Please don't move retirement threads to Off Topic

mischiefmaker

I discovered today that bonfire01's retirement thread got moved to the Off Topic forum. Once I went over there and found it, I found GothicKratos posted one too, and so did a few others.

I'd like to please request that we keep these in General Discussion (or wherever the poster put them). First, almost all of them make excellent points about improvements that could be made to the game. Bonfire's post, for example, talks about a perceived lack of progression that I have not seen mentioned elsewhere. I think we are doing ourselves a disservice to label that "off-topic".

Second, and much more importantly, we are a community, and when one of our members decides to leave, this can have profound and significant effects on how much the rest of us enjoy the game and the forums. A thread buried in Off Topic will be mostly unseen and ignored -- please, let it continue to be easy to know when one of our friends leaves and let us say goodbye.

Unknown

Well thank'you for suggesting my post is worth reading!

I actually queried the message I got about my thread being moved (might have been a little attitude in my message... a smidge you might say) and got a wonderfully pointless reply. I was told that someone had flagged it as off topic and they normally move leaving threads to off topic......

The line of dots is meant to represent the part where they actually tell me what about my thread/post was off topic. But that bit never came.

"Off Topic : New album out? Cat do something amusing? Discuss it here. "

Totally seems like my thread belonged in there... rather than

"General Discussion: Come here to talk about any game related topics. "

Would have made a bit more sense if it had been moved to feedback but off topic? ****?

I wonder if the edict to move leaving threads there came from on high and the mod in question was gently crying into his keyboard as he sent me such a silly (non) justification or if the mod thought "well that NAILED IT, totally justifies the move". I'm not going to say who it was but they are probably legendary for this kind of stuff....

Still, not fussed about it, just made me chuckle. It was merely me trying to let players know about and discuss late game progression (or lack thereof) in MPQ so they can feed their opinions back to the devs and give some feedback to the devs as to why they had lost a paying customer (may have underestimated what I spent on the game BTW, my brain was protecting itself from the pain with a shot of amnesia apparently).

I did consider just changing the title, removing the bit where I say i'm going to stop playing and reposting it as a bonefide ON TOPIC post. Because as we ALL KNOW.... if you say you are quitting it causes all the characters on the screen to jumble into a mass of numbers and letters and when they FINALLY settle all that's left is "I'm quitting. Cities Skylines is fun."'and that is demonstrably off topic. Then I decided I couldn't be arsed and just left it.

JamieMadrox

I'm the mod in question. I move quitting threads to Off Topic because while the OP may mention some in game reasons for not playing anymore, the threads almost always quickly become more about the person leaving and not about the reasons why. If you want to break down what issues you have with the game then go right ahead. I love reading other people's perceptions of what is wrong with the game especially if they include genuinely insightful ideas on how to fix those problems. My only request is that you make the topic about that and not about you leaving. When you put that stuff in an "I'm Leaving" post it makes it sound like the rage quit rants of a disgruntled player. If you frame it as "This is what I think the game's problems are" post then it generates discussion about those problems and not pages and pages of people saying how sorry they are to see you go.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sorry to see you go, but there's no reason why you couldn't have posted your issues with the game as one post and "I'm quitting see this thread for reasons" as another and both threads would stay on topic. Mostly. I hope.

Unknown

Jamie Madrox wrote:

I'm the mod in question. I move quitting threads to Off Topic because while the OP may mention some in game reasons for not playing anymore, the threads almost always quickly become more about the person leaving and not about the reasons why. If you want to break down what issues you have with the game then go right ahead. I love reading other people's perceptions of what is wrong with the game especially if they include genuinely insightful ideas on how to fix those problems. My only request is that you make the topic about that and not about you leaving. When you put that stuff in an "I'm Leaving" post it makes it sound like the rage quit rants of a disgruntled player. If you frame it as "This is what I think the game's problems are" post then it generates discussion about those problems and not pages and pages of people saying how sorry they are to see you go.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sorry to see you go, but there's no reason why you couldn't have posted your issues with the game as one post and "I'm quitting see this thread for reasons" as another and both threads would stay on topic. Mostly. I hope.

Was it though? At some point did the post degenerate into mostly being about me leaving or was that a very small part of a long post about the game? Still don't see any kind of sensible or reasonable distinction that means moving said thread (and other people's) into the off topic section considering the description of the general section says ANY topics related to MPQ.

Or let us put it another way.... if general is NOT the place for a post/topic that MIGHT degenerate into being about an individual rather than the specifics of the game then how does a thread like, say, the legend of jamie madrox stay in general?

