Forum Reputation Changes - January 18

Brynd: Greetings Commanders!   On Monday, January 18th we intend to remove the reputation system and replace it with a new system for showing your appreciation of helpful or insightful forum posts.   This new system allows you to show you “Like” a post, similar to the system currently in place for online services such as Facebook or Twitter. Just like with those places, you will be unable to show you do not like a post and will instead need to convey your disagreement by writing your own constructive reply to the thread. Though it sounds similar to just allowing only positive reputation, there are two further aspects to the new system that make it different:   When you Like a post, other forum users will be able to see that you have liked it, and indeed everyone who has clicked Like on a post. The amount of Likes received by a player will no longer be counted or shown in their profile (and the existing reputation count will no longer appear).   In addition to this new system, to further accentuate forum posts that a lot of players like, we are adjusting the requirements for a post to receive the “Popular” icon. In the previous system a post required 50 up-votes to acquire the icon, but with the new system a post will only require 25 Likes. Furthermore, you will be able to Like up to 15 posts a day, up from the 5 up-votes you can currently award. We will continue to monitor this after implementation and may make tweaks if necessary.   Whether you take notice of forum reputation or ignore it, in some cases the “vote down” functionality of previous system was being abused, leading to some unfortunate consequences – including sometimes making the forum not feel as welcoming to players that would otherwise benefit from making use of it. Also for some it could lead to an unintended fixation on player reputation rather than a focus being on the actual content of forum posts.   Player feedback is very important to us and even with the dramatic growth of player presence on places like Facebook in particular, the forums still remain a strong source of player feedback for us. Because of this we felt that keeping the forums as welcoming as possible, as well as maintaining a focus on the actual post content, was important going forward.