The Daily Grind: Do you make regular visits to a game's forums?

I've usually enjoyed the forums for the games I've played, most of the trolls are easily ignored anyway, though I've done my own trolling & troll-baiting on occasion, if I felt it was serving some purpose other than just trolling for the sake of it.

It depends on the community though, in EQ you were often dealing with people who were very well-versed in the game & it's various aspects & could get involved in quite deep debates on issues wheras on other forums I found myself either helping a constant stream of people having difficulties with the game & ended up being one of the people most active on the tech help forums mostly by accident (passing on solutions of how I solved my own myriad problems).


I really enjoyed being involved with the community in RoM, other than a huge stream of people asking the same old questions day after day (instead of looking for 5 seconds to find it already answered) there were some good discussions & opinions with some really well thought-out ideas on how to move the game forward, the shame was the sheer volume of great ideas, a lot very realistic, that the devs simply refuse to acknowledge, rather they ignore good class balance ideas & go ahead & introduce nerfs nobody asked for & nobody needed to classes that were already the "worse off".

I have over time formed the opinion that when you enjoy the forums far more than the game it really is time to move on.

I visit the LotRO forums fairly regularly.

I visit the online forums, for any MMO I'm playing, multiple times a day -- if they're any good. There's an art to moderating a game forum, and almost nobody gets it right. (EVE and FreeRealms, for example, have utterly worthless forums; City of Heroes has excellent forums).

For one thing, the forums become a kind of meta-game that can be played in only a couple of minutes, the sort of thing EVE is planning to do with CONCORD's web-based presence, the kind of thing that FreeRealms is trying to do with their web-based presence: hit a web page, skim the latest developer comments, go back to whatever else you were doing. Got a few more minutes? Then also check the test server forum to see what's coming. Got a few more minutes? Check the general discussion forum to see if other people have found something you haven't found yet.

I also can't imagine truly enjoying a game as complex as a modern MMO that doesn't have a robust player-written guide forum, something I got used to back in the old Neocron days and can no longer live without. I despair of living long enough to find an MMO whose official documentation, both company and 3rd party, doesn't suck warm sick through a short, fat straw.

LOTRO, yes.


Anything else, no.

I only visit WoW forums when I'm first starting a new class or profession. There's a wealth of information available on specs and strategies in pinned posts.

Most of the forum beyond that is whining about how horribly served the class or profession is by Blizzard. Reading it makes me want to delete my character and my account. If I read enough, I'm tempted to shred the install disks as well. It's just so sad and ugly.

EVE has the bestest foruns in the whole universe!

The obligatory mention of CAOD ("

yeah, got cut out. ;/