Mark Jacobs Interview Regarding AoC and Hellgate (Why They Tanked)

[HaemishM]

MMOG developers seem happy to treat MMOG's as a genre instead of a medium.

Except in a way, they are. Most games go through this. FPS and RTS are all inherently the same with tiny little tweaks here and there to change things up. No one has made a major change to either genre in how long? I think expecting MMOs to make major changes is akin to expecting the next FPS to be revolutionary and different from its predecessors. The best you can hope for is a Deux Ex out of the same old, same old, and even that game wasn't that different from all the others out there.

Except FPS and RTS are GENRE of games. MMOG's should be considered a MEDIUM, not a genre. Massively-multiplayer online games as a catchall phrase should transcend genre, because you can do many different genres within the framework of an online game with many players. You don't have to do fantasy diku to be an MMOG - after all, Tabula Rasa and Eve are examples of non-fantasy MMOG's. You don't even have to do RPG's (see Planetside). Confining what an MMOG is to fantasy diku is confining it to a limited genre, a genre that has been played out and has almost no one doing anything to innovate. They are treating it like a genre, shitting out useless clone after useless clone.

[cevik]

I think there is a seperation here that we're ignoring.  Not all MMOGs are MMORPGs, but all MMORPGs are MMOGs.  MMORPGs are a genre, MMOG is a medium.

[Ingmar]

I have yet to see a forum for a MMOG, either official or otherwise, where the signal to noise ratio wasn't so low as to be practically unmeasurable.

Then you haven't been looking. Even WoW's are manageable, particularly the class specific forums, the raids & dungeons forum, etc. CoX did a *wonderful* job with this.

I was actually thinking of City of Heroes. The moderation there has clamped down some in the past year, but there used to be a godawful amount of trolling and otherwise useless posting. And I'm not even talking about the "general" board (does CoH even have one?). I'm thinking specifically of the Suggestions board, or whatever it was titled. You know, the kind of board where a dev might go to look for feedback from the playerbase. An anthropologist would have had a life's work in there, figuring out the social power structures. Classical primate usenet behavior. Shouting down ideas you don't like. Flinging poo. Banding together to call on the tribe's great warriors to come drive out the newcomers. A massive fucking echo chamber, with the gestalt purpose of trying to keep anything from actually changing. Especially if a suggestion flies in the face of some documented "we can't do that" three-year-old post that a dev made. Self appointed moderators. I hated it, and I never even made a post there. God help the newb who came in there thinking they had a good idea. I was glad when the mods came in and took it down.

I agree that the AT boards and some of the other specific boards there (Player Guides in particular) are quite helpful. I disagree with the idea that none of these things would have been possible on an unofficial board.

You are talking about the Suggestions forum where there were massive sticky posts from developers looking for feedback on specific topics? Where you'd often see Statesman pipe up 20 pages into the discussion? I think you are significantly understating the amount of use Cryptic got out of those threads.

[IainC]

But the point wasn't about building a thriving community - it was about listening to your community. Which you've just said is a trivial task and favour checking the data. If it's trivial to get the subjective material from fansites, why not have the official forum and keep it central?

I didn't say that listening to the community was trivial, I said that the process of collecting feedback for any given subject is trivial. Continually collecting, collating and presenting feedback is a massive task for any decently sized community but it's not especially difficult regardless of whether you're pulling it from one forum or many. Personally I like the different slants we get on similar topics from different forums. Even though there is a lot of subscriber overlap, each forum has a distinct flavour and the feedback direction will be different from each. That's far more valuable to me than having one huge echo chamber where the same people are hectoring their personal hobby horses and drowning out alternate points of view.

 Checking raw data is the best line for some things but not for others, it's also a good way to sanity check your subjective and soft data points. You always want to have multiple data points where possible and player perception is always going to be one of the biggest, it should never be the only one however.

[HaemishM]

I think there is a seperation here that we're ignoring.  Not all MMOGs are MMORPGs, but all MMORPGs are MMOGs.  MMORPGs are a genre, MMOG is a medium.

But not all MMORPG's need to have the diku at their core, yet all but Eve and UO do. There's a ton of difference between Oblivion and Fallout 1, though they are both RPG's. There is a whole helluva lot less difference between EQ1 and WAR than between Oblivion and Fallout 1.

[Lum]

Disagree.  http://elitistjerks.com/forums.php has all that is needed for Designers to understand the problems and learn about possible solutions.

Sure, if you're making a game for, well, elitist jerks.

[Mrbloodworth]

All MMO makers target elitist jerks. They pay the bills.

That's why they put in shit like this.



And why most times, things like that take more time than is healthy in one sitting to get, so you can be l33t (and pay the bills).

[Soln]

"Sells to vendor for 24.31g"   

[slog]

I think there is a seperation here that we're ignoring.  Not all MMOGs are MMORPGs, but all MMORPGs are MMOGs.  MMORPGs are a genre, MMOG is a medium.

But not all MMORPG's need to have the diku at their core, yet all but Eve and UO do. There's a ton of difference between Oblivion and Fallout 1, though they are both RPG's. There is a whole helluva lot less difference between EQ1 and WAR than between Oblivion and Fallout 1.

I think you are dreaming.  This is it.  MMORPGS, MMOGs, oranges, whatever.  What we have right now is all this genre is going to be for the next 20 years.  In 1999, I was playing a Troll SK at EQ launch. Well, it's 9.5 years later and we have slightly prettier graphics and some refinements.  That's it.  

There is no magic dev company that's going to come along and change how this Genre works.  There is just too much money on the table when you make one of these things to risk REAL INNOVATION.

