Blizzard Moderator expresses sanity

[Simond]

Didn't Milo move to Sigil?  :-D

[Trouble]

We have official word now that Tseric either quit or was fired.

I haven't seen Tseric posting in a few days and now I notice that this new job has been posted.

Coincidence?

http://www.blizzard.com/jobopp/pr-online-community-rep.shtml

Tseric is now pursuing other opportunities and we wish him the best in his future endeavors.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=104492124&sid=1&pageNo=1

[Miasma]

Interesting, maybe Eyonix will stop being such a shitheel now.  I wonder if he quit or was fired.  I'm leaning towards quit, he obviously didn't like what his job had become.

Strong customer-service skills and a professional attitude

That was only listed third in the bullet points.

[ajax34i]

Hopefully the guy who affected him enough to make him lose it also got banned, at least from the forums.

[Horik]

I suspect he had already put in his notice and just wanted to tee off on people before he lost his CM privileges.

[Engels]

He sounded WAY burned out. I've been there, but not quite that bad. He needed to be let go, cuz he obviously didn't know when the job had worn him to a nub.

[ajax34i]

I suspect he had already put in his notice and just wanted to tee off on people before he lost his CM privileges.

No, I think the original thread was edited; he flipped out and insulted some asshole, who then reported him for that, then he edited his post replacing it with "Ok go ahead and try to get me fired, whatever" and entered a much more mild one-liner flame war with the guy.  Then the petition got reviewed by his boss and he got fired.

[Khaldun]

I think the blanket dismissal of official forums is a kind of commonplace attitude round here and in other sites where people see themselves as more informed or less immature than the average forum whiners. I think it's right that f13 posters are more informed and less immature, but I think the attitude towards official forums is misplaced.

First, because even the worst ones offer some useful information if you develop the right reading skills.

Second and way more importantly, because I think forums do offer a kind of rough gauge of the health of the in-game community. Not an exact one, mind you--it's like trying to do weather forecasts by asking your grandpa if his knee hurts, climbing a tree and looking to the horizon, and checking the farmer's almanac. But you do get a rough sense at times about where the zeitgeist is moving by getting a sense of the mood of forums. When devs set themselves against their own forums, or start blaming the forums for causing negative feelings about the game, that is always a very bad sign in my view. It's roughly equivalent to when politicians who have fucked up enormously start blaming the media. It's a sign that they don't really want to deal with either the problems with their design or with the legitimate unhappiness of some customers, and would rather scapegoat. The CMs get it coming and going: they have to listen to a lot of immature people, a lot of manipulative people, and a lot of genuinely unhappy customers, and yet they also have to pass on a lot of bullshit or avoidance from the developers. But that's the lot of PR people in general in a service economy when the service has problems.

If the mood is turning uglier in the WoW forums now, I think it's because there is a rising level of frustration with the game even among non-forum users. The zeitgeist *is* moving, I think. I'm not sure what Blizz can do about it--they may just have designed themselves into a corner and will just have to concentrate on retention of the customer base for the longest possible time within the design paradigm that they've chosen to stick to.

[Jayce]

Second and way more importantly, because I think forums do offer a kind of rough gauge of the health of the in-game community.

Oh, I personally agree that official forums are a good idea, for the reasons you state, and more personally for the same reason that schild likes Blizzard: it gives the monkeys a place to hang out that is not near me  :-D

It's a good thing, thought, that CMs especially and developers to a lesser extent get paid to read and respond.  I hope they get paid A LOT for it, because they are destroying their brains for the job in much the same way that coal miners were destroying their lungs for their jobs in days past.
(pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis anyone?)

[Tale]

Didn't Milo move to Sigil?  :-D

http://www.sigilgames.com/team/milocooper.html

I was a huge fan of the "Ask Milo" column when you wrote it. Will it come back in some form at Sigil Games?

That will be up to Brad and Jeff, whose judgments I trust. But I would like doing something like that again. I really enjoyed it.

:(

[Zedword]

It worked for DAoC.  However, DAoC also had the answer center, or whatever that thing's called.  I don't see EA shelling out the time or effort to build such a database for WAR.. which is probably part of the reason Sanya left.  No official boards + no official knowledge base to query = frustrated customers.

Very true, and part of the problem with the wow boards. People come to the official site looking for direct information from the game developer, at least in part. Wow devs/CMs rarely post useful information. Blizzard in fact has the policy of "just trust us, we're reading" That doesn't fly with people. That is one of, if not the main reason, why the forums are so hostile. Game forums will never be all cheer, for the most part content players just enjoy the game...it is the disgruntled ones that will find their way to the forums. And when your class board is full of questions on a particular issue, and you can go 3-6 MONTHS without a SINGLE post from a Blizzard employee...it gets frustrating. Of course you can decide implicitly that they simply disagree with your views through their inaction, but that just isn't enough for most people.

Communication needs to flow in both directions, regularly, for everyone to at least be happy with the company. Blizzard is making the mistake of not just alienating players from warcraft....but from blizzard itself.

They have one of, if not the worst customer service policy I have ever seen for an MMO.

--Zedword, we care...4 rlz

[Khaldun]

I basically thought that from the beginning, the official forums at WoW showed Blizzard's interesting combination of being kind of new to running MMOGs and their fierce determination to do it all themselves in-house without taking advice from anyone. That actually served them pretty well on the design side but not so much on the service-management side. So not only did they not do some of the sensible things recommended here (such as limiting the frequency that one can post to the forums) but they didn't foster a good collaborative sense of the relationship between devs and players. They didn't do as badly as SWG in board management (or Funcom with AO early on: remember when they wiped all the completely legitimate negative threads in the early going and then tried to claim it was just an accident?) but they didn't do very well, either. Blizzard's devs just don't seem to believe that there is some kind of transparency in planning that is actually healthy and necessary, and they don't seem to understand that at least some player hostility is caused by that lack of transparency.

