Mercy threads on the forums are both numerous and varied. They are numerous because it’s a subject many people want to talk about, and varied because each individual person wants to approach the conversation from a different angle. They deserve to be separate threads, because the direction of conversation in each thread is often entirely different from its peers on the forum index.
People who are calling Mercy threads “spam” are generally disinterested in the hero as a whole, and do not care for the details of the conversation. I completely understand that mindset, but what I don’t understand is then spending the effort to go into each Mercy thread and leave generic negative comments without reading the OP as so many upset about the “spam” are wont to do.
The separate Mercy threads are necessary for a number of reasons, but the most important reasons why we need separate threads are:
- It’s too hard to have constructive conversation in a megathread. It becomes a dumping ground for posts that nobody will ever have the patience to read through.
- New rework/change ideas deserve their own thread for discussion. Each single idea to change Mercy is just one post that requires many responses. The format of a dedicated thread helps organize this type of content.
- Old threads need to die. While some threads are kept alive for a long time, threads in which conversation has ceased for an extended period of time should not be pulled back to the front page when someone else wants to start up that same conversation again. That’s commonly referred to as “necroing” a thread, and is actually a violation of forum policies if I’m remembering correctly.
If you don’t want to see Mercy topics in the general forums, there are solutions to the problem you perceive… but silencing or interfering with constructive threads is not the answer. A separate forum category for each hero would be one reasonable way to go about things, which would keep all the Mercy talk contained within one category where people who don’t want to look at it never have to. Ultimately, though, the preferable solution to the problem would be for the developers to fix Mercy.
If Blizzard never reworked Mercy, we wouldn’t have Mercy threads all over the forums. Mercy players wouldn’t be so rightly upset with the state of the character. Other players wouldn’t be so rightly upset with how powerful Mercy was right after her rework. This is a problem that Blizzard cannot fix by policing the forums. The problems on the forums are only symptoms of the real problem: the design decisions made in the game itself.
Fixing Mercy in-game will fix the forum community problem that Blizzard created with the rework. Blizzard is at fault for Mercy’s problems, not the players, and not the players who use the forums. It is Blizzard’s mistake to admit, and the first step of that admission needs to be a full revert to Mercy’s pre-valkyrie state. It doesn’t have to stop there. Some minor changes could be perfectly acceptable, but it was absolutely a mistake for Blizzard to completely rework the core kit of a hero who was well-received among a majority of the community, and that mistake must be undone first.
If you don’t want to see any more Mercy threads, you have two practical choices to help solve the problem yourself: either ask the forum moderators / community managers for separate forum categories appropriate for such discussion (NOT megathreads), or join the cause to get Mercy fixed. Solve the real problem, and the symptoms will go away.