Yet there are other factors that differentiate these threads you haven’t mentioned.
The instance lock thread has 35.6k distinct views and 104 likes.
The AQ stress test has 1.5k views and 3 likes. This only equates to 4% of the visibility of the instance lock thread. Yet in this smaller sample, which shouldn’t even be considered due to very low response rate (based upon the distinct viewership), there is a similar rate of .2% likes to views.
The ban wave thread has 12.6k views and 139 likes. In 35% of the views, there are 135% more likes - and a 55% increase in the relative rates.
Furthermore, both these threads occurred thereafter the instance lock thread. Reading the comments therein, a large portion are speaking negatively of the instance lock. In fact, the vast majority of the AQ thread is players calling to boycott it due to the instance lock, which is a factor in the like rate.
Ok, but why should any legitimate player have to change the way they play (due to a shortsighted change that won’t stop bots anyway)? Bots will just switch realms every 6 hours, or make more accounts. Legit players shouldn’t have to stop playing at an arbitrary time, in a game they pay to play, because actiblizzion made a bad change that will do nothing to deter bots.
What percent of the playerbase do you think 35.6k is?
Separately, do the majority of your posts rely on slander and vitriol? It seems a place for feedback would frequently include negative feedback, those providing it aren’t “angry neckbeards.”
While some may be perturbed about this specific change, I can’t understand the correlation to their facial hygiene.
Gameing forums and places like metacritic have shown that voluntary “feedback” is almost never indicative of how the majority ACTUALLY feel about something
People with negative opinions go out of their way to slander and hate things, while people with indifferent or positive opinions about something are much less likely to go out of their way to express their feelings about something
Every single gaming forum ive ever visited has been a cesspool of negativity, abd some of the most popular and well liked games in the world have terrible user scores on sites like metacritic.
Consumer feedback is always a metric of consideration. If we had a dislike indicator and like/dislike were account wide, it would be much more valuable. Simply discrediting the viewship and assorted responses/lack thereof of nearly 40,000 customers is not advisable for most firms.
While they need more effective polling ti accurately assess their NPS, the forum exists entire for player communication and Blizzard should utilize all avenues of data sourcing to understand consumer sentiment.
The point is number of likes should not affect the decisions blizzard makes on said topic because whether or not people like a post is not the end all be all about how good this change is. Most people will like a post if it affects them in a directly positive way.
Instance cap change affects people indirectly by trying to limit the number of instances bots can run, people can’t see any immediate positive only the negative and so are less likely to like it. For a majority of the playerbase they won’t hit the instance cap but they still get mad because they can’t see any immediate positive.
They had tons of feedback about bots. They made a change to help combat bots. From 15 years of wow I can tell you that the bots will never be gone, blizzard just deals with bots differently than private servers. They will never have gms just flying around the world investigating reports and then banning players after looking at their movements for 1 minute. They either need to detect the software directly or spend a lot of time collecting enough evidence that said player is botting. They have explained their anti bot systems plenty of times before.
Because i for one spent years browsing forums before deciding to log in and participate, i still don’t even have a reddit account despite viewing it every day
I know almost nobody in my guild log into the forums, but all of them click links to forum blue posts like those that people link in discord
They read them, but they spend zero time “liking” or replying to it
Or you are just en extreme casual. I can hit 30 easily in 6-7 hours a day on my rogue. Just pickpocket farming, helping people get HOJ or SGC, rend/Jed runs, DM jump runs, Twink items from SFK, and raids on two characters on top of that. Just because it doesn’t effect you doesn’t mean that it’s a good change. Like if Blizzard decided to ban people not playing 6 hours a day or more wouldn’t effect me, but I’d still be angry because it’s a change that literally helps no one
It won’t effect bots… they can make enough gold in less than 2 hours to pay for their Subscription. And if it’s a program leveling new characters it takes 0 player effort to make dozens more and they all pay for themselves in a short amount of time with zero human interaction
I don’t mean the actual systems like warden or whatever, I meant the methods. They have explained before why it seems like they’re not doing anything to combat bots when they actually are doing something but people just don’t see the effects.
It limits the number of instances they can run on each server per day for each account they have.
So the population is relative to your anecdotal experience.
I was logged in the first time I ever used the forum, due to being logged in to the website on my browser already.
I guess that means everyone is logged in. Or your experience is right, and nobody is logged in. Or maybe they are merged and 50% of people log in. Alternatively, you’re the only person to have ever viewed while not logged in. Or I’m the only one that’s ever logged in and I’m chatting with a bot.
All this said, to put is succinctly:
You nor I have any metrics concerning the rate people log into a forum, only those indicating how many users have viewed and liked something.
The irony is that the mages complaining about not being able to afford things are directly responsible for the ridonculous amount of gold in the economy, inflating prices to the extent that one has to have a farmer mage just to afford things.
Here’s the thing though, you are not “doing the instance”. You are doing a very small amount of the instance and resetting it for max gold per hour (or simply fishing for rare spawns)
If you were legitimately “doing the instances” as intended, you would not be doing 30 of them in 2-3 hours.