider though is the nature of the game. Unlike D1 and D2, the only way to find out about game mechanics is to play the game. You can't decompile the code or mod and test things. So you need a bigger base of active players if you want to pull the other information out of them. If all the players join other guilds and spend all their time on their forums with just occasional in game contact with active lurkers and casual browsing here, you lose the resource pool to pull from. The in game interactions of WoW are vastly different than D1 and D2 as well. Since the LL seems commited to WoW at this point I think the site will have to adapt some to be able to continue to do so. I think part of that is catering, to some extent, to a larger playing population.

I do believe that we can have more server specific info hosted here, if we put some thought into the set-up first, and still not run us too far down the road of a guild. Sure if we do it, we'll get members who are only here for the guild stuff and the organization that helps them play and we won't really get much back in terms of cool articles or strat guides or nifty not common knowledge info. But we also might attract people who will provide more of that. People from other guilds on Stormrage or Terenas who pop in here to check out what is going on and maybe post in the defensive warrior thread in the startegy thing. I also don't see a LoD influx and crush happening since the game has been out and the population increase in the game is pretty steady and contained. A future expansion pak, well that is a different story. There is also a brake on a mass influx because of the game mechanics that make being in a guild in game advantageous. Since the site won't be trumpeting "join our guild!" and other sites will be that will be a bigger siphon than D1 or D2 had.

I must admit that I personally started reading the Amazon Basin for D2 strat and info more than the Lounge or any other site (Phrozen Keep was next because of the detail of info for mods) around the 1.10 beta time. It was because the Basin had more active players from the guild and were doing a lot more testing and experimenting with the game than people here were. There was just more and better info on that site than here.

We're not producing a lot of WoW information right now either. There have been a few gem threads and Mongo's Onxyia write-ups have garnered good attention, but there isn't even any site content right now at least not that I can find. I'm thinking about setting up some instance runs though where one of the stated goals is to get screen shots and take notes on the strategies used for the group so that I can try to add to that. And of course my ideas can detract for this even more providing an outlet here that has very little chance of generating that type of info doesn't help, it just gives more reason to visit without contribution. :)

Again I don't know. That is why I started the thread. I sensed the need or desire for such a thing, but I'm not prepared to answer the questions it raises for the whole site. I'm still pushing for it, but I'm sure I still haven't seen all sides of the issue yet either.