What is the point of these forums now?

"JediKnight_MarkRyan;c-1607048" wrote:

"JacenRoe;c-1607035" wrote:
The point of this forum is complaining.

Exactly. These forums are toxic. If folks here were pleasant and fun to work with perhaps they’d interact here more. When people are toxic the best thing to do is ignore and reduce interaction with them.

I’m sorry, but this is nonsense. Every game that has ever had an official forum has people who complain, and devs are never going to please everyone, but there is nothing unique about the player base in this game that makes the forums toxic. The forums are toxic because they are horribly managed, communication from the devs is non-existent and the community’s feedback is ignored like no other game I’ve seen. I’m not blaming the mods for forum management, btw. They do as good a job as you could ever expect from volunteer moderators.

I played The Old Republic MMO for the first couple of years from launch. I participated in its forums. People complained about balance or whatever else, but the forums had a different atmosphere because the devs listened and communicated. They patched things when the balance was messed up. They offered legitimate rewards for completing raid content. They extensively beta tested content updates before releasing them. When the consensus was clear that a change to something like rewards was horribly received, they responded. That game was far from perfect, but it at least felt like the devs cared what players thought. That is totally absent here.

Maybe this has something to do with the business model. An MMO like Old Republic relies on subscribers and then later on vanity chests. A mobile freemium game is far more dependent on whales. Perhaps the predatory business model feeds the indifference from the developers. But it is grossly unfair to blame the players for a bad atmosphere on the forums when those who do give feedback are ignored and repeated promises to improve communication are broken.