What's the point of a fansite these days?Follow

Just a curiosity really. Blizzard has done a lot of things that have arguably made an online community less relevant than in the past.

For example:

- Breadcrumb quests lead you to the next zone
- In game Questhelper
- In game guild finder
- Characters are more powerful, making leveling easier
- Simplified stat system makes mix/maxing largely irrelevant to most players
- Dungeon Journal explains boss fights

I could probably add more to the list if I thought about it for a while. When it comes down to it a lot of the compelling reasons I sought out answers on line originally can now be found in game; or at minimum on blizzards website/armory. Not meaning for this to be a dismal post. There's always a place for people with a shared hobby to come together to chat about it. It just seems rather ironic to list one example, that as the theory-crafting community got better tools, those tools were less necessary.



Any thoughts? Also given the ways things have changed in game, do you still think there's a compelling reason for new players to visit an online forum? What would that be? What do you see the purpose of a community such as this one being now and in the future? If you're a newer player, why did you come here?

So many questions...

The thought being that people ask for help when they get stuck.

I just kind of made the off-hand observation (true or not) that people I was seeing on forums playing something like a Arms Warrior in spellpower cloth with a white shield tended to be more along the lines of level 60ish, instead of level 20ish. It probably sprung from that.

Well, Wow O-boards, game and armory don't have Darqflame and Pigtails avatars, so there is a plus!

On a serious note, I like the community here, even tho I lurk most of the time. I'd say it's one of the best on Zam. I guess that's your answer. It's all about the people that are the regulars.

Agreed. I have been lurking for roughly 4 years. Checking this forum and a few of the classes that I play is almost a daily ritual even if I average about 10 posts/year...I enjoy reading the contributions from regulars and learning (or living vicariously ) in the process. The Alla forums have made Wow a much richer experience for me as I am a pretty casual player.

And while I have played Wow long enough to figure out most of casual problems I run into, it's nice to check online to see if I'm dealing with a bug or if I'm just a bad player. It's usually the latter but sometimes I am surprised...

WoWhead is still nice for instantly knowing who sells what, what mob drops what, and where especially for crafting recipes, and it is good for looking up where something drops and/or what vendors have what instead of having to travel way out to, say, Vashj'ir to find out what exactly the Earthen Ring vendor sells, for example.

Edited, Jul 13th 2011 9:47pm by Lyrailis

After reading this I went back just to vote that WoW is dying. How many mmos have you played?

+1

This site's also a decent place to ask questions when you want some advice not laden with massive technobabble and maths.

Your mario avatar was awesome.

1: They nearly always did, only the breadcrumbs were small, and further apart. Now we have breadloafes instead, at every corner, and spiced up with a blue item now and then. Has nothing to do with a forum, it's just because WoW attracts all kinds of people (you know what I mean).

2: again, not forum-related. Add ons and wowhead did exactly the same.

3: Just a toy. It's not likely to place you in the exactly right guild for you without many tries.

4: They are, but I don't see this related to a forum in any way.

5: min/maxing is just as relevant as before, only the simplification leaves less room for error. Also, there WILL be mouthbreathers failing at equipping their characters as long as there's more than 1 stat to choose from.

6: It doesn't exactly explain the fights, it only tells us the abilities. And to be honest, some people will still fail, no matter how much information they get. They will only be increasingly more pathetic the more information they get.



For me, a (non O-boards) forum is about talking to and with people who are not quite as stupid as some people you may find on the oboards or ingame. A retreat from the stupidity of the wow community without having to leave wow as a game.

Blizz has done a lot of things in the past two years that have, at first glance, appeared to be augmentations to the game, but upon further (real world) testing have proven to be detractors from the overall experience.

As you put it – “Bread crumb leads” seemed like a good idea. How frustrating was it when you knew you had to do something in Dustwallow with spiders, but where the hell were the spiders…? While on one hand I’m happy to quickly and easily find the quest – it does take a bit of ‘feel’ out of the game.

The same could be said for the dungeon finder. At first glance, this thing was a great idea, but after experiencing life after /LF-Random… All it has done is create a hostile atmosphere, an entitled tanking class, and destroyed the on-realm community.

When you look at BoA gear (or anything else that helps you power through lower level BS) – again ~ At first glance you want to congratulate Blizzard for recognizing that the game is really all about ‘end-game’, but when you watch how it played out… Well it wasn’t quite so clean. People complained that old content was boring – so Blizz made it easy to become OP using BoA gear. While this did make the boring period progress quicker – it made the boring period MORE boring. I first killed dwarves in the Searing Gorge years ago and it was exciting and while it has grown tedious over the years – making it both trivially easy and tediously boring didn’t improve it much. I’d equate the “BoA Solution” to boring (dead) content to the “Air Freshener Solution” to foul smells.

“Wow. This place smells like ****. Let me spray some of this potpourri scent in the
air…….. Wow, now it smells like **** and Potpourri.”

Instead of making it better. They made it trivially easy and just faster…


So – IMO, a lot of the changes in the last few years have been designed to fix problems, errors, and complaints, but something was lost in the translation. I think that something is/was the online community and feel to it all.

Not gonna lie, the only thing I ever used Zam for in WoW was the forums. Those are still relevant, though to be fair less so now that dedicated TC sites have cropped up.

Though the WoW forums had never been as active as, say, the FFXI ones were. There just wasn't as much to talk about, with only endgame ever being a point of concern.

I thought there were always the breadcrumb quests, as you finished an area sending you on to the next "logical" zone which might not be level appropriate for where you're at. I don't know for sure as I've always been one to work at completing a zone before moving on, skipping some zones to come back to later when I had nothing really going on. But I thought if you pretty-well completed a zone you were lead to a new spot. NOW though, now you finish a quest /ding whatever pop back to the capital to clean out your bags / dump some stuff in the bank and hit the hero board for your next questing spot (I take 'em just for the bonus xp for not really "doing" anything more than finding your next level appropriate spot.