[GENERAL] Why Were the Subforums Removed?

[Edirr]

[GENERAL] Why Were the Subforums Removed?

Seems like the maintenance update has resulted in all of the subforums for the various chapters being removed and all posts mashed together into one big forum. I would like to know the reasoning behind this change, because it does not seem to make any sense to me. I also note that the Polish forums still have their separate chapter forums.The previous organization into subforums was rather genius, because it allowed participation in the forums even if you had only completed a part of the game, and discussing that part without a significant risk of running into spoilers about further stages. Mashing it all into one forum removes those walls of separation, increases the risk of running afould of spoilers unintentionally and generally results in a bloody annoying forum experience because you may need to slog through a morass of jumbled threads concerning all chapters to find something.And when the topic titles themselves often contain spoilers if they concern a later chapter, it becomes very much like the scene from the Simpsons episode where Homer and Bart come back from watching Empire Strikes Back and as they pass the people queuing to the theater outside, they go "Who would have guessed DV was L's father?" in a loud voice.In any case, if this reorganization and removal of subforums is permanent, I don't think I will participate here anymore. I generally do not read the chapters of a book out of order, nor will I risk doing similar with the game, so staying out will be the only way to make sure of that. I'll keep dropping by from time to time, but as of this writing, it looks unlikely at best. I might come back after I finish the game, but that also looks unlikely at best. Was nice knowing you lot, game widow especially. See you around the wiki.

 

[ifayra]

I agree in some way, cause now it is harder to find what you need and you have to work thru mountains of threads and are permantently in danger of reading something which has to come.The second point is, it will come to a massiv fleed of new threads though they are already written.I would prefer the old chapter grouped threads too, cause it is easier to overview.

 

[username_2061574]

Yes - it would be nice to keep e.g. the chapters (I, II, III, IV, V, prologue, epilogue) subforums; on the othe hand, I like the clear division of "spoiler" and "non-spoiler" sections.

 

[petra_silie]

Maybe right now it's unsual and it needs time to get accustomed to the new layout. For all game related topics there is now one fourm, which is the Story & quest forum. I admit it's a bit hard to survey now because I have to look twice to find back my recent threads of the new topics. But the "Show new replies to your posts" filter and the "Show unread posts since last visit" should help you.The General forum is now the discussion board for common topic around the witcher includind off topic and of course no spoilers there.I admit I will need some time to get used to this new structure as well because it is new. But when I joined this community I had to get used to the former structure too because I was new and the board was new

 

[Edirr]

The problem is that here I would have the most things to contribute, as I have done in the past. But the current structure just means that I won't. Not worth it after the change. We'll see where the general forum goes and maybe I'll participate there. But so far the story/quest section was the only one that held anything for me, aside from the places to make the occasional bug report. The functions you name are going to do bugger-all toward the goal of avoiding spoilers. If the choice is that helping someone else out with some difficult section of the game would entail me being exposed to spoilers, the other guy is just out of luck.

 

[deoren]

I agree in some way, cause now it is harder to find what you need and you have to work thru mountains of threads and are permantently in danger of reading something which has to come.The second point is, it will come to a massiv fleed of new threads though they are already written.I would prefer the old chapter grouped threads too, cause it is easier to overview.

I agree. I really enjoyed the subforums for the same reason: When I was on Act I, I would browse the Act I subforum and wasn't worried about having Act II or beyond spoiled.Now ...

 

[Gamewidow]

also, why did the polish side keep the subforums and not the international ? if it's good for one, why not the other ?

 

[st_ghost]

Due to the low activity in the subfora, the higher ups in the CDP hierarchy decided to scrap them and unfortunately we were in no position to appeal that motion as the facts were stacked against us. Sorry about that.

 

[Edirr]

Okay, thanks for the reply, St_Ghost. If you cared to bring this thread to the attention of the CDPR people, I would appreciate it, because there is also an aspect into this that concerns them directly. See below.Right now, The Witcher is a game that has been out for a fairly long time, so in that respect the elimination of the subforums makes some sense. However, despite its success, the game is still relatively unknown and has a fairly large untapped market segment that is going to be discovering the game now that the EE is out and gives even more than the original one did. Hell, I can easily be counted into the new arrivals segment myself, since I didn't play past the very beginning of Chapter 3 the first time around before my Witcher experience was derailed by the Real World and other commitments. I only got back to it after the EE came out (and which I bought).This sort of board reorganization is going to be very much like a sledgehammer to the face for all the new people and it would not surprise me if many of them were severely pissed off with it. I know I am. Spoilers ruin the game, but sometimes you just need to ask for advice on something, but if you accidentally get to read important plot points such as

