Any person that is into this game should be semi familiar with it's official forums. I'm not saying that they need to post daily, but perusing and skimming a few times a week will only help you. A) See some general census about what people are complaining about or happy about. And B) to occasionally discern some actual factual information that might not be so easy to find unless you were deliberately searching for it.

I would suggest all players, new and old, peruse through the forums to some degree. There are some jems in here certainly. I often find a lot of information I probably wouldn't have known about as soon as I had were it not for people on the forums. Granted there's a lot of BS to dig through when determining what is a useful/helpful/informative thread verses a complete waste of time. Generally speaking, the first page in a thread (if not the first post) will guide you as to if the whole thing is worth your time or not.

/shrug

Personally for me these forums have provided an enormous amount of information and insights. Sure, there's a lot of trolls and the like, useless/stupid posts but unless you check, however briefly, you never know.