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”.