Spoiler

Azar Javed kills Raymond and impersonates him in Chapter 2

by accident, it's just another one of those Simpsons moments. It's absolutely counterproductive from the marketing perspective and from the user experience perspective.By contrast, segmenting by chapter avoids this and encourages people to participate already from early on. I'm an example of that too, jumped in very soon precisely due to the previous organization. This issue is further compounded by the fact that while the storyline in The Witcher is ultimately linear in the sense of going from beginning to end, the path it takes to the end is very variable, with (as I understand it) three somewhat different endings and all the permutations of choice leading to them along the way. This increases replayability far beyond what is common for a typical game with an outwardly similar setup. And consequently the impact of early spoilerization is that much more pronounced. For me personally, that means essentially not coming back until I've played the game through with all the endings. I should be done with that sometime around 2010 or 2011, maybe, since I have other interests and obligations too.If people do not want to get spoilered, they have to avoid the forum where they need to go for help until they have finished the game and therefore no longer need the help anymore. If the problem they are facing is one they just aren't equipped to handle for whatever reason, whether it be trying the wrong tactic, overlooking something or failing to think of alternative solutions, they will abandon the game and badmouth it as unplayable. Just taking a look at the Beast Help thread or the various Chapter 2 blacksmith and investigation threads should be plenty confirmation of this. On those occasions, it has taken some serious effort to get some users to calm down and nowhere near everyone who buys the game registers on the forums.It happens to be an actual statistical fact that a person will tell of a good service experience to maybe five or six people if the provider of the service is lucky. Poor or abysmal service will be advertised to 20 people on average. That's some scary numbers right there if the goal is to get more good exposure. I work customer service (tech support) over the phone where I only get to deal with customers who have problems. They are often very angry and very often I get all kinds of litanies on just how bad our service is, which they have already told to all their friends and acquaintances. When I actually solve their problem for them, which I often do, I get astonished compliments and the customer being surprised that they got good service or even excellent service, but at that point it's just repairing damage incurred earlier and it usually does not undo all of it since the negative perceptions got wider coverage than the final good service.The Witcher forums, and in no small part the story/quests forum is very much a marketing and even more a support tool for CDPR and a reflection on the quality of service their customers get. With the forum reorganization, the service for international customers just got significantly worse. Actively degrading your own tools is something that I simply cannot understand. Even if the forums sit there with fairly low activity, that should not be a problem from a forum administrative perspective. Or from server load side either since the amount of DB traffic would be the same anyway.In any case, that should be about the size of it. Expect to see me comment on this thread, maybe a bit somewhere else, but otherwise I'm as good as gone from here. From being one of my "must keep open in browser tab and regularly check" forum, the Witcher forums as a whole just went to a "Meh, can't really be bothered to give a shit" forum. Whether other people agree or disagree with quite as strong terms as that, I don't know, but the comments already posted indicate that there is an impact. How large it is going to be remains to be seen.In any case, I wish CDPR the best of luck and everyone else here as well. This thread is not sour grapes (not all of it anyway), but an expression of a point of view from someone who actually cares about the success of The Witcher.

 

[Daerdin.435]

Thank you a lot Edirr for this post. It has been forwarded to the CDPR guys.

 

[lovely_psycho]

:hmmm: The spoiler issue is, I think, quite relevant. I've been involved in a number of game forums over the years for various devs or publishers, and now that I cast my mind back, it seemed fairly standard practice for the subforums of a previous game be collapsed once the new game was announced/coming. So I guess I wasn't surpirsed when this happened, although given the relatively recent time since the EE was announced it seems logical that some people would still be on their first playthrough.

Even if the forums sit there with fairly low activity, that should not be a problem from a forum administrative perspective. Or from server load side either since the amount of DB traffic would be the same anyway.

That is true. However, there's another facet to consider: slow-moving or empty forums look bad. You have a very good point, in that if people are worried their run will get spoiled, they may be less likely to participate. However, the other point is if people see a slow moving or dead forum, they may be less likely to join, figuring nothing's happening or they won't get answered anyway. It's not necessarily a given, of course, just something to consider.What interesting times

 

[Daerdin.435]

So, to cut story short, lovely_psycho - there is no black or white, only choices and the consequences Right?

 

[Edirr]

Even if the forums sit there with fairly low activity, that should not be a problem from a forum administrative perspective. Or from server load side either since the amount of DB traffic would be the same anyway.

