How to make flamebait-free Paladin threads.

Publicado por pezz

So this thread got me to do some digging in other class forums, and it's true: we do have more flaming and locked threads than the others do. And I decided it's probably because we get a lot of really stupid threads, which after a while can try anyone's patience. I also want to apologize for being one of those regulars who loses his patience, but I believe I'm justified in saying there's good reason around here. Maybe it's because Paladins are the flavor of the year by this point, so even the people who spend hours in Stormwind begging for Stockade boosts at level 35 have managed to hit 80 now, but in any case I think we need a guide for how to not make a terrible, terrible thread. Hopefully this will also cut down on all of the bizarre flame wars as well. I'm just going to go through several types of threads and behaviors that tend to lead to thread locks below:

1. Read the stickies, and do some other research first

Those of us who write any kind of guide spend a decent amount of time on them. We do that to make sure there's plenty of information in them. If you have a really basic question about rotations, gems, enchants, various caps and minimums, etc., chances are that your really simple question is answered in the stickies, right under a big bold heading about exactly what you asked about. But we aren't perfect. We don't get everything. Believe it or not, I am not the only person with any knowledge of holy paladins anywhere that has ever lived. Sure, I wrote the guide that happens to be on Wowhead about them, but I am not the only other holy paladin in existence. Plenty of them hang out and discuss their class on plenty of other good sites. Same goes for any other kind of paladin, or any other kind of character. If you don't even bother to do a simple Google search for yourself before posting your thread, why should we do it for you? If you really can't find anything and it's not in the stickies, there's still no need to make a brand new thread. Ask in the relevant sticky, that way the right people can see your question right away, and maybe it will get added to the front of the thread so in the future people with your particular question can have it answered.

2. Rate my paladin/spec/gear/whatever. Closely related to can I tank/heal/dps insert instance here?

No one is going to spend a half an hour pouring over every enchant and gem you have, looking at ilvls, putting gear through rawr or any rating system in the stickied thread here and compiling a list of pieces you should be shooting for in various instances and ending up with a guide you can follow to become awesome in 12 easy steps in 6 to 8 weeks. If there's any glaring faults, we'll point them out. If you have a horrible piece of gear, someone will probably recommend an easy-to-get upgrade. If you don't know what content you're capable of handling PvE wise, there's a couple guidelines in the form of profiles made up and numbers listed in the various guides, as well as resources around the web such as be.imba.hu and wow-heroes.com. You'll get a faster answer if you do five minutes of research yourself rather than post a thread and wait a couple hours for someone to get around to responding to you.

3. I came up with this new idea! Do you think it will work?

Almost certainly not. Be prepared for this answer. There's been one remotely viable new idea in a year at the very least discussed on this board, that being Protribution. And even that doesn't seem to be better than just being ret (as far as I know). Your idea is not hugely, amazingly better than anything ever thought of before. Accept that. If you think it's interesting and you don't see any glaring faults, by all means post it, but it would be remiss of anyone who can see why it would fail not to tell you when you come here asking how it is. If you get this response you have two choices: 1) Accept it gracefully or 2) Provide some cogent, logical argument, preferably with statistics to back it up to refute the claim of 'it sucks'. Despite these limited choices what people usually do is: 1) Get defensive and lash out and/or 2) Pull random, obviously fake numbers out of their butts. Don't do this. It won't end well for you or your thread, and at the end of the day you'll still be wrong.

3a. When I say provide statistics to back up your idea, check your numbers and check their context first. If you did some amazing amount of damage or whatever, tell us the context. Did you come up with a new spec that gives 20k Holy Shock crits? Big deal, if you needed every raid buff known to man and a few gimmicky boss specific buffs. Did you make some amazing holy tank spec that you've been breezing through heroics with? Big deal, if your dps are all idiots pulling 9k dps and your healer's ToGC 25 geared. Some of the better theorycrafters on this forum can come up with very very close estimates of what you're capable of doing in various gear sets, and their first assumption is going to be that you either made a mistake or are intentionally trying to mislead us. If you've come up with an idea that seems to be worth something, check and double check that you have useful data.

4. English

These are English speaking boards. You do not have to be a literary genius, but you need to have a working grasp of punctuation and capitalization at the very least, and if you're a bad speller or English is not your first language, use a dictionary some times. It is not our job to sit there and get a headache deciphering your post, only to find out 10 minutes and 6 motrin later you asked a really stupid and simple question. Also remember this is not a raid where commands and communication have to be given quickly, and this is not IM where it's a real, immediate conversation over the internet. You have unlimited time to construct your posts, use it. Think through what you want to say, organize your thoughts, proofread a couple of times. You have absolutely no reason not to, and it's disrespectful to just turn your keyboard sensitivity up and vomit all over it and post whatever comes out of that.

