Feedback: Official Forums

[Luna.1598]

I think that removing the avatars for thumbs up/down is a good call. Now if we could just have a background that's a bit easier on the eyes.

[Exedore.6320]

I liked the old forums better. Desktop view btw.

* Thin grey text on very light background hurts my eyes. Please use a bigger font or give us customization options.

* Auto-format in reply box is getting annoying. I can add my own bullet points, TYVM.

* "Draft Saved" keeps popping up on top of my post while I'm trying to proofread.

[Exedore.6320]

> @"Miss Lana.5276" said:

> From what I've seen the posts don't show the date that they were posted, only the time. This could affect the amount of necro'd posts in the future, and will be irritating all around. I'm always checking the patch notes and if I can't see that there was a new post yesterday/today I will be unlikely to read it.

You have to hover over the post time and it will display the date. I'd much rather have both listed without the hover, though.

 

[Senritsu.9271]

I don't believe there was any "trying to be too fancy" you all must remember even if you give these suggestions, Arenanet may or may not give the changes, it's ultimately their call. Also to properly read through posts so we are not trying to post duplicate issues or concerns in the forums need to be done, otherwise the minor issues will be lost within the cluster of major ones.

[Zoltar MacRoth.7146]

Can I get an option to disable that warning that it's going to show an external image. I accept the responsibility when I use the forums. You don't need to keep checking with me.

[MrsAngelD.6971]

* Having a time limit on forum posts or comments at all for that matter is a bit ridiculous. I don't understand why that has become the "in" thing to have on discussions, whether we're referring to comments on articles or on a discussion board.

* Having a ranking system and gating "privileges" behind the various ranks does nothing to promote a good gaming community. The point of forums for games is to discuss the game not require already paying customers to have to earn ranks just to unlock basic features.

* Please provide a dark theme.

* My last thought, is why not allow users to chose a face shot of their character as an avatar. Could you not make use of an internal API to allow this function?

[Neural.1824]

Removing the avatars that have liked/disliked is a huge boon to the readability of the forum. This is not to say that it was a bad idea, but there needs to be another way to do that.

I'd like to see markers on threads that let the user know it's a thread they've replied to. So far I'm not seeing this.

The "privilege" system for unlocking forum features is absurd. JustTrogdor nailed it right on the head. Leave the mastery system in the game.

We need a dark theme, or, at the very least, drop the overall color of the background to an off-white.

Would love to see more avatar options, or the ability to choose a character portrait from in game as the avatar (the character select/party icons).

 

[izari.8203]

Mobile - iOS 10 Safari

 

Two factor doesn't work. It would not accept my code. Tried on another mobile browser (Opera) and works like a gem! Just throwing that out there.

[Zoltar MacRoth.7146]

So.... uhm.... where does one find a list of the badges and how to get them? I'm not asking for the completionist in me.. nooooo... it's for a friend. Well, more of an acquaintance. I hardly know him. In fact, he's a stranger to me. He's... uh... stranger who wants to know what badges there are.. yup.. weird, but that's him. Sooo... about those badges?

[The Hydrating Nuke.3206]

I have nothing to say other than the fact that I am glad I have the opportunity to tell you all that I have nothing to say!

[Pittcrew.6592]

> @"Zoltar MacRoth.7146" said:

> So.... uhm.... where does one find a list of the badges and how to get them? I'm not asking for the completionist in me.. nooooo... it's for a friend. Well, more of an acquaintance. I hardly know him. In fact, he's a stranger to me. He's... uh... stranger who wants to know what badges there are.. yup.. weird, but that's him. Sooo... about those badges?

 

Currently, a decent way to see some of them is to click on Gaile Gray's profile (https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/profile/discussions/Gaile%20Gray.6029) and just look through the badges she has. They give a short description of what you need to get them. So far, it mainly seems like just getting lots of Helpfuls/Thumbs Ups on your posts.

[Zoltar MacRoth.7146]

> @Pittcrew.6592 said:

> > @"Zoltar MacRoth.7146" said:

> > So.... uhm.... where does one find a list of the badges and how to get them? I'm not asking for the completionist in me.. nooooo... it's for a friend. Well, more of an acquaintance. I hardly know him. In fact, he's a stranger to me. He's... uh... stranger who wants to know what badges there are.. yup.. weird, but that's him. Sooo... about those badges?