That is true. However, there's another facet to consider: slow-moving or empty forums look bad. You have a very good point, in that if people are worried their run will get spoiled, they may be less likely to participate. However, the other point is if people see a slow moving or dead forum, they may be less likely to join, figuring nothing's happening or they won't get answered anyway. It's not necessarily a given, of course, just something to consider.What interesting times

You do have a point there about how it looks. The problem with a story-driven game like The Witcher is that you usually have to trade one off for the other. The thing is, from a casual glance, the existence of the child forums did not give the impression of necessarily moving slowly, as some forum or another was constantly getting new posts. I've been involved in my share of communities and as long as it's easy to separate story from the other stuff, collapsing forums is usually an easy thing to do and doesn't cause a lot of disruption. In the case of the story/quest forum(s), it's not so.From my perspective, the change here looks like CDPR turned this into this. The first link is actually a distillation of the important stuff in the second and making it required slogging through all of the second link (compare the amount of green text). Right now, trying to find any specific thing in the story quest forums is much like doing exactly that, with everything jumbled together, whereas even if we did not have a completely organized system, we had smaller haystacks to search that allowed us to stay in our own respective corners for as long as we chose. An even better comparison for the Dom3 stuff would be the additional manuals before a makeover (jumble) and after it (categorized organization), but there are no online copies of those that I could link to. Neither one is 100% accurate because there is no gradually unfolding story element to Dom3 as there is in Witcher, but that was the easiest one that came to mind.I guess I see things more from the point of view of ease of access to information, because of my experiences and tendencies. In my viewpoint it is more crucial than the supposed gain from the forum merge for the reasons I outlined earlier. However, I do acknowledge that my own viewpoint is obviously not the only correct one and certainly far from the most relevant here, so I welcome this discussion. It is important to be exposed to other points of view, and the point you made had not even occurred to me.Daerdin, quite so. I believe we are, shall we say, exploring the ramifications of those choices and wondering whether they can be changed later...

 

[lovely_psycho]

So, to cut story short, lovely_psycho - there is no black or white, only choices and the consequences Right?

I see what you did thar I likes, I likes

The thing is, from a casual glance, the existence of the child forums did not give the impression of necessarily moving slowly, as some forum or another was constantly getting new posts.

Ah, I like this, we're learning stuff See, for me, I do look at the timestamps on posts and threads, so it's always immediately apparent to me when a subforum has no traffic for a while (even if the others around it do). I guess the moral of that story is that the browsing habits are different for most everyone, and ultimately I guess the forum design can only hope to hit as many targets as it can.I'm not actually disagreeing with your points, by the way, no need to explain yourself to me. Apologies if I didn't make that clear earlier I'm harmless. Crazy, but harmless And I was quite comfy before I just wanted to point out that pure DB traffic isn't the only consideration to make when looking at forum design And is it just me, or has the forum design changed again a teensy bit, with index shading and the like? :hmmm: I call shenanigans!

 

[Gamewidow]

i think my forum habits more closely resemble Edirr's ... i got the exact same impression he did.as for shenanigans .. has anyone tested to see if searching has been fixed ? now there is something that badly needed attention (i have not tried) eace:

 

[mardana]

Wow. The forum layout has drastically changed :whatthe: I thought it was a lot easier to traverse when there was a sub or child board such as ACT I , ACT II , ACT III , ACT IV , ACT IV , etc. You know what I mean? What happend? Man you really have to do some evasive searching to find the topics now. MERGE, MERGE, MERGE, MERGE, holy cow! ???

 

[Corylea.723]

I agree with Edirr; collapsing the subfora into one big mismash takes a big chance of spoiling the game for the very folks that we're hoping to attract -- people new to The Witcher who could be converted into the enthusiastic fans that your long-term forum users are.Beginning writers are taught that very long paragraphs are intimidating, and people are much more likely to dive into your work if you keep your paragraphs short. Putting all of the Story & Quests posts into a single area is like doing away with paragraphs -- who can find what they need or what they're interested in, in such a dense pile of posts. It's like a wall of text that keeps people out, instead of a little paragraph that invites a person in.As for the problem of having a "dead" forum, there are some very loquacious people here. If you tell us that you need for every forum to have a new post at least every other day, we'll think of SOMETHING to say.

 

[deoren]

I really do hope they'll reconsider. I still haven't beaten the game yet and would like to continue to browse subforums specific to the Act that I'm currently in. That and be able to help others who are having issues in Acts I've already completed. The latter I'd say I have the most interest in.

 

[Corylea.723]

I find myself coming here less frequently and participating a lot less, now that the fora have been collapsed into one big mishmash. Somehow, it just doesn't seem like as much fun, now that everything's all jumbled together.How about if you start off the new year with a new look -- have subfora, like you used to.

 

[thurauh1]

If you look at how Bioware's forums are organized; they are alle all organized the same way as the forum The Wicther now has been; they have General forum, a Story&Quest forum, and a tech (self help) forum. It works very well, I find. So I find do the organization of these forums the way that they are now.