Job Specific Forums

[Jeryhn]

All I know is BG doesn't want to be like everyone else, and they come up with compelling arguments like "it's retarded" to negate the implementation.

It's not that its retarded. It is a valid question and a job specific group of forums could bring about more streamlined info about certain jobs and whatever situations those jobs could be used in or are most effective at, etc. However, you admit yourself that job specific forums have their own brand of problems, including the fact that job forums will eventually become nothing but there own versions of Random Question threads. You also have to deal with inappropriate information or just downright incorrect information more often in job specific forums because players who are authorities who can speak on the specifics of multiple jobs are less likely to visit every single forum they have knowledge about on a regular basis.

So how do we address this issue of people wanting to submit information, have it not be lost, have it be fact-checked and verified, and be easily referenced? The Wikis.

Your problem is that you want BG to serve the majority, and well, BG has never been about serving the majority. This forum serves a niche of mostly elite players with a few of the standard retards and semi-casuals thrown in. This forum is also about credibility - some people have it, others don't. This excuse (because that's what it is, bar none) that you're still playing with the lv75 mindset is not an appropriate argument to make to us as part of your wish for job specific forums because you took a break from the game and missed the recent accelerated growth the game has experienced. It is not a compelling reason to give us, and you have yet to give us a compelling reason to create a job specific forum here that cannot be addressed in an easier way through what is already provided as reference/resource.

tl;dr: It's retarded, but only because you didn't think it through.

[Fievel]

And you're surprised by this?

Not at all, I was being facetious.

[isladar]

I honestly though most everyone's responses were more than sufficient to address the question, hence the highly condensed "job forums are retarded" response. Since that did not satisfy:

Forums are, by example of this thread and pretty much every other one on the boards, a conversation. Not as fast as a chatroom (most of the time), but the function is essentially the same. One can reference older comments, but there is a reason why necrobumping is frowned upon by almost every forum in existence: the conversation has moved on, and unless it's incredibly pertinent to an immediate point, what's been said is done with. Some conversations move quickly, others slowly, but in the case of fast conversations, if you're not there for it, you have, essentially, missed the conversation.

Jeryhn just mentioned Wikis. That is, as he says, a research-friendly place to reference information. It is (mostly) static. It's purpose is to be there, exactly where it is, so people can access it. Yes, you can search forums. But what the RQT does is provide a place where it is allowed and in fact encouraged to have real-time access to information that, in a Wiki, would be static. It's like a search bar, except with people on the other end. Or in real-people terms, a conversation.

As mentioned by others, job-specific forums end up diversifying and thinning out the population of people on-hand to be used as human search engines. There are a number of users who practically camp the RQT and WB? threads. Maybe their expertise is specific, but they are present. Asking someone to scour every job forum, plus whatever would be used to answer general questions, is inefficient. The RQT functions because people are there to answer random questions. We could make 87 individual threads/forums/sub-forums or what have you for the supposed convenience of the questioner, but by thinning out the pool of accessible information (the aforementioned human search engines), those 87 different search bars would be slow and ignorable.

This is not 'BG just tryin' to be different'. This is to ensure that BG is exactly what it is: a forum.