>

> Currently, a decent way to see some of them is to click on Gaile Gray's profile (https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/profile/discussions/Gaile%20Gray.6029) and just look through the badges she has. They give a short description of what you need to get them. So far, it mainly seems like just getting lots of Helpfuls/Thumbs Ups on your posts.

 

Clever. You're right - it's mostly those, although.. photogenic? Hmmm.. must be for putting in your own piccie or something. Thanks for the help.

 

EDIT: Yup. It's for choosing an icon for your profile in Preferences.

[biofrog.1568]

As mentioned, the Draft Saved popup needs to be in the usual notification positions. Maybe add an account setting for Desktop Notifications? They are native and easy to implement in modern browsers these days.

 

Hmm my Scrollbar Anywhere addon isn't working either - it's used to right-click drag scroll the page up/down. I haven't checked yet, but is there a right-click handler in the forum pages that is taking control instead? Works fine on the main site pages (and pretty much all other pages I go to).

[Charrbeque.8729]

Being automatically signed out of the forums/website due to "inactivity" after about a half hour or so doesn't seem right.

 

It would be nice if there was an option in preferences to turn off automatic draft saving. When going to 'My Drafts' by clicking the gear icon at the top of the page, it isn't obvious you can delete saved drafts you decided not to post. You need to hover your mouse over the saved draft to get a black 'X' to appear on the right of the draft. Clicking this 'X' will delete the draft. It would be nice if each saved draft would have a red lettered link that says 'Discard' or 'Delete' and then give a prompt asking if you're sure you want to discard/delete the draft. As it is right now there is no prompt. So if you have multiple drafts you could end up deleting one you meant to keep to finish later.

 

I don't understand the need for a rank up system for "behaving" ourselves on the forums. Do we actually earn anything for the game, like a special title to display on our characters? It seems rather pointless, other then to encourage players to have nothing but happy polite opinions. Trolling is one thing, but players should be allowed to give their honest opinions when they feel strongly about something. It could discourage players from giving negative feedback when they disagree with changes to the game, or giving their honest response to another posted. In my honest opinion, it's just thought control. Personally I think forum moderation was adequate before. You can't force people to agree on everything and be polite all the time.

 

Edited for typos.

[OriOri.8724]

Some more feedback (sorry that its coming in piecemeal style, been pretty busy all day). While I do think that the excessive whitepsace is a big problem, to me these are bigger problems

 

* When you quote someone, it includes a link to their user profile instead of the comment you are quoting (what the old forums did). Can you possibly change this back or is that not possible? I imagine it should be if you are using the "quote" button underneath a post.

* When you are on a subforum, there is this tiny, grey text underneath a thread title that says "XX new" if there are unread messages in that thread. This is actually great! What is missing is that the thread title actually changes colors (goes to grey if there are no unread messages, back to red if there are). This was much easier to determine at a glance which threads had new messages.

* There is no indication in threads that you have posted in them that I have found yet. I like the old arrow that showed up to the left of a post if you had a made a comment in it. Made it significantly easier to track certain posts, especially when combined with the above mentioned feedback

* There is a working Dev Tracker page, so the top of the main page that includes humongous links to the most recent comments made by ArenaNet employees is not only redundant, its now just a waste of space, a large one at that. Please remove that and just let us use the dev tracker.

[Boogiepop Void.6473]

The new forums don't track topics you have commented on. Unless you start the topic, you get 0 notice, even if the person is responding to you, unless you are quoted. This makes tracking conversations virtually impossible. We need to get a notice, as on the old forums, for when there are new things on topics we have commented on, not to mention a graphical callout so we can easily spot it in a list of topics.

 

Before anyone mentions that technically there is a setting for "Notify me when people comment on discussions I've participated in", yes there is. But instead of telling you once "there is new stuff in this topic", it generates a notification for EVERY RESPONSE INDIVIDUALLY. On popular threads this can quickly add up to hundreds of notifications in only a few hours. I know, because I set that and it notified me nearly a hundred times about this topic right here.

 

Those are currently your only options: no notice or flooded by notices.

[Boogiepop Void.6473]

The Dev tracker doesn't seem to be tracking DEV comments, just comments in threads that have EVER had a dev comment. For example, this comment has just moved this thread to the top of the dev tracker, even though I am not a dev ad there have been no dev comments in several pages. This is not how a dev tracker should work.

