That’s your interpretation. And part of what I’m criticizing. That some people feel like every negative post/thread is made in bad faith and with the sole purpose to rile other players up. As long as there are no insults thrown around, it’s completely fine to state why they don’t want to play anymore. Even if it’s just “I hate the game now and I’m done”.
I understand the wish for more precise feedback, but often these players already tried to change something through proper feedback and then comes the time when they’re just frustrated and done. It’s fine to dislike farewell-posts, but imo there’s no reason to mock these players or act like they’ve done something terrible and treat them like outlaws for leaving the game.
In the end it all just comes down to “Be polite”, that’s it. Bad takes, frustration from other players or annoyed feedback are not an open invitation to get condescending or toxic, just because these people somehow “deserve” it.
Problem being that people conflate the two and nobody here actually agrees on what constitutes one or the other.
Which is why we leave the handling of all forms of abuse in the hands of the mods and what qualifies as abuse is at their discretion (likely with plenty of guidelines) to decide.
If “abusive complaint threads” are not being taken down then it’s highly likely that a person’s threshold for what they consider abuse doesn’t match with the mods. It’s my experience that the truly bad stuff is taken down pretty quickly around here these days.
I’m reminded of a story I read in, of all places, The New Yorker, where a woman’s fiancé visits her father’s office. The young man is struck by how happy and engaged the employees are and asks his future father-in-law what their secret is.
“Simple,” he said. “We fire unhappy employees.”
Sometimes your dissatisfaction is actually because of your circumstances, and levelling criticism at those circumstances is valid and necessary. Sometimes, your dissatisfaction is something that you brought with you, and no amount of accommodation or change is going to solve that for you.
It’s a moderator’s job to know the difference, and this is an area where I feel that WoW abdicates their responsibility.
But that is, of course, just my opinion, and I have no power to do anything but share it.
I don’t think anyone implied every negative post/thread is made in bad faith. Moreover, I already stated that people are entitled to make whatever posts they want.
However, I completely reject the notion that we all just have to be okay with whatever someone posts simply because it’s their opinion. I don’t expect people to give precise feedback, but it doesn’t take much effort to throw something out for people to chew on and discuss. These forums are designed to generate discussion, and someone stating “I hate this game, WoW is dead to me, Blizzard is terrible, goodbye” is innately not substantive discourse, nor does it enable people to generate additional commentary.
Perhaps it’s wrong to insinuate that these posts are made in bad faith, but when they do absolutely nothing to further the discourse on WoW’s current state, I don’t think any of us are in the wrong to call it out and view it as such.
And FWIW, that is precisely what OP is calling out. They are not blanketing all criticism of WoW under this. They have outlined what it is they take issue with, and anyone attempting to twist that into anything else is being dishonest.
It exists to the degree that the owners decide it exists. Which in this case happens to allow criticism. Even poorly worded, amoral, or harsh criticism, so long as relevant rules (language, call-outs, etc) are not broken.
But I’m still very against the idea that every complaint should simply be wiped away.
Inflammatory comments are usually because a player is very passionately upset about a problem they have with the game, be it poor design decisions or otherwise.
Reminder that Dragonflight is good because of all the negativity and vitriol that was caused by Shadowlands.
Sometimes good things come as a result of previous bad things.
Eh, I’m more inclined to believe the issue was more or less the bleeding subscriber numbers, which can go hand-in-hand with all the negativity, but it’s worth noting that similar sentiments prevailed throughout both Legion and BfA, and Blizzard didn’t alter their trajectory of the game to meet the demands and outrage of players on the forum.
It wasn’t until they were faced with their game actually dying that they were forced to do something about it.
Well, Ion also explained in the Preach interview some of the fundamental approaches to their game design.
They’re typically lagging behind by at least one expansion when it comes to systems feedback.
People generally liked artifact weapons, so blizzard things “ok cool, borrowed power is good. We’re throwing it into BFA”, and they’re already looking towards shadowlands.
Once the negative feedback really started pouring in during BFA, Blizzard’s already designing shadowlands. Hard to scrap it now, but come Dragonflight, they had more than an expansion’s worth of feedback and implemented very necessary changes.
Not to argue that a diminishing subscriber count doesn’t have a massive impact, but they set themselves up for failure once they hit a point that players didn’t like their designs because it was always going to take them at least one expansion cycle to fix them.
That’s kind of been the running theory for the entire life of the game for some people. I don’t see it that way for the most part, but people have long said it’s S-tier expac followed by F-tier expac followed by S-tier expac.
Meanwhile there’s me, thinking we haven’t had S-tier since wrath and while we’ve never actually hit F-tier nothing has been much higher than a B since then.
I disagree with this, the vast majority of the hate that content gets early on is less about the content itself, and more about how it’s tuned. I believe that the vast majority of what we see as wrong with any given expansion is able to be fixed with a pretty painless patch.
I’d argue that most content we get is actually pretty good when it’s tuned for the final patch and not tuned in such a way that’s all about controlling us, all of the quality of life stuff they add in final patches like loosening restrictions, making stuff account wide and lowering rep requirements are just things that should have been there from day one.
This might be true, considering that a common reoccuring complaint is that players in the forum allegedly get banned for the “silliest stuff” and for “having another opinion” and “negative posts get silenced and deleted all the time”. Usually these people demonstrate the reasons they got ‘censored’ pretty quickly.
You don’t have to be okay with these kind of posts. It’s okay to disagree or maybe even ask for more detailed reasoning. But I don’t view it as necessary to get snarky when someone hates the modern Blizzard or just the game. Or both. It just creates more toxicity and these players get a sense of the community being ‘trash’ too. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t get a feeling with these posts that it’s my duty to defend the company or get into defense mode when someone finds the game terrible. Who am I to make fun of them for their subjective feelings? It doesn’t hurt me and I gain nothing from being mean.
Also most of the time the accusations of Blizzard being “incompetent” or that the game “sucks” rarely stand alone. Most of the time it’s backed up by some specific circumstance but somehow the player is just unwilling to elaborate further or gets dismissed by other forum users. “I’m done with this bugged trash, they don’t care anymore”, just as an example, is a statement I’ve seen quite often, especially in DF. And while it’s not really constructive and doesn’t bring anything new to discuss to the table, the lack of quality these days is a pretty good reason to be fed up with the game and how it’s treated by the company.
You can see the potential for abuse of a policy like this right here in this thread. People taking what the OP said and twisting it to say something that the author didn’t mean. There is one part in it that could be interpretated to silence any criticism though I doubt thats what the op meant.
I’m sure the moderators are quite good at their jobs but it still seems a bit dangerous to have this kind of policy. I doubt too many people at blizzard would be too much in a rush to put a stop to a mod that goes heavy handed. I could be wrong but its one of those things I’d rather not let out of the bag.
Someone saying something sucks may not be the most productive feedback. However it is still feedback and it expresses a persons feelings that there is stuff they don’t enjoy. As long as its not a direct attack on the devs themselves or other individuals.
There’s plenty of times that someone can put out a well put together criticism and then you have people coming in and attempting to invalidate their opinion. So i suppose I will ask, what would be the criteria of a post to be considered valid or invalid? What exactly would be considered actionable?
I don’t think you were around for BFA and shadowlands beta / launch if you don’t believe their systems (edit: and I’m talking fundamental design. Not tuning) were the #1 point of complaint across the playerbase
I was actually, and i stand by the idea that the systems usually aren’t the major gripe, it’s how they are tuned. Look at Torghast for example, massive point of contention for a lot of people, widely criticized, yet most of the complaints would have vanished if it weren’t structured the way it was (no rewards and forced weekly participation).