It would make sense… I could track down some of my old raid buddies and find out for sure. Just a passing fancy. I hope the community council didn’t replace them myself but im getting off topic.
1 Like
Yes, EU has far less moderation than US, and US is not great. I don’t know what causes that, but it is certainly not idea and it is across all the forums, not just WoW. The mods don’t just handle one game.
That may be actually true and I also suggested this a while ago. Obviously they not only have to handle the forums of every franchise, but our “mods” seem to be no ordinary mods but GMs who do this as a second task. For me there’s no other explanation to why it often takes several days until someone shows some mercy and look into the forums.
iirc, there’s also only one single CM for the whole EU area left because all the others were fired.
There are, of course, still secret forums or at least top end players have some more direct line of communication to the decision makers at Blizzard. Someone leaked a good bit of it and what things were being discussed back in SL Beta as I recall. No I won’t be bothered to try and find it.
The CC are a bunch of self-important nobodies who are “supposed” to be a representative of the WoW player populace and bringing to topic the concise threads and posting for the group they largely are meant to represent. Problem though is “I” represent me. I am all too capable of articulating my own thoughts and ideas and do not trust or give any of them permissions to speak on my behalf. If Blizzard really wanted feedback from the masses, they have the options of polling users and even tying player’s responses to account activity to gain better information about the feedback. For example their dopey mythic+ instance pick poll could have been parsed out (and probably was) by respondents and tied to their overall mythic+ experience. Were it me, I’d probably just dismiss votes by those with no or minimal mythic+ experience.
Are you a CS regular?
I thought this moved to Discord myself.
As I recall, it was definitely a forum of some kind. There were screenshots. Could be both (probably is).
Even in a place I used to work at, it wasn’t advertised, but we had customers who were part of a council of sorts. They got together once a quarter with the sales director and other top-ish folks and got sneak peeks of future product lines and even got to beta test our totally revamped website for massively discounted subscriptions and product packages. These weren’t necessarily all the biggest clients (though most were and all would have been in the top 10% of customer by revenue easily), but they were decision makers who also was in key positions to other organizations or had connections to other decision makers in clients we were trying to win.
Edit - So basically they got boozed and schmoozed and got to feel extra special and important and if/when they had issues/questions, there got to talk directly to the head of CS who handled their accounts and got basically override the system to work whatever kind of deal had to get made while we got good words put in for us to their powerful friends/connections and we won a lot of smaller industry award and accolations relevant in that space that nobody here would even know or care about so we could brag about it on our website/marketing materials.
Gotcha. Yeah, I’ve been on both sides myself, even for other video games. Discord itself just makes it easy to fall into and fairly innocent at times.
IE, picture you’re a game dev. You work on class balance. But you also like playing the game and raiding. So you join a raiding guild. Someone posts in your guild discord how they don’t like something about the class they’re playing, you read it. Their feedback was heard while a thousand others are screaming into the void on the forums.
That’s how I usually see it go down.
I am an MVP in 3 MVP programs and did a year term on the Council. I regularly post on WoW and Diablo forums.
CS Regulars are defined as people without colored text who primarily post on the CS forums, and often participate in the Lounge thread there.
2 Likes
I think it’s more “hey here is a prototype of a boss. You get first crack at it and the mechanics before it goes on PTR. Also, do you think having riff raff gear at X% relative power to gear you’ll get is too good and would “require” you to do that lesser content? We don’t want your kind to feel obligated to do content too far beneath you so at what point is the juice not worth the squeeze”.
That isn’t to say they have direct control of the game, but they definitely have a voice and their input is magnitudes more valuable (hence why they get their own special forum where devs and actual decision makers do have direct conversations with them)
I got suspended for having an opinion some time back. Sharing that opinion was considered trolling. I was making no attempt to troll or offend anyone. Avoiding the LGTQIA++ threads remedies this.
I would definitely want a light touch from mods. I’m less concerned with content moderation and more conversation or topic development. Lots of good topics get buried while the same troll threads get pushed to the top. Being able to bring greater visibility to good topics are where the mods or MVPs could step in.
1 Like
I don’t accept that definition you just created. I think if you were asked the question outside of a conversation like this you’d gladly claim membership.
1 Like
That used to be the case, then from 2018 forum software change until about last month, green posts had no special visibility. They only recently put that forum feature back in. Which I find interesting… I don’t know what it means for forum MVP programs, if anything.
I wish they had picked something beside a crown though. Green dot, leaf, something else? Not a crown though.
1 Like
I would agree and honestly its better off. People have this grand idea that those forums are wow players shaping the game. In reality they are math nerds arguing with art nerds and the art nerds veto every thing.
As an ex moderator/admin (no not this forum), ill tell you.
First of all, besides us no one knows whats going on behind the scene between moderators and admins and NDA prohibit us from spilling out any info in public.
Secondary, most of us are not getting payed, hence no one in the right mind will do it as a full time job, and if you are jobless basement dweller with all the time on your hands, you wont get these responsibilities due to the fact that we would be more concerned why dont you have a normal job like majority of people and how that inability might impact the whole community (I am talking about you radical leftists who like to go full power trip on anyone who disagrees with you).
So in the end, unless company ready to provide a compensation to right people, no adequate person willing to do it for a long time, without power trips and breaking NDA.
Of course theres more to it but you got a basic idea why we see a lack of moderators across the forum.
Wut?
3 Likes
In California where Blizz HQ is, it is illegal to have volunteers do paid work. Blizzard forum mods are a subset of the CS/GM team who work mostly out of the Texas office. It is a full time paid position where the tasking includes forum report tickets.
Even Blizzard interns are all paid positions. They have an extensive program that includes pay, travel, housing, and a lot of professional development activities just for interns as well as selected tasking designed to give interns industry experience in the area of their major. They have specific projects for them, not just throwing tasking at them. CS is not one of those things they do interns for.
They just don’t have many staff tasked to the forum moderation, period. That is an upper mgt thing based on their priorities and budget.
Yeah that was my take too once I got down into the post. Wut?
2 Likes
Okay if you are getting paid, thats great, good for you, 99% of the forums mods dont. My points are still valid and i am just gonna move because its not going anywhere and i dont feel like convincing anyone into something basic that was around since before some of you were born.
Good day.
MVPs are other players, not staff, so get no compensation. They also have zero moderation powers and zero tasking or required activity. Just a general “hey you are helpful can we make you green?” thing.
I pre-date personal computers, the internet, cell phones, automatic windows, cassette tapes, CDs, etc.
6 Likes
I think over moderation is the real issue.
I mean the AI is doing its jorb. Report then move on. If the AI deems it against its programming then it issues a time out. If the appeals process agrees with the AI then enjoy the time out.
Working as intended.