I strongly dislike merged topics

It makes the forum nearly unreadable. Why are the mods so OCD that similar discussions need to be unceremoniously thrown into a different thread creating a jumbled mess of 80 different conversations in one thread? Almost half the time threads that get merged aren’t even the same thing. Someone tried to create a thread earlier about the wonderland heroes after release and it gets merged to a discussion about the heroes while they were still beta and half the comments are people arguing about the semantics of beta rules and nothing related to the thread I actually wanted to read. Super frustrating.

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Mods, can we please merge this thread? :yum:

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Mods are power hungry and have nothing to do?

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They should make another game account. This should be enough to keep them busy.

I actually agree I wouldn’t mind having 5 different topics one for each new hero (for instance). Discussing all in the same topic isn’t as practical…

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Mods are putting energy and time into helping us with the forum. If you have a suggestion, better to put it up on a constructive way!

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I would also prefer one thread per hero.

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Thanks for the feedback, we’ve been discussing how to best follow #forum-rules that prohibit duplicate threads that discuss the same topics, while also making threads navigable.

Some meandering thoughts to help get more feedback:

The rules technically say that duplicate threads will be deleted, but obviously everyone has preferred to merge them. The benefit of merging for the person posting a similar topic to an existing one is that the existing participants in the thread often respond to them quickly after the merge. When many similar threads exist, responses are more haphazard. But the tradeoff is that someone reading through every topic in chronological order sees the closed threads.

I think part of the issue is the way the forum software lists closed threads. If you don’t take note of the lock icon in the listing to see that it’s closed, you can end up clicking on things that have been split off. We’ve discussed removing those from the list, but so far have left them because they can be a useful entry point for someone searching, as they link to the new thread.

The idea of a thread per hero is logical, I agree. It unfortunately hasn’t seemed to work out well in the past, though, as people tend to wander between the heroes anyway, and each thread sort of converges to the same discussion. Several threads created today also asked about multiple heroes at the same time, which makes it hard to avoid a proliferation of threads on similar topics — I’m open to suggestions on how to handle those.

Within #gameplay-help-tactics when people ask for advice specific to their rosters etc, threads are almost never merged. It’s just the broad topic ones that are.

I’ve highlighted this thread for all of the staff and moderators, so any feedback given can be considered. Thanks!

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My two cents: we just need a megathread where to talk about new heroes and then merge there every thread that talk about newly added (or reworked with v20) heroes.
While having a single thread for every hero could be “logical” I’m all for merging :wink:

Also, while every event have their own limited heroes even an “all portal summons megathread” would be better than have a thread for every different portal’s summon method but we have few events (opposed to many heroes) so I would pass on these cases.

I generally agree with most of the merging of topics because people really do ask the exact same question again and again. However, the merging of the discussion of the wonderland heroes while in beta versus wonderland heroes after release was not helpful at all. We need separate post-release discussions of heroes.

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I like the idea of separate post-release via pre-release.

Many of the people already discussing in the pre-release thread kept going immediately after the heroes were released.

Would your suggestion be to close the pre-release thread and direct people to the new post-release one? Otherwise if both stayed open, there’d be likely to be two similar conversations in parallel.

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It’s not just broad topics getting merged. It’s like anything slightly related to something else is becoming a mega thread. Somebody posted asking about the hatter, when he steals buffs will they stack with your existing buffs or overwrite them. That got merged to a thread with hundreds of comments where the first 75 or so is people wondering what the new heroes will be and people arguing about beta rules and it just gets lost in the comments. I didn’t scroll through hundreds of comments to find that. Wonderland isn’t one topic and that made me pretty irritable. That thread should be dead but every new post about wonderland is getting added to a discussion about wonderland in beta.

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That particular question had also been asked in the large thread — that’s where large threads get challenging, the same questions come up in multiple places. I don’t think merging everything is useful, but I don’t think a topic for every question variation is either, so this feedback is helpful for finding the dividing line.

This isn’t quite accurate, the merge destination depended on the question. Some went to event guides, summons results, bug reports etc. Only the threads about Wonderland heroes went to the thread about…Wonderland heroes.

But this distinction of the pre-release / post-release is useful feedback.

To ask the same question I just asked above:

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That seems to be best. I wasn’t following the pre release discussion and I’m sure many people didn’t. Now that it’s releqsed and we’re allowed to talk about wonderland without restriction, additionally it’s not just speculation and rumours anymore a new thread is more easily digestible. Nobody wants to scroll trough hundreds of irrelevant comments to get the relevant discussion.

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Thanks, that’s a helpful insight. :slight_smile:

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I agree wholeheartedly. Reminds me of when I worked a help desk. I had a client call and wonder why his computer did not boot past bios. Well after a ton of frustration over the phone he admits that he was monkeying around in dos and did not like the file structure. So he made a *.exe directory, a *.sys directory etc. Then he proceeded to put all .exe into said directory, you get the idea. Then rebooted with no backup of course and wondered why it did not work. Kind of like trying to find info amongst 1000 posts that have NOTHING to do with the info you are looking for. Such a mess.

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Perhaps we need more fine-grained subforums. One for hero discussions, one for quests/events/maps, one for raid/war tactics, etc. Seems like a decent compromise between leaving similar threads as is in General Discussion and merging to megathreads.

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I’d be all for that, personally. I’ve always thought the categories were quite broad, and the vast majority of threads get created in #general-discussion.

I’m not sure whether SG would be open to reworking them, but I like the idea at least.

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Closing the pre-release thread seems a bit harsh. A compromise would be just marking the pre-release thread subject as [pre-release] and the post-release subject as [post-release].

As a side note: I actually really like many short threads where one specific question is asked and answered in a few messages. It makes searching much easier. If all questions about a particular mechanic/hero/etc are merged to longer threads, then it makes searching more difficult.

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It’s Groundhog Day for the people who do the actual answering, though. The same questions get asked over and over and over (and over) again. Do we really need 300 threads asking how damage works?

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