Well whatever, just seems like a nonsensical distinction to me.

KrazyKeylime

ya if we are voting for keep them or move them i'd say keep them if they address game points.

JamieMadrox

bonfire01 wrote:

Or let us put it another way.... if general is NOT the place for a post/topic that MIGHT degenerate into being about an individual rather than the specifics of the game then how does a thread like, say, the legend of jamie madrox stay in general?

Well whatever, just seems like a nonsensical distinction to me.

To be fair, that post was made well before I was a mod and is so far off the first page now I doubt anyone could find it. To be honest, I forget it exists most of the time until someone mentions it. Does it belong in Off-Topic? Likely. If it ever pops back up I'll be sure to move it.

Unknown

I think jamie did a great job! Please remove those neverending goodbye thread. We want tactical and improvement discussion thread .

JamieMadrox

I've moved all of the posts back to the General Forum until such time that they become mostly off topic.

Trisul

This thread should be moved to Off Topic.

DaveR4470

Retirement threads are overpowered. NERF RETIREMENT THREADS NOW!!!!

Unknown

I really don't understand the rationale behind topic moving.

The official thread on character changes is chock full of "suggestions" and "feedback" but is in general, but make a separate post with a suggestion you want people to discuss and it is likely to get moved to S&F which gets an order of magnitude less traffic and therefore that much less discussion. Often posting ideas straight to S&F means no one will read it, which if that is the purpose of using subforums, to keep people from reading posts then it works well.

I don't know if retirement threads belong in general but I do think they are often important well thought out posts and this forum noob (clearly) didn't even know how to intuitively find "off topic" at first let alone have the desire to sift through everything else there to find quality posts that I would have read if they had just stayed in general.

Serious question not intended with any snark, but Instead of the removal of posts would it be too complicated to leave the original topic where it was made leave a link to a clone thread in the appropriate forum so those who wish to continue following and/or contributing to a thread know where it went to, or those who had not seen it yet would even know of its existence?

Moon Roach

Maybe we could have a new, separate forum for retirement threads.

babinro

Saying that you quit / retire in the title makes it an off topic thread.
The thread is about you.
I actually agree with the moderators on this front.

Let me illustrate why. Suppose I want to find that thread recently posted that talks about the lack of risk vs reward in PvP....
Would anyone think to search for this topic under the thread name "Bowing out (mostly) gracefully"?
I wouldn't.

I know from my time with Hearthstone forums and the Diablo 3 forums that 'I quit' threads ultimately become intrusive in the general forums even to the point of feeling like click bait.

By the way...each and every one of you can call me out as a hypocrite here because I can guarantee you that I'll post an 'I quit' thread in general in the future when I eventually decide to move on.

Moon Roach

It occurs to me that the proper place for retirement threads is the Suggestions and Feedback forum. If retiring isn't negative feedback I don't know what is.

And going slightly off-topic, has any suggestion ever been implemented?

Doc L

Moon Roach wrote:

It occurs to me that the proper place for retirement threads is the Suggestions and Feedback forum. If retiring isn't negative feedback I don't know what is.

And going slightly off-topic, has any suggestion ever been implemented?

We did ask them to buff X-Force for like... A year... And then it happened.

Unknown

They have implemented suggestions before...but the implementation often looks different that the original suggestion...

Unknown

I agree the problem is that everyone posts things in General because that's where they'll be discussed. People who obey the rules just don't get any traction if they post say, a 2AP charged tile suggestion in the Suggestions and Feedback forum. Everyone established knows that that forum is the dumping ground for frivolous ideas that have already been discussed to death; in that forum good ideas get buried with the bad, and rarely are the same suggestions merged into each other.

It probably makes sense after a week of inactivity to move suggestions to the Suggestions and Feedback forum, and character discussion to the character's thread, but that takes a lot more dedicated moderation.

Trisul wrote:

This thread should be moved to Off Topic.

Nah, it should be in Suggestions and Feedback


They've implemented tons of suggestions:X-Force buff, time slices, PVE refresh times, longer PVE refresh times, shield cooldown timers, IFs nerf, PVE and PVP Progression reward shifts off the top of my head.

Unknown

And Vaulting!

Moon Roach

OK, I should have said "And going slightly off-topic, has any suggestion made only in the Suggestions and Feedback forum ever been implemented?"

We've discussed stuff to death here, but there have been some mighty suggestions in the forum of despair and loneliness that never got anywhere.

Smileys for tinykitty

My health pack suggestion wasn't made there, which is obviously why it was ignored.