Do you post on forum? We all know the wonderful reputation that the official World of Warcraft forums have for demonstrating the ideals of collaborative discussion and personal etiquette. **Former Sentence Coated in Sacrasm**. Forum posts are a big part of the extended WOW community. Unfortunately, they tend to resemble trade chat more often than not. The intention of course is that you post a question or idea or thought, and a constructive dialogue begins were concept and the game is discussed. Then why does it devolve often into the lowest common denominator of knucklehead ville?
The player community in WoW could not be more diverse from the normal average aged gamers to kids barely out of their braces to old timers looking for something new. The viewpoints shared by the community reach beyond state, town, province and country. Not to mention varied degrees of education, class and wealth and political views.
Now, as a new player you may look to get some information from these forums to help you along. So, how, should you go about participating in the forums? Well, my esteemed colleague on the TSZ has a hard and fast rule, “Don’t Post”. The read only rule is a popular one. If it wasn’t then you’d see about 1000 more posts to every 1 post you currently see. Now, you may say to yourself, “But Snarl, it can’t be that bad.” Well, let me give you some hypothetical but painfully real examples of what you could see in the forums should you post something.
Say you start a question, like, “Hey, I’m a Mage, what’s the best rotation for someone between level 20 and 30.” You will usually get this response, “Noobs shouldn’t play Wow”. Now, you may get some other response in there, but the one you will remember is the one I just posted.
Say you just want to make an intelligent well thought out observation, like, “It appears that while the LFG tool introduced in Patch 3.3 does many things right, it has created less community chatter amongst the guild. I think that guilds will have to work harder to preserve the fellowship they have in-game.” This will be met by the following response, “Look at Mr. Fancy Pants Douche Nozzle, WoW Players no use Vocabulary.”
Or maybe you just want to make a witty comment, like, “Ellite Tauren Retribution Paladins will bring new meaning to the phrase, Holy Cow!” This will be met with the following post, one word, “FAIL”.
It seem sad, but WOW has a lot of TROLLS. It’s a problem, and it cannot be resolved. Ever since annonymous posting boards have been up on the internet, TROLLS have been a reality for all forms of public discourse on the internet.
However, not all forums are bad. I for one have had good luck on the elitistjerks.com forums. Despite the name, I don’t run into too many actual jerks. Have you had positive forum experiences or night mares? Let us know.