A lot has been said already by others, I will just add a "few" things :
5D__Ardez, on 20 February 2018 - 10:59 PM, said:
Do you have any specific examples of this so far with TWA? I'd like to ensure that we don't run into any issues like that.
Pretty much every discussion in Discord ends up flooded by an endless flow of comments. When that many people answer to a question/remark, it's impossible to keep track of what is happening. Just take yesterday's Q and A as an example, Zwillinger missed several questions and had to ask someone to copy paste his answer again so he can see it.
The bug thread section in Discord is a nice addition (and devs seems to be quite active in it), but the same thing can happen if a lot of bugs occurr after a patch. It will be impossible to keep track of all of them. To sum it up, unless it's a discussion with less than 5 people, Discord is not a good way to have a discussion (unless you create one channel per thread, as Weskerrr said), either for bugs or (and especially) feedback
Let's talk aboout Reddit now :
Reddit is not a platform I'm familiar with, so I may miss a few things here. But basically, the lack of organization here is outstanding. It lacks subsections, but that can be solved I guess. Add a tavern subforum, a Feeddback subforum (with Gameplay, Factions, UI, and Maps as its subforums, for example) and others for content creators, clans, etc..
Something more concerning is how the comments are organized : the order of the comments is changing according to how many points they get, whereas here, their position is locked, which is very helpful when you come back to a thread. For example, the last time I read this thread, the last comment was Jojo's and therefore, I knew perfectly where to start reading. On Reddit, you can't as the comment can change position. Therefore, it will be a mess for everyone to keep track of a discussion and especially for developers (they will lose a lot of time searching where the comment has been added). You can change the way the comments are organized, but you will still need to search a bit for an answer's answer.
Moreover, the way a discussion is organized (aside from what I just pointed out) makes it hard to read and hard to get the logic or the continuity of the thread and its answers. You have people answering the main thread, then some are answering the answers, some are answering the answer's answer and so on... If I want to make a point by answering to several people, I won't be able to, or it will be hard to make a clean reference to what someone wrote (There is no quote system as far as I know) or I will have to make several and separate answers. Overall, a discussion will lose the intensity and continuation it could have had here on the forums.
The idea of a bug Megathread could be nice, but Reddit doesn't allow this to work. One of the reason is the lack of structure and the fact that the comments are not fixed in terms of position in the thread (see above). The second is that Reddit doesn't have the tools for complete bug reports. As I said before, I'm not familiar with Reddit, but I think that you can't link files (pictures, logs, dxdiag, replays, etc...) which is something that a bug report needs most of the time to allow the devs to see clearly what is the issue. If you can link files, please tell me.
An other issue is still linked to files : you can create (or submit) a discussion with a file, but you can't add text with it. So, how to post feedback with a replay/picture ? The same goes with bugs : how do you want to describe a bug if you can't add a picture/replay and explain what's wrong at the same time ?
Lastly, the last thing that slightly concerns me is that the Reddit section that will serve as forum is not run by WG or CA. Moderators are players which are not neutral to the other players (they can like or not like some players) and therefore could act differently to the same issue caused by two different players. They can forgive someone and ban someone else even though they did the same thing. I hope it won't happen, believe me, but that possibility still bothers and concerns me.
There are not only cons : a pro would be that it will bring a better interaction between players, CA staff and WG staff as well as grouping everyone (aside from CIS, so that's a miss). But the same could have been achieved by grouping the forums and changing adding a few things to encourage interaction between players and developers (like adding CA posts to the WG posts small window on the main page of the forum)
To conclude, I would love to be confident and absolutly certain, to be positive that this decision to close the forums and move to reddit is a good decision. But the high number of cons, compared to the low numbers of pros just shows that it is an awful one. Then, it could happen that it will improve a lot of things, and that I'm too pessimistic here, and that something I would like to happen as the decision probably won't be changed, but the facts exposed here and comments here are showing that it will be the opposite, I'm afraid.
P.S. : As this is supposed to be done for the Community, why didn't you make a poll (one per forum, then group the results) to ask the said Community what they were thinking about this idea ? That would have shown your willingness to intreact with the community as well as having its opinion.
Edited by Quo_usque_pro_victoria, 22 February 2018 - 04:43 PM.
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