[schild]

Man, WoW is ugly.

[Mrbloodworth]

 There is just too much money on the table when you make one of these things to risk REAL INNOVATION.

and people call me the Charon of MMORPGs because i like to watch the indi games, where this normally happens.  

[Khaldun]

You can mine "objective" data all the live long day and you are not going to find out what you need to know about how customers regard your game, whether they're having fun, what your likely long-term retention is, what the really serious bugs and feature problems are, what kind of subjective experiences are constructing the culture of your world. I guarantee that every failed MMOG has had absolutely fine data-mining processes.

Being afraid of running your own forums is being afraid of your customers, your game, and your responsibilities as a service company. It's not even as good as outsourcing customer service to Bangladesh. It's giving yourself a license to stick your fingers in your ears and hum real loud every time you hear something you don't like or don't want to hear, because it's not in your forums and not your employees listening and you don't have to care. It's not even a cost-saving measure: it's an alibi, prepared in advance as carefully as any murderer on Columbo ever did.

[tmp]

But now I must digress, because the original statement from me was typed too fast, what I really meant by the sentence is:  No one before or since has allowed UI modding to the degree that WoW has, and it's a big part of their success [that they are willing to do things that everyone else said couldn't be done because the dirty cheating players would take advantage of it].

I don't know if UI mods themselves play to the success of Blizzard, but I do think that Blizzard has taken that "ohh, it can't be done, can it?  Well try this!" stance with a ton of things.

Ahh; i see then, yup this extended version certainly sounds reasonable. No disagreement with it here.

[tmp]

That's why they put in shit like this.

Holy shit. That's one way to draw attention away from shoulders, i guess.

[IainC]

You can mine "objective" data all the live long day and you are not going to find out what you need to know about how customers regard your game, whether they're having fun, what your likely long-term retention is, what the really serious bugs and feature problems are, what kind of subjective experiences are constructing the culture of your world. I guarantee that every failed MMOG has had absolutely fine data-mining processes.

You'll find that nothing I have said is in disagreement with this.

Being afraid of running your own forums is being afraid of your customers, your game, and your responsibilities as a service company. It's not even as good as outsourcing customer service to Bangladesh. It's giving yourself a license to stick your fingers in your ears and hum real loud every time you hear something you don't like or don't want to hear, because it's not in your forums and not your employees listening and you don't have to care. It's not even a cost-saving measure: it's an alibi, prepared in advance as carefully as any murderer on Columbo ever did.

Why is it less important if it is on an external forum? If the community is in uproar about something or a measure is unpopular, why would the fact that the players are having their revolt somewhere external make it any easier to write off? We have people who spend all day listening to the playerbase (that would be me and my colleagues for the slower ones on the page), why should we somehow inherit a worse work ethic just becasue we aren't hosting the forums ourselves? Seriously, stop with the projecting and hyperbole.

Oh and by the way, it totally is a cost saving measure. It may not be the primary reason for not having official forums but one of the more obvious benefits is right there on the balance sheet.

[photek]

All MMO makers target elitist jerks. They pay the bills.

That's why they put in shit like this.

[img]http://elitistjerks.com/attachments/f14/a2173d1205298844-authorization/yaywarglaives.jpg

And why most times, things like that take more time than is healthy in one sitting to get, so you can be l33t (and pay the bills).

In selected games yes. For Blizzard, the causal crowd is the one paying the big bills. Blizzards introduction of heroics, dailys, honor PvP gear and instances like karazhan is whats keeping recurring subs and bringing new ones. Availability of purples that is.

[tmp]

Why is it less important if it is on an external forum? If the community is in uproar about something or a measure is unpopular, why would the fact that the players are having their revolt somewhere external make it any easier to write off?

It's like having the customer bitch at your service while in your store vs them doing the same in some random pub out there in the wide world. Reasonably enough most companies do care more about the former than they do about the latter.

Also, if you have a number of external forums, then the potential [official] forum base gets fractured between these. That again makes it easier to write things off as "just few nerds going through a rage while most of the playerbase happily keeps playing"

[IainC]

Why is it less important if it is on an external forum? If the community is in uproar about something or a measure is unpopular, why would the fact that the players are having their revolt somewhere external make it any easier to write off?

It's like having the customer bitch at your service while in your store vs them doing the same in some random pub out there in the wide world. Reasonably enough most companies do care more about the former than they do about the latter.

Also, if you have a number of external forums, then the potential [official] forum base gets fractured between these. That again makes it easier to write things off as "just few nerds going through a rage while most of the playerbase happily keeps playing"

In that case then you have a community team not doing their jobs. My company knows how much of an issue any particular topic might be because I tell them, they invest in me a certain amount of responsibility to filter things honestly and to give them the unvarnished truth. If a Big Thing is being written off as a storm in a teacup then either I've failed to analyse it properly or I've failed to communicate it clearly.

The fracturing point is moot because even in games with official forums, you often have third party sites where just as much (if not more) useful discussion goes on. Unless your game community is tiny, it is necessarily going to be fractured. The bigger communities become, the less homogenous they tend to be.

[tmp]

In that case then you have a community team not doing their jobs.

And given this is MMO industry i can respond to that with "Yes, and?" That is, people not doing their job seem to happen frequent enough that it's almost par for the course...

The fracturing point is moot because even in games with official forums, you often have third party sites where just as much (if not more) useful discussion goes on. Unless your game community is tiny, it is necessarily going to be fractured. The bigger communities become, the less homogenous they tend to be.

I don't quite see how it makes the point moot -- as the point was smaller-sized forums are easier to ignore due to their size and (somewhat consequently) amