Class Safe Havens - Gone or Never Existed?

Here is a very typcial situation in class forums, which was only exacerbated by the beta:

1) Someone posts in their class forum how terrible their class is or how a particular change will doom them.
2) Since this is their class forum, they find a willing audience of people of the same class.
3) The thread just feeds on itself. We're the worst class. Nobody is as bad as us. The devs like the other classes better.
4) Sometimes another class will poke their head in with their point of view.
5) What usually happens in that case is the intruder is attacked. Leave our forums. Your forum is that way --------->.
6) And the pity party resumes.

We like when players talk to each other. We like to see the debate. In the unlikely situations where players of different classes agree on something, that really makes us stop and take notice.

For someone like me, it's much easier to spend time in 3 main class forums, which might even allow me to read the PvP, dungeon and other boards more often.

Q u o t e:
I don't think these forums would never be used, but I do think they would rarely be used. (However, just because it's used rarely doesn't take away from the fact that the forum is fulfilling it's job.) If a class had a legitimate concern of their present/future the case could more effectively be presented in this forum which would constitute a larger audience where the traditional class forums would provide a more specific topic such as arena strategies, class tips, class macros, ect.

That is a risk -- that legitimate questions over spec or how to play might get booted to page 5 very quickly. We hope part of that will be improved by posters just learning a new system. And if we do find that there is a need for specific class discussion that can't be done here, we might change the forums again to accomodate that. But a lot of class discussions are on class balance and we wanted to make sure those happen here.

Q u o t e:
Hunters are undeniably awful in arenas - yet the "feedback" you'll get on that from a centralized forum such as this will lead you to conclude that hunters are fine or even overpowered based on the replies from terribads in the 1300 bracket that got themselves stomped by a hunter. So then you'll go off and make dev decisions based on an odious pile of dubious QQ.

Right, but see what you did there? You feel comfortable knowing the difference between “undeniably” and “terribads” who would disagree with your undeniable truths. Yet you aren’t going to give us the credit for knowing the difference in this forum. But if that is how you think we operate, then it stands to reason when we went into the hunter forum we would just dismiss your point as you being a terribad QQing about your own class.

Put more simply, when we read YOUR class forum we should assume your claims are undeniable and when we read other class forums we should assume they are terribad?

Q u o t e:
Are the forums for YOU? or for Us?

I get it that class forums are dead ... but lumping all the damage dealing into one forum is just unfair. It puts too much burden on this one forum as I would guess the majority of players are "Damage Dealers" vs Tank & Healers.

They’re for all of us. We do think we need to fix the class forums though. I’m not sure they are serving anyone in their current form. The beta class forums were better (not great), but I think that had everything to do with A) a smaller crowd and B) the stakes being lower since these weren’t live changes to existing characters.

Q u o t e:
The Live forums are much more than this. I have a druid leveling sticky that I've spent years maintaining. I monitor the druid forums for new druids that say "halp! I'm new to the class, how do I play?" And I respond by linking my sticky and answering specific questions, and then they know how to level and go about their way. Druids switch between 3 roles, so as a prominent druid community member, it's my role to guide people who are new to the community. We work together not just for a pitty party, but to build things together.

We talk about the best way to do things (what's the best rotation, talents, glyphs, etc). All those discussions are class-specific. It's not just about "halp GC make me better", its also about building a community, that gets lost when I'm split across 3 forums and dumped in with a bunch of people who just think I'm a level 60 noob (when I'm obviously not).

Where does this part of the community go? You pretty much take away my ability to do what I've been doing on the live forum for years. Where does my druid-specific leveling help go to?

Totally agree with all of that, and ultimately we don't want to see it go away. But we also probably need a way to separate that out from class balance discussion, which is where all of the class forums were leaning.