When players don't know what's going on with their class, or they have every reason to suspect from long experience that they're about to get nerfed, possibly in ways that the devs won't easily even admit that they did, hostility isn't that surprising.

I've long thought that the industry model ought to be the City of Heroes/Villains boards. The devs are present, they disclose a lot of what they're thinking about the game and its future, they explain the logic of contemplated changes, they admit to mistakes of execution and design.

[Typhon]

I've long thought that the industry model ought to be the City of Heroes/Villains boards. The devs are present, they disclose a lot of what they're thinking about the game and its future, they explain the logic of contemplated changes, they admit to mistakes of execution and design.

I've often thought that the CoX devs wished that they had less interaction with the player base.  Just prior to and after ED, for example.  I will give them props for trying the "one post per thread (per dev post)" style threads - too bad the forum software didn't enforce the rule.  Unfortunately those boards are just as much of an example of players trying to game the communication channels as anywhere else - rabid camps of pro/anti Cryptic folks trying to drown eachother out.  Not a tremendous amount of calm, critical analysis going on in those threads.

Worst official boards I've ever been on - EQ + Abashi.  Man I hated that guy.

[Modern Angel]

http://tsericdown.ytmnd.com/

[Signe]

On a side note, WAR isn't having official forums.

Because that worked out so well for Vanguard!

Anyway...

GOOD LUCK TO FLOOFY HAIRED EMO MAN!  I hope you find a good job that doesn't make you cut yourself.  I wish this for everyone.   

[Ironwood]

Especially the Sword Swallower.

[Phred]

I've long thought that the industry model ought to be the City of Heroes/Villains boards. The devs are present, they disclose a lot of what they're thinking about the game and its future, they explain the logic of contemplated changes, they admit to mistakes of execution and design.

I've often thought that the CoX devs wished that they had less interaction with the player base.  Just prior to and after ED, for example.  I will give them props for trying the "one post per thread (per dev post)" style threads - too bad the forum software didn't enforce the rule.  Unfortunately those boards are just as much of an example of players trying to game the communication channels as anywhere else - rabid camps of pro/anti Cryptic folks trying to drown eachother out.  Not a tremendous amount of calm, critical analysis going on in those threads.

Worst official boards I've ever been on - EQ + Abashi.  Man I hated that guy.

Odd that I felt the post Statesman made justifying ED based on his playing some portable console game on a plane ride was the closest I'd ever seen another dev come to one of Brad's vision posts or Abashi's "maybe if I pile it deep enough no one will notice it's shit" posts.

[Sogrinaugh]

http://tsericdown.ytmnd.com/

Win.

Tseric was pretty bad.  Way back in the day i can remember him posting on the mage boards about why blizzard could not and would not allow mages to make more then 4 water per cast (the at-the-time "good" lvl 55 crystal water).  His post was quite long-winded and articulate, trying to explain how allowing mages to make more water per cast would lead to more mages handing out water for "free", which would have DEVESTATING IMPACT appon the "mana economy" of WoW.

Problem with all that horeshit being, no one cared.  We were mages, and we were mad as bloody fucking hell about spending 15 minutes before the goddamn raid tediously creating water.  Let it auto-cast or let us create more per cast, we dont care, just for god sakes make the pain go away.

And surprise surprise, blizzard did, and merrily enough, soon after Tseric's dumbass post.  When called out on it later, he didnt say "sorry i had bad information/was wrong/etc" instead he said we had "misinterpreted his post".  Funny that like everyone posting in the thread just happend to misinterpret it in exactly the same fucking way you douche-bag cock-munching faggot you.

[HaemishM]

I think where Tseric goes wrong is that somewhere inside he believes people are better than they are. I imagine I would not be able to tolerate his job for very long but only because I have a very bad temper and would simply fly off the rails in a fit of rage one day. I do it all the time now, I'll be reading the WoW boards and then BAM someone says something so stupid it makes my eyes twitch and I just have to bring out my troll toon and let them have it. Tseric seems to be genuinely upset and betrayed by their activity though, definitely he has not been desensitised by enough internet to do his job, they need someone so jaded they are no longer surprised and simply don't care what people do anymore.

Or just put Haemish and Ironwood in charge and let the bannings fly. Not to mention the hilarity.

Fuck that, I had enough angst dealing with the ability to ban all you assholes on THIS board. You think I'd want the power to silence the unwashed mentally deficient hordes of shittalking fetusplats that dominate the WoW boards? I'd go Cho in a matter of minutes.

I don't read the WoW boards unless linked, and I rarely make it through the first page of posts when I do. Judging from this guy's posts, he forgot the one rule of Internet Community Management. NEVER ENGAGE THE FUCKHEADS IN ACTUAL CONVERSATION. If they think you are actually listening to them, they talk louder and they bring their maladjusted broodlings with them. Being a professional CM dictates that you maintain a distance between the fanatic and the professional, such that no one ever doubts who is getting paid to post on a forum and who is doing it because mommy didn't hug them enough. The minute you ever try to prove a point with these Monogoloids is the minute you have lost that distance.

[Azaroth]

Guy sounds like I did during IPY.

He's lucky he got fired before he started torching buildings.

Maybe after a year or two, he'll figure it out for the first time.