The class forums, as long as I can remember, have been pretty crappy. But there were still good posts here and there. The 500000 rate my gear, can I tank X, rate my spec, etc. are not what I refer to. Those may be annoying after you're posting for three years, but let's be honest, in the absence of stickies and having a weak search function, they are necessary. Hell, they're productive. Thanks to those threads someone out there is a little bit better.
Everything seems to have gone downhill.
The serious helpful people seem to be leaving. I can understand. Why stay in the nearly unmoderated forum, full of trolls and spam, when you can go to the role forums with a Blue, no, a DEVELOPER apparently hovering over them 20 hours a day?
The DPS forum is shit. Really, it's awful. But it's still better than the paladin forum now. The tank forum is great. Not perfect, but still, not much trolling, no spam, helpfulness out the wazoo, and a surprising amount of tank unity. Healing is a bit whiny, but I can understand it. If you're going to end up with the least well-designed role in the game, the least you could ask for is that your class be excellent at it.
The paladin forum seems to have collapsed. The trolls don't have the sort of urgency, flavor of the week, this is important, sense of a week or two ago. It's not as if they jumped on a bandwagon. That left. Now they're just sort of there. There were trolls before, but they were rarer and just seemed different.
There's nothing much productive anymore. The annoying, but useful "rate my X can I tank X help me with X" is fading or gone. There isn't even elaborate theorycrafted complaining. Instead there's a general sprinkling of whining and exaggerated claims of doom.
It's almost like a ghost town, except instead of normal ghosts they are from 12 years-old who died from lead poisoning. There an aura of trolling, desperation, and stupid. The sheriff seems to have left, but there's nothing worth looting. Instead people are wandering around in a drunken stupor, looking for cheap whores, but not even having enough money for them. There's no life anymore. I almost wonder if it is worth keeping open or if it should just be put out of its misery.