Also: ellipses (...) are NOT what you put at the end of a sentence. You only need one period at the end of a sentence.

5. Be polite

We literally had a thread earlier about how someone knew a paladin who was too stuck up to ask for help, because all paladins are stuck up. In broken, nigh-incomprehensible English, he then asked for help with his friend's performance in a raid. This is not a good idea. We're rarely jerks without cause but we don't give jerks second chances most of the time. Be polite, be respectful, if someone proves you wrong be glad you learned something new. Insulting them doesn't make their good, logical arguments why you're wrong any less true, I promise you.

6. Provide enough information

This should be a no brainer, but if you want help with your character, we need to be able to see your character. If you want to know why your paladin tank couldn't hold aggro, at the very least tell us what he was tanking. And I don't mean 'have an out of date Wowhead profile buried in your profile somewhere while asking for help' I mean 'have several pertinent links right at the top of your post with big shiny arrows pointing at them with bold, underlined text saying 'HERE IS MY CHARACTER.' It is not our job to go and find this information for you. Strictly speaking, it isn't our job to tell you how to play, so be glad we are.

Publicado por pezz

7. Grow a slightly thicker skin

Strictly speaking, 'you are just really sensitive about everything' is not a good excuse for being a jerk to you. But if you post a really, really, really stupid question after ignoring everything I've written here, or you make an amusing spelling mistake, etc., chances are someone is going to make a lighthearted jab at you. Accept this. Sometimes people communicate by a bit of friendly mocking. Try to take it with good humor. The wrong thing to do, and the reason most of the locked threads here get locked, is to absolutely fly off the handle at someone who made a small joke at your expense, and start a vendetta that ruins any chance of the thread staying relevant to the original post. No one will like you for that, and it will achieve nothing. Accept a joke at your expense every once in a while, learn something for it, and you'll be a much better person. Plus, if you prove you can do this, and you prove you learn things when taught them, you will receive respect or at the very least civil tolerance.

8. Accept polite criticism

Related to #7, some people have such thin skins that they can't tell the difference between a slightly mocking tone and constructive, polite criticism. In my opinion, both are perfectly valid methods of teaching people things (satire has the aim of fixing a perceived problem and I'm a great believer in satire) but I can understand that not everyone likes being made fun of. However, if someone says 'you would get better dps replacing those Outlands AP gems with Northrend Str gems' in those words, you are NOT being mocked. This is useful information, which 99 times out of a 100 you asked to be provided with. Don't get mad at a person who says that to you, because then no one is going to help you. Why should we, when you flip out and people who are trying to answer your question?

9. Should I tank, heal, or dps? Or should I be a Paladin or <class>?

By asking this, you're asking us which you personally would enjoy doing more. We are not some big, collective conscious that can tap into your brain and find the truths it even keeps locked away from you. We don't know what you prefer to do, or what you enjoy doing. We don't know what your realm and/or guild requires the most unless you tell us, and you rarely do. When we say 'do whatever you enjoy the most' people often accuse us of being unhelpful. We are being unhelpful. However, 'do whatever you enjoy most' is actually the best advice anyone can possibly give you. This is simply not a line of questioning that lends itself to helpful responses.

10. NO, THOSE ARE NOT THE OFFICIAL, FINAL, SET-IN-STONE, LIVE-SERVERS, CATACLYSM TALENTS/SPELLS/RACIALS/ANYTHING.

I have a feeling I'll be seeing a lot of use out of this one.

And I believe that covers most of it. If anyone has anything they want to add, let me know.

Publicado por blademeld

While this is more in-depth, I do have a shorter and similar post in the FAQ.

No as in-depth, because I wanted to make everything in the FAQ short.

Publicado por pezz

Publicado por chase123

Maybe it's because Paladins are the flavor of the year by this point

There's your answer. Same goes for Death Knights.

Publicado por blademeld

Alright, here's hoping that people actually read and follow this.

Publicado por pezz

Maybe it's because Paladins are the flavor of the year by this point

There's your answer. Same goes for Death Knights.

The Death Knight forums aren't as bad. I've checked.

Publicado por 328121

This post was from a user who has deleted their account.

Publicado por svirve

As someone who posts regularly on both the Pally and DK forums, let me tell you: the DK forums get a lot more idiots asking stupid questions, like whether they should use spellpower or not.

We get that too you know.

Publicado por chase123

Maybe it's because Paladins are the flavor of the year by this point

There's your answer. Same goes for Death Knights.

The Death Knight forums aren't as bad. I've checked.

