D&D 5E Why Forums Should Be Ignored By Game Developers

[cmad1977]

Clearly the forums are broken.


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[Lanefan]

On this site, I'd say that there have been some very good threads that the designers may want to at least read through. The ones I have in mind being the discussions on each of the UA articles. Although I assume many of these thoughts get reproduced in the surveys, they might still be useful to read through in addition.

Every now and then an excellent discussion will erupt in here regarding some underlying philosophy or other to do with the game and-or how it's played. Problem is, they're sometimes hard to find as they'll arise in some innocuously-titled thread such as "The Ecology of Unicorns"*.

* - as far as I know there is no such thread...

One actual example from a few years ago is the thread "Combat as War vs. Combat as Sport"; I'd call this one a must for any designer and a good read for anyone interested in quasi-deep game theories and discussions around such.

Lan-"if that CaWvCaS thread hasn't been archived already, it should be"-efan

 

[Zardnaar]

That makes it sound like an agenda rather than an observation.


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The 1st two were fairly spontaneous and there are only 3 more classes that would warrant the thread and 2 of them are already known for being a bit meh (Beastmaster Ranger, Elemental Monk).

I'm on the fence about it as the last class is not bad its probably even good its just out classed by other options and I feel it should be the bst at what its supposed to do and it arguably is not.

 

[Morrus]

The 1st two were fairly spontaneous and there are only 3 more classes that would warrant the thread and 2 of them are already known for being a bit meh (Beastmaster Ranger, Elemental Monk).

I'm on the fence about it as the last class is not bad its probably even good its just out classed by other options and I feel it should be the bst at what its supposed to do and it arguably is not.

I'm now confused as to what this thread is about!

 

[Zardnaar]

I'm now confused as to what this thread is about!

Just responding to some previous points/posts.

 

[Morrus]

Just responding to some previous points/posts.

You responded to me, but I never mentioned classes. I'm totally confused!

Ah well. Never mind.

 

[seebs]

I don't think people should ever ignore forums, but I don't think they should assume that forums accurately represent the entire player base.

 

[happyhermit]

It would be a bad move for game developers to ignore forums, they can be useful. Mike Mearls mentioned in the pre-production of Volo's Guide to Monsters they scoured all of the forums to find lists of monsters not yet updated to 5e. Good use of crowd-sourcing.

What they shouldn't do is look at the people there as representative of players/GMs as a whole, or make any design or marketing decisions based on that assumption, obviously Wotc isn't going to do that. White room theory crafting back forumites can be useful in some cases, but should never be the primary consideration in design or marketing IMO.

 

[Dualazi]

In my opinion, it's the exact opposite. Forum goers are usually the vocal minority, but they also tend to be the ones with the greatest degree of game knowledge/experience. They are also, in my anecdotal experience, far more likely to help the game continue to grow through things like mods and homebrews.

 

[corwyn77]

If WotC gave a flying fig about what forumites had to say, they would not have shut down their own forums.

They also would not limit their online contributions to outlets like Facebook and Twitter where they disappear into the aether almost as fast as they can utter them.