[Hawkfeather.2071]

After browsing a bit these are my main reactions

* Avatars are nifty, but pretty much pointless clutter if they aren't unique. Either give us access to something like the character portraits from the in-game character select screen so avatars can all be different, or get rid of them completely (or make them super tiny if you really want them).

* The posts are way too wide. It requires you to move your eyes across the entire screen, and with things like the colored avatars to the side and bright red buttons below, you basically get eye fatigue and give up halfway across the screen in favor of looking at the other bright aspects around the text. I've had to zoom way out to condense the text in a more central location, but then everything is really small so that's not so great either. And is it just me or is the text color sort of grey? Not so great for readability

* In typing this up I've added "the [Draft saved] popup is super annoying" to my reactions

* I've also spent forever rereading this a million times because being locked out of editing after 15 minutes is too much pressure lol

 

Definitely think there's potential here, but it absolutely needs tweaking. I'm not sure how I feel about the rank and rating systems, but I'm willing to give them a shot. The forum just needs to be easier to read.

[Cronos.6532]

Please don't keep the low-resolution, up-scaled avatars on the side of posts. They're great, but use images that are large enough so they aren't blurry.

 

If you're not going to redo the assets, use waifu2x to upscale the art and make it still look pretty or something. It's a pain to use userstyles to fix this.

[Cronos.6532]

> @LucianDK.8615 said:

> Not a fan of the new forum style. The posts looks -extremely- cluttered together and it feels hard to catch individual posts with a glance, because there is not enough distance between them, or missing much more visible divide between them so you clearly can tell each post apart.. I feel i have to squint to focus on indivual posts now, i am thinking my forum use is going to go drastically down now.

 

Compactness is good.

[Cronos.6532]

Oh dear, there's no automerge. That's not good.

[Darlgon.9273]

> @"Gaile Gray.6029" said:

> Hey again,

>

> Taking your feedback on board, we've disabled avatars related to reactions. The reaction system remains, and we appreciate your sharing thoughts on various posts, but we no longer will see the wave of images across the bottom of a post.

>

> You know it's going to be a problem when a single post shows three **rows** of images in just 6 hours! =) And this is something that was not readily apparent in our testing, it only became noticeable when you guys dove in and reacted, reviewed, and shared your thoughts. So thanks for that feedback!

>

> We'll continue to review and make decisions on other input and suggestions over time.

 

Thanks for making the icons go bye-bye.

 

Two more things.

 

For some reason, when a player quotes a Dev post, it shows up in the Dev tracker. When I hit the ANet on the thread, it takes me to that players post, not the Anet comment. That is just silly.

 

Also, how do players track multiple ANet posts in one thread? I dont see a way. Right now, its all in or nothing, with each time I hit ANet, it goes to the last comment, either an original ANet post or a player quoting a post earlier in the thread.

[Rauderi.8706]

We could really use an option to reduce the line spacing and maximum line length.

[nottsgman.8206]

I haven't read all the thread (that would be insane), but I do have to agree with others saying that there is too much white space. also not sure if it is the font, the white, or the almost black colour, but reading here hurts my eyes after a while.

 

would be nice to have a way to see when you've clicked boards (like the bold on the old forums), or have the boards tell you when there are new posts in those areas. right now it all looks like a bunch of red text, and I have no idea where I've been, or if there is even anything new there since the last time I clicked (not just the last post posted in).

[Kumion.7580]

I'm having a very hard time reading so much red text on bright white. Night mode, PLEASE. I can hardly imagine how rough this colour scheme is on folks with eye issues or dyslexia; red text is about the worst choice. From Learning Disabilities Association: http://www.ldau.org/ld-facts/guidelines-for-font-size-color/

 

Can we get a longer timer on that "draft saved" pop-up? It feels like it's coming up every 10 seconds or so and it blocks my typing. Better yet, nix the pop-up entirely.

 

The segmenting of comments is messy. The broken lines mostly serve to highlight a username and feature a very large, non-personalized icon. Furthermore, the icons are offset from those highlighting lines, which bugs the gremlin inside me that wants smooth linear alignments. I would prefer solid lines that go across the entire page or boxes surrounding individual comments and user names in order to make a clearer deliniation.