Making a forum the best as it can possibly be is always a good thing in my opinion, so I’ve decided to make a post asking fellow forum users what they would would like to see be changed or added to the forums.
If it was me, I’d like to see the addition of strikethrough text. Bold and italics are great, but strikethrough is really something I feel that’s missing.
Also, I’m posting this in the Lounge because I couldn’t really find any category specifically for suggestions to the forums themselves. In fact, that was probably what made me make this post in the first place.
I’d just like for the official forum to be the first point of contact for news and announcements about the game. Instead of having to read through reddit posts or steam forums. Besides that, I’d say this is one of the better designed forums I’ve been on. I like the account progression and general set up.
I’m inclined to agree. Though I have only recently joined these here forums, I’ll take your word for it.
I myself have previously spent time on the League of Legends forums (which had strikethrough text, might I add) in the past, and was disheartened to find out that the devs also much prefer using Reddit as their primary source of communication with the fanbase.
If you, as a company, go out of your way to create an entire forum centered around your game, it would make the most sense to utilize it the most, yeah? Yet it seems Reddit has just become the end all be all of large scale forum-esque communication for both developer and consumer alike.
Either way, it is something that is out of my control, and not a decision for me to make.
I actually think that there should be the option to create a topic with a reddit style system where the intent is solely to respond to the op and not form a discussion.
This could be doubled down by allowing only one reply.
Well, we actually have the power to user a bunch of stuff. Markdown, BBCode, or HTML can all be used to format our text. It’s not immediately intuitive, but there’s a ton possible here. Polls, charts, diagrams… all that jazz.
I don’t think there’d be enough traffic (especially for the console side) to justify that kind of division. Besides, aside from updates (which are named for the platform in the News section anyway), bits of balancing (which get somewhat more in-depth than most of the conversation, are quite specific points and that I haven’t seen much discussion about at all) and a few specific bugs (which need pretty precise description anyway) everything here is platform-agnostic. So splitting the conversation into console and PC sides would also produce a lot of duplicate topics, and ones that would be useful for both sides.
Strikethrough text doesn’t have much practical use, I think. It’s a stylistic choice, usually reserved for humoristic purposes (and the kind of relaxed conversation that prompts that kind of humor is rare here, as you might’ve noticed). If there is a serious use, it’s to show plainly that you made a mistake, acknowledged it and amended the text. That can be done in other ways. I don’t have anything against adding it, of course, but I don’t think there’s any real need for it either.
As for my own wants, I’ll accompany @SmokerT69 here and say that the changes I’d like to see are more in the use of the forum than in its actual properties or capabilities. A shift to the forums being the primary channel of communication, and more conversation with devs (even if it’s restricted to particular, rare threads or a specific section, as their comments have a tendency to hijack threads otherwise) would be welcome changes. In all honesty, I’d actually also like to see a bit better formatting skills on some users, but I think that’s just sort of a pet peeve of mine.
Okay, there is one actual thing I’d sometimes like to see, but it probably wouldn’t end up working like I wanted it to: a Dislike button, to accompany the Likes. Often enough, I find posts that bring nothing to the conversation, are borderline offensive or somehow else disagreeable without deserving an actual flag, or whose points I just disagree with but don’t find anything constructive to say. In those cases, I’d prefer to just put a dislike in and move on. But Reddit (and other places) have shown that those are likely to be used simply to downvote and drown opinions you disagree with, instead of using them constructively.
I think I’ve seen a mention at some point that a lot of those are actually taught somewhere (with a sandbox to test them out), but it’s quite well hidden. I certainly have never happened across it, though I haven’t started specifically looking for it either.