What's with the forums?

[Striker44]

I'll admit, I haven't been here that long, but why are the forums so... miserable? I get that people come here to give feedback, but it feels like some people see it as permission to be as toxic as possible. To be clear, I'm not talking about just any criticism. I mean people demanding staff members be fired over mild grievances, claiming there's some kind of conspiracy to ruin the game, portraying anyone who isn't as negative as them as idiotic, that type of thing. I guess what I'm trying to say is at some point, there's a line between criticism and entitlement. Have the forums always been this way? Even before I set up my forum profile I heard they have a reputation.

In a word, yes. These forums have long been an echo chamber of negativity. The worst expansion is always (insert current expansion), which is such trash compared to (insert previous expansion which is now suddenly amazing despite being trash when it was current).

It makes sense from a psychology perspective, though. People are much more likely to complain than they are to praise something, especially like a video game intended for casual gamers. Most people really enjoying themselves are...well...playing the game.

EW is now regularly spoken of positively here, but during EW itself, there was the usual multi-hundred-page thread trashing everything about it. Heck, even ShB was ragged on here despite widely being viewed as the "top" expansion.

Which, again, makes sense. The people who posted here during ShB were mainly those who didn't like how it retconned Hydaelyn and Zodiark. Then EW happened and retconned the retcon, and it was those who didn't like the new retcon that cycled in to complain. Now, it's the people who don't like the new direction of DT who proliferate. But each of those groups generally liked the previous installment before the changes, so suddenly the conversation about past expansions gets a lot more positive.

The sad part is when you create an echo chamber, it's easy for the people in it to get a greatly overinflated sense of how large their "movement" really is. "Hey, everyone here agrees with me - therefore the whole playerbase must!" Nevermind that we represent nothing more than the proverbial grain of sand on the beach, and the rest of the beach is having fun playing the game.

That said, I'm here banging pots and pans in certain threads about these issues because I do deeply care about this game and want to see it improve.

I think conversation could become so much more productive if people could separate their own personal opinions from objective facts. For example, I have no doubt that you care deeply about this game. However, what you really want to see is not for the game to truly improve (objectively speaking), but rather for it improve for you. The same thing any one of us views as an improvement could just as easily be seen as a disappointment by someone else. If we could make that distinction, we might start realizing how comments like this inherently come off as telling other people they are "wrong" for enjoying the game as it is.