User talk:Brokunn

GWFC

Please feel free to put any of your thoughts about the Guild Wars Feedback Community in this section, or better yet, post them here!

Suggestions

• Most people think of the Guild Wars Factions Championship when they see that. Not least because that's the one where iQ unveiled the awesomeness of glyphsac-MS at VoD. -- Armond Warblade{{Bacon}} 03:31, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

• Should be UGWFC (u for unofficial). Dominator Matrix 03:34, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

:/

So GWFC is just a forum with some bells and whistles. That's nice, except if you want it to be able to compete with already-existing forums like Guru and izzy's private forum, you need to realize what the real problems with them are. The problem current forums have isn't the lack of utility (or a lack of voting system), it's the shitty mods. Mods who are unable to distinguish between productive trolls and destructive trolls, who can't bring themselves to ban idiots for the good of the forum, and who are basically incapable of doing what is required to maintain a high level of meaningful communication and content. The GWFC forum offers pretty much nothing any free forum wouldn't - so your main selling point, IMO, should be that you have mods that are capable of keeping discussion on-topic and weeding out the idiots.
I hope your forum goes well, but I also hope that you realize getting a solid group of mods is the hardest part of maintaining a forum. It isn't enough to just have a place for people to spout off. You have to make sure what they're spouting off isn't complete trash, because ANet's PR people have a history of listening to that trash and making huge changes because of it (case in point - every change ever made to Heroes' Ascent).
If you have capable mods, awesome. I might even bother posting if the mods can keep retardedness to a minimum. But if they are anything less than excellent, the site will suffer just like Guru and GWO :/ -Auron 09:02, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

I disagree that moderators are the key element in making a community successful. For example the Guild Wars Wiki has a fantastic group of folks who are trying to manage the content, but they're still failing at the task. Don't get me wrong, they're certainly very important but you can have the best moderators on the planet and if the volume of trash surpasses their ability to deal with it, they're still going to have problems.

However, you bring up an interesting point. It's actually one of the primary reasons why Grupthink (the foundation for the GWFC) was developed. Grupthink sites can be managed with little to no moderation because "destructive trolls" and "idiots" can be dealt with by the other users through reaction points. If productive users start marking "trash" posts with negative reaction points, those posts will be hidden from view - no interference from moderators is necessary.

It's a simple numbers game really. Forum/wiki's of the past fail in this regard because there are usually only a small percentage of moderators vs. a larger set of destructive users. With a Grupthink site, you've put the power to smack-down those users into the hands of the majority again. In addition, it's very simple for moderators to review users who have accrued massive amounts of negative reaction points - thereby dealing with them in a quantitative way (instead of having to read through to individual complaints). --Brokunn 03:08, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

GuildWiki -> Guild Wars Wiki

Arena Net really liked the concept behind GuildWiki, so much they decided to implement a wiki of their own. However, and this is what I would like to tell you, they didn't take over GuildWiki - they couldn't do that, thanks to licensing problems and other issues. So the solution was to create a new wiki, an official one, under Arena Net's hosting. Now GuildWiki still exists and it's still a fairly complete site, but one of the many differences between GWiki and this site is how here we're in an "official" place. Which means, we have more direct contact with the Arena Net staff, as they could be worried about colaborating to one fansite and not any other, but don't have that worry here, in "the" official site. I'm sure we have more users than we would have if the Arena Net staff weren't active here.

Now compare that to your site. It is a nice looking site and it may be considerably useful, but think how much better it would be if it were an official site hosted by Arena Net, with "official" staff participation. There is a demand for that kind of site - the community here has often discussed how this wiki isn't a good place for suggestions (as seen here, for example), and Arena Net itself was discussing that issue as well (as seen here - notice that's a link to an archive page, so please don't add anything to it). At the same time, the current Community Manager for the English language is incredibly supportive to new formats - it's not a coincidence that Arena Net has just created a YouTube channel, a Twitter page, etc.

If I may, then, I would like to suggest for you to see how would it be possible for Arena Net to host the kind of service your site offers. This would of course require you to talk to Arena Net (something that is already happening at Regina's talk page), but also to consider software options and other technical issues that would fit the most this kind of initiative. Erasculio 13:54, 31 October 2008 (UTC)

GW Ideas.com

I have added your site to our list of fansites. Since we are most likely doing away with the Suggestion pages in the ArenaNet namespace here, it is one of the sites we are suggesting people use to post suggestions, so I thought it was appropriate to add it to the list. -- Wyn 19:12, 7 March 2009 (UTC)