Friday, August 1, 2008

Do we need a Plus-dps community?

Today Larísa’s got a slightly sickening green colour of her skin, which makes her pink pigtails stand out even more. How come? Well, I’ve actually had a look at the new nice healing community focal point Plusheal.

It seems like such a warm and cosy place, where you comfortably can ask and discuss things in a polite manner, and be sure to get intelligent answers from people who know a lot but don’t have any need to perform as jerks. Players who still remember how it was to be new and who find a pleasure in sharing thoughts and information. People even introduce themselves by cute little posts. You're sort of overwhelmed by the caring atmosphere - I guess it's the druids who're causing that beautiful healing sort of rain they do from time to time, all over the Plusheal community.

You could wonder if there’s really any need for another WoW forum – after all there are quite a few of them out there already, but having a look at it, I definitely think you’ve guys have found a niche of your own, a kind of forum that didn’t exist before.

Some of the threads seem to be pretty general, about leadership issues and such, and could probably be useful even for non-healers. But to tell the truth, the forum is – and should be – targeted at healers only. This wasn’t meant for gnome mages.

So where could we go then (whenever we feel like doing anything else but hanging around at The Pink Pigtail Inn), if we’re not let into the healing community? Where is the equivalent mage community?

When it comes to me, I used to read the standard forums quite a lot before. At first I read the official ones on the Blizzard sites, but as I learned more about the game and the community I found that although there were some nice writings there too, there was way too much of crap to make it worth the time to search for the good stuff. So lately I’ve been reading the mage related threads in Elitistjerks, from time to time. And there’s really a lot of great information there, but somehow I get a bit overwhelmed by it and there’s a lot of stuff that are way beyond my comprehension. And I’d really think twice before even daring to ask something there. To answer and share of my own thoughts in such a forum would be definitely be out of the question.

Maybe there already exists some kind of Plus-dps community for mages, warlocks, shadowpriests and other classes who rather fight by spells than by kicking and stabbing mobs, it’s just that I haven’t heard about it. Then I guess they should market it a bit better.

Well maybe there is when I think about it. The inofficial forum at worldofwar.net, which Gnomeageddon enthusiastically wrote about a while ago. It's just that they demand you to register just to get reading rights and I've never bothered to do it (and seriously can't understand why they do), so I can't tell.

On the other hand, thinking closer about it: would I really, really like to have a parallell dps forum to Plusheal? When would I ever get time to visit it, and would I really write in it? If I did, it would probably mean I would have less time to take part of the treasures already offered to us from the blogosphere – to visit, read and comment on other mage blogs – to contribute to our ongoing discussions. Is that what I want?

Discussions in forums and discussions in blogs aren’t quite the same thing. Since I’ve com into blogging myself, I’ve found that I many times prefer blogs to forums. If a forum may be cosy, a blog is even cosier. It’s easier to keep up with the writings from someone you like and trust if you have all of the writing collected in a personal blog, rather than sprawled out in a bunch of discussion threads.

Of course it would be nice to have a forum available where I could go with my questions and expect easy available nice answers from experienced mages. But if the price of that would be that Armageddon´s Coming, Critical QQ, Spicytuna, I Sheep things, Automagica, Frost is the new black and other mage bloggers I’ve come to appreciate would produce less posts for their own blogs, I wouldn’t be willing to pay it. I’d rather see you as blog writers than as forum contributors, to be honest.

So maybe I’m not so envious after all. I’d rather have a mage blogging community that rocks than a brand new forum. Or it’s just like in the fable by Aesop, where the fox watches some grapes he cannot reach and dismisses them as “sour”.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Warlock's Den:
http://wowmb.net/

Hi :)

Nibuca
http://chicanery.fibergeek.com/

Anonymous said...

Damn, you must have picked up the same Gnome Goggles of Jealously that I did....

But I have come to similar conclusions to you I guess.
1) I don't have the infrastructure or knowledge to host such a monster.
2) I don't have the time to run such a monster
3) Doing so would take me away from the Blogs I love, and maybe dilute what is already out there.

But it is a problem. EJ is great, but they state quite clearly that they aren't a Leveling a Mage type forum, they are discussing skills and abilities at the top end.

The Unofficial forums are great, but have been a bit slow lately, and as you have discovered, close down to members only during periods of stress (high traffic)

I occasionally come across Mage wiki's out there, but they all seem to have run out of mana pre-BC.

So for now I guess the mage bloggers will just have to weave a web that makes it easy for the curious

Darkhorse said...

I think we need one, and I don't think there would be any negative impact on the wow mage / caster dps blogosphere.

Similar to the plusheals forum, a plusdps forum would be complimentary to the DPS blogs and make information more accessible to more people as well as opening more lines of communication.

I will see what I can do.

No promises.

Anonymous said...

Noooo.... don't do it Zupa!
I was arguing AGAINST it, my intention wasn't to put any new ideas into your head.

But maybe you're right. I guess time will show what's the way to go - forum community or blog community. Or if there's enough of people who want to devote time to keep running both of it.

I hope - and think - I'll be blogging for a while. But I seriously don't know if I'd be able to put much time into forums.

I'd probably end up using it as a bank of ideas for new blogposts.

So... if you really want to, go for it!

Anonymous said...

We could call it PlusFire ;-)

OK, maybe OpenFire

krizzlybear said...

OpenFire sounds like an awesome name. If I wasn't such a cryophile that like I am now, I would have respecced cookie-cutter a long time ago and started a blog using that kind of name.

As for the PlusDPS idea, all the power to y'all if it gets pulled off. I wouldn't mind lookin' around. But IMO, I would rather see a PlusDefense for tanks go up first before us. No offense to us, but I am led to believe that tank shortages on realms are simply due to the overwhelming responsibility of that role in a group in the eyes of newcomers, that they're turned away from it.

You can get away with one underperforming DPS class in a pug, but not as much (if at all) with a tank or healer.

Shwitz44 said...

http://forums.subcreation.net/
Intelligent Mage Discussion

Enjoy.

Anonymous said...

Ah, lovely Josh! I think I've seen that one ages ago, but I had forgotten about it. So a pure mage discussion forum with a nice atmosphere probably already seems to exist. Remains to think if the dps classes have issues in common that we should discuss cross-classvise?

Maybe not...? We've got some competition in our blood haven't we? Mages for the mages and nobody else... Keep those locks at a safe distance... :)

Shwitz44 said...

Oh, and for krizzlybear:
http://www.tankspot.com/

Tank discussion, administered by the legendary warrior Ciderhelm of official forum stickies, and moderated by several of the finest tanks known to Azeroth.

There are a lot of dedicated forums out there - Warlock's Den for locks, Subcreation is for mages, retpaladin.com and maintankadin for paladins, tankspot for tanks of all classes, Shadowpanther for rogues, shadowpriest.com for shadow priests, the BRK forums for hunters... the list goes on. That's just off the top of my head.

krizzlybear said...

oh, right. i remember subcreation. i don't go anymore because it's blocked off at work. go figure.

Andy Salisbury said...

Hey Larisa, hm it crashes? That's odd, perhaps it's lightbox?

Let me see if I can figure it out, and let me know if this keeps happening.

Thanks!
-Andy