Potential Forum Changes

Sorry but my feedback will have to be mostly negative.

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Bex_GGG wrote:

the first one we wanted to address is the staleness of some subsections of the forum

Yet many of the forums you are proposing to merge are among the most active forum sections.

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condensing broad topics into fewer categories for more focused discussion.

How is that going to result in more focused discussion exactly? If anything, merging unrelated sections just dilutes the discussion topics with threads that the visitors have no interest in. The more specific the forum section is, the more focused the discussion can be.

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Help and Information would merge with Technical Support and be renamed 'Account Help & Information/Technical Support'

The last thread on the first page of these two forums is from three and one days ago, respectively. Do you believe that either of these sections are "stale"?

Further, people who are capable of helping with gameplay-related problems and people with technical expertise are frequently not the same. Merging the forums would make somebody like me have to skip over half of the posts where I can provide no relevant input. Threads which I am actually qualified to answer would drop off to the later pages more quickly.

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Gameplay Help & Guides would move to the 'Help' subcategory.

GH&D has become the unofficial "gameplay mechanic discussion" section. I am not sure that labeling it under Help is accurate.

Do I understand correctly that there will be no more "Discussion" section? Is everything going to be encompassed under News, Help, Feedback, and Community? If so, which section should the mentioned mechanics discussion topics belong to?

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The Skill Gem Feedback, Support Gem Feedback will be merged into one topic 'Skill & Support Gem Feedback'.

I have no opinion about this one. I don't get the point of having a thread for every skill gem in the first place. Is there anybody who actually follows all of these threads? Especially since they are sorted alphabetically and not by last post time, this seems like an extremely futile exercise.

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Art and Audio Feedback would be replaced by stickied threads in the 'Feedback and Suggestions' forum.

This makes sense. I agree that A&AF is pretty much a dead section.

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General Discussion would become simply 'Discussion' and encompass Gameplay, Hideouts, Community Showcase and other miscellaneous topics.

This is perhaps the worst possible example of the diffusion I was talking about above. Why exactly do you want to have "Talk about new league mechanics", "Check out my hideout", and "Subscribe to my youtube channel" all in one place?

Merging all the sections currently under Community makes some degree of sense (although I believe that Guild Recruitment should have a separate section due to the volume of threads in it); but I don't see why you would lump General Discussion (which tends to be specifically about in-game matters) together with it.



Once again, I am concerned about the lack of explicit space for game mechanics/theorycrafting discussions, i.e. that which is currently covered by the Gameplay Help & Discussion forum.