I’m surprised the forum still exists to be honest. Blizzard doesn’t moderate them directly unless something receives too many flags. It’s easy to spot the trolls here - IE, if you see something that you feel is troll-ish, check their post history and you can quickly see if that’s how they generally act or not.
I don’t think Blizzard reads the forums in general any longer, gathering most of their feedback from select Discords, whatever streamer someone happened to be watching, and sometimes reddit.
Support Forum Agents post on the Support forums and moderate those specifically. Vrak, Orlyia, etc. They are very active and post pretty much every day. They also handle the CS Twitter.
The rest of the forums are handled by the actual Forum Moderation team who are a subset of the GMs. They handle tickets from all the forums and act on those, as a general rule.
Community Managers have a different role, and post announcements, patch notes, etc. They CAN moderate, but are not tasked with it and generally don’t. The tools they have are mostly for posting announcements and stuff.
The SFA’s also CAN moderate outside CS but they generally don’t because it is not their role and belongs to a different team. Stepping on toes and all.
Lack of moderation is honestly better than when they were moderating it.
They selectively chose to keep political threads up, modded certain opinions/posters over others and were basically just as useless in a more annoying way.
The first half is correct, but this segment isn’t really why MVPs get a lot of flak from the general playerbase. The most active green posters up until they started disappearing made a habit of being hardcore blizzard shills. And I don’t mean that lightly, we’re talking full on tongue polishing their boots.
If you observed a problem with the game and they reply to you, it’s probably to defend a stupid design decision.
I can name two mvps who were cool, but can’t because rules, so we’ll go by class - a druid and a paladin. That’s it.
The gnome and deaty knight were particularly obnoxious.
The moderation is definitely strange/inconsistent on here
For example, bait-y “LGBTQ” threads and random politics threads sometimes stay up for multiple days at a time (…often reaching 500+ replies)
Meanwhile, fairly innocent-looking thread topics such as “FF XIV is better than WoW” and threads “callng out” Blizzard figures (such as ion, Bobby, etc) often get deleted or 404’ed after a few hours
And of course, guys like the “LGBTQ” bait-thread creator seemingly alt-hop with impunity and it seems like nothing ever happens to them (…otherwise they would’nt still be able to post)
Do we want stricter moderation? A soft touch is a selling point in most cases. I just wish that they allowed both sides of political threads rather then taking one side… but i just avoid those threads.
Yeah, I don’t expect most people to know who has what role. The fact that jobs descriptions and tasking has changed between 2004 and now, also causes some mistaken expectations as to what some of the Blizz folks are tasked to do.
I had the chance to sit down at Blizzard with the Support Forum Agents and talk about all this. As well as check out the game report/ticket system that was in place at the time. I was only allowed to view my own account for privacy reasons of course, but I was allowed to see the basics.
I have spent quite a bit of time around Blizzcons with the CMs too. Lots of chances to talk about their role, the challenges, etc. I have not actually met the CS/GM team because they are in Texas mostly.
Pure politics really does not belong on the forums. Same with religion, discussions about national issues, etc. If something is not game related or at least community building, it is not going to be constructive.
YES. It drives me batty and I have been complaining loudly for years. They need staffing and consistent follow through. A thread with RL threats, horrific slurs, etc should never stay up for 10 hours.
Some of those stay up for days too. It all depends on when they happen and how many reports they get it seems.
Wow interesting. I made the claim a number of times last year that this was happening and each time my comments were mass reported as trolling. It turns out I was correct.
Claim that what was happening? That Blizzard gives tours? That MVPs talk to CMs or their CS/TS lead via email or discord? That is all public knowledge. I also got to tour the following:
Diablo 3 Dev area, WoW Dev area, NOC, Library, theater, etc.
Are the old pvp and raid private feedback forums around? Ive lost access since the forums went over to the new system and to be fair im not a part of that crowd anymore to give that feedback.
Yeah you will get reported for that because it does not happen. They have no means to talk to Blizzard. The regs are people on the forums MVPs have means to talk to the program contacts.
Everyone else on the tour also had the same ability to talk to the people I did. The rest of the people I was with were D3 streamers and community members.
There are no secret special privileges. The contacts between the MVPs and Blizzard are listed in the MVP FAQ. The info on Tours is also publicly available. They have to be scheduled and arranged in advance.
All the old forums were wiped and are gone now. Blizz might have them archive somewhere, but they are not available to us as posters. I was never part of those. I am more TS/CS and a casual player. I am aware they existed though.
Ah was more curious if they were reestablished or not. They were contentious as the players and devs didn’t really ever see eye to eye. I could see them moving on from them.
Dude, I am talking about MVPs, not the CS forum regs. All of the contacts MVPs have are publicly known. CS forum regs do not have the same contacts. They can post on that forum and in the Lounge thread there. That is it.
I don’t have any idea. I never had insight into them to start with so don’t know current status. I know the Council was designed to be a public replacement for those forums, to some extent. What channels the Influencers (streamers, guide writers, etc) have outside that I don’t know. I assume there is the usual Discord though.
Ironically I think the US forums are even moderated much better than the EU forums. The german forums for example are well populated, but not that cluttered like these forums here, so mods would have an easy time to moderate, but nothing’s happening.
When we’re lucky, then every 2-3 days one lonely mod chimes in and maybe (!) closes the vile troll threads that have gathered over the days. People are begging that someone finally takes action and maybe bans some of the people who constantly brag about being able to troll and insult others without any repercussions. That’s the sad state of things.
Now trolls and bullies have taken over and more and more dedicated players leave the forums because proper and constructive discussions are almost impossible. They’re just tired that Blizzard obviously doesn’t care what’s going on on their community boards and forum users have to go to Twitter to beg for mods to come in and clean up the mess.