(payne, I'm not targeting you. You just happened to be the most prominent example of a member exhibiting exploitative behavior. Nothing against you personally, really
)
I would suggest awarding negative minerals for posting in the Other forums were I not concerned about being taken seriously...
Two things:
Minerals are SRS FUCKING BUSINESS. Like the Internet. I mean, when you accumulate more minerals you level up your awesome level, gain moderator status, and then graduate to RL. Oh wait, that's not how it works. Minerals are around to get you.. more minerals? It's just a fun side contribution to make this place more engaging. The fewer minerals people get, the less fun they have. More importantly, we need to cut it out with the negative reinforcement. Removing mineral contributions from things like Serious Discussion will not cause more people to work on Starcraft. It will not magically increase the amount of mapping production. If it leads to more spam threads in the Starcraft forums, then these are the same threads that were in Serious Discussion before, and I think moving the spam to Starcraft is hardly productive. The only thing you will do is depress the people who aren't contributing to Starcraft now and make them leave instead of contributing to the other forums. Yes, I'm aware there are people who think this would be a brilliant idea. But I repeat that this will not spur some magical renaissance of mapping productivity.
Make maps. Take part in contests. Help people. Amazingly, you get minerals for that too.
I don't believe that's how it'll unfold, DTBK. I was going to post about this, but DevliN beat me to it:
Why remove minerals from forums that have the most meaning in the "other" section? Most people have things to say in other forums too. D:
And what does the lack of minerals have to do with people having things to say? Members can still post regardless of whether or not they are rewarded with minerals. I think this sort of mindset is really driving the mineral argument sometimes, and that's not good.
Let's say people are not rewarded minerals at all, and they post X topics in Serious Discussion. After introducing minerals to SD, the incentive for posting there increases, and they post Y topics in Serious Discussion. Question: If Y is greater than X, then how do we account for the extra topics that are the difference (Y-X) between the old post count and new post count?
Obviously, this excess of topics would not have been made had there not been mineral incentives involved. The point of Serious Discussion (and pretty much every other forum, for that matter) is to create discussions about interesting topics. Thsee extra discussions are effectively trash, since
the posters of these extra topics did not care enough about the content to post without mineral incentives. That is why this:
[quote\DT_Battlekruser]The only thing you will do is depress the people who aren't contributing to Starcraft now and make them leave instead of contributing to the other forums.[/quote]
...is inaccurate. If the posters are
genuinely interested in the topic, they will post it regardless of whether or not they receive minerals for it.
Threads like
this again demonstrates that threads in the purgatory between "not important enough to post about" and "not rewarding enough for me to bother typing it up" turn up in forums because minerals are involved. Minerals
generate spam as a necessary consequence. However, we probably don't realize that
spam in SC forums is beneficial to the site. Spam in "Other" forums will not get us any more hits. Spam in SC2 forums lead to
SEN showing up as the first result in Google Searches for "zerg spit". It doesn't matter if we don't like the content. More site visits is
good, and potentially outweighs the drawbacks of having that little bit of extra non-content in SC-related forums.
None.