What i meant was that both Paladins and Death knights have been the flavor of the year classes so far. The difference between the paladin and death knight class forums are that the death knight as a class has only been out for a year while the paladin class has been out for 5 years. So what you have in the paladin forums are pre 3.0 paladins arguing with post 3.0 paladins about whos wrong and whos right. You have your "ive been playing paladin since day 1, i know everything" paladin against "liek i heard pallies were op so i rolled one" paladin. Thats where alot of these flame wars stem from.

Publicado por 367141

This post was from a user who has deleted their account.

Publicado por hatman555

That's a thing I like about the FAQ, but these boards have been getting worse lately, I'm going to go through it slowly and talk much louder for a while, repeating myself frequently, to see if that fixes things a bit. Most of the people who post threads that end up locked or in flame wars probably only learn when someone goes through issues very, very, slowly, as far as I can tell.

See that's the problem though. No one reads the stickies. No one who doesn't have 30+ posts on this forum is going to take the time to read what you have written. The threats with the most flames start with people that have 1 post to their name.

The really problem from what I have seen is when pairs of the 100+ posts come here and start up crap with their own replies. Most of our locked threats are because our better posters WANT to flame. I fight with Quest, BrokenWing fights with PessimiStick, and these are just to name a few.

If you want to cut down on the locked threads in this forum, talk to the +100 guys.

For my part, I have really been trying hard not to hit the quote button on anything Quest says. First, I know it accomplishes nothing, because I'm not going to be able to change the way he is on these boards. And secondly, it just adds more fuel to his flame fire, and too his ego.

If a post comes up and it was one of common, "can i do this?" or "is my gear good doing this?" Just link them the FAQ's and tell them that they will be better of looking for themselves. That they would LEARN more and UNDERSTAND there question better if they did some work. That's how I did it, and that's why, in my opinion, know so much about my class.

Cheers,
Hat

Publicado por Quest

/foams at mouth

Publicado por hatman555

/foams at mouth

*sigh*

Publicado por 260814

This post was from a user who has deleted their account.

Publicado por chizhik

Publicado por hatman555

Serious question - I'm not trolling or baiting anyone into a flame war. What kind of posts are welcome on paladin boards, then? Pezz's post excludes just about every common class-related question. Information is out there - Google it, Wowhead it, use Rawr, and read EJ's forums.

So what kind of discussion is encouraged? Take math away and EJ boards have the same problem: there is nothing anybody can post (technically speaking, anyway) that wouldn't result in getting an infraction . It works for them, but I always thought of Wowhead forums as milder version of EJ - a forum where people are actually allowed to ask for help as pertains to their particular situation, and get more than "lol google it" or "use Rawr n00b" back.

I totally agree with you man. I think people should post any questions they have. If people read the stickies they will get alot of answers but if they post a question and someone knows the exactly link to the answer then its answered and that's it, we move on.

I don't think that "protribution" PVP is the idea of the year. I think that the game is constantly changing and paladins are such a versatile class that there are many many more things that we can do in quests / heroics / and raids that people have not thought off.

So post your ideas and questions, because something you think of could be obvious to some, but not to others. and those who truly, truly know the class, can sometimes even think of how to make something work with a question or idea posting on these threads.

Cheers,
Hat

Publicado por pezz

I'm not saying don't post. I'm saying 1) you will probably find the information faster looking for it yourself, 2) we are not going to basically rebuild your character for you. We might help with one or two things if you ask for help but that's probably about it and most importantly 3) if you ask for advice, make sure you can take it.

Publicado por Quest

So what kind of discussion is encouraged? Take math away and EJ boards have the same problem: there is nothing anybody can post (technically speaking, anyway) that wouldn't result in getting an infraction . It works for them, but I always thought of Wowhead forums as milder version of EJ - a forum where people are actually allowed to ask for help as pertains to their particular situation, and get more than "lol google it" or "use Rawr n00b" back.

I think intelligent discussion comes from those that take time to read at least the guide pertaining to their interests on this forum. Not others, at least here. Asking things like 'what is the best stats for rets and whats ret hit cap?' is flame-bait, because people took time to put that in an FAQ and put it in a sticky that tells you flat out to read me before you post.

All the basic points are already answered. Its obvious when people ask questions wither they took the time to read any of the guides or not. I mean, they aren't long guides. 75% of what it takes to tank in this game is covered in 10 min of reading the link in my sig. The rest is details that are learned by asking in the forums here, and general experience.

I usually answer stat weighting questions too. Mistakes we all make that need a reminder and a second pair of eyes. 'Look at my gear' threads. Getting a second opinion on stuff, things that are not constant or static like def rating for raid/5man, or hit caps.

Now if you want to pay me by the hour........

Publicado por 358147

This post was from a user who has deleted their account.

How to make flamebait-free Paladin threads.

Escribir respuesta