I would disagree, the game played just fine without forums in the past and would survive going forward. Does the forums have benefits, yet but as egamma put, are they worth the trouble if it always breaks down to insults? The simple answer is no even with moderation you eventually have people that will continue to press and press until even the moderators say screw it, i'm done. The debate is whether its really good for gameplay and honestly imo its not, it takes away from it.
Stabbity, I did not miss the point of the roleplay forum, let me ask you a question as it just popped into my head, what if roleplays went island wide. That may not fix what you want but it is another option to consider
That's a terrible solution. Some roleplays deserve mass distribution, and some don't. The wiki is good for preserving things, but who wants to have to dig through a thousand dull pages to find one good roleplay? The forum provides a good way to read new, interesting roleplays you might not otherwise ever come across.
Yes the game functioned fine for years without the forum. I'm aware. I was there. However, I feel the forum adds only positives. The amount of good content completely outweighs the very few incidents were it comes to insults. Anyone saying the forum is nothing but bile and insults and flame wars is wrong, and is exhibiting a terrible bias. Besides, moderation is only a part of the solution. We have the magistrates and titans for a reason. If someone continues to abuse the forum, open a magistrate case. The social contract still applies on the forums, and the only problem I see is a lack of enforcement. When you have a MAGISTRATE going around and openly accusing a realm of cheating for months, there is a problem. I was at the point where if I saw it one more time I was going to take it to the magistrates for repeated abuse, but then the locals were closed.
I challenge anyone here to go through some of the top local threads and compare the number of flames to the number of non flame posts. You're all exaggerating a problem and shutting your ears to any possible solutions that aren't "close it all down" because you're too set in your ways of "forums are bad".
The topic is stopping forummaster from destroying battlemaster, which is frankly, dumb. From what I've seen the forum hasn't detracted one bit from the game of battlmaster, and I have yet to see any evidence that this is the case.
Present evidence that the locals are harming Battlemaster, and I'll listen. Otherwise this entire thread has been just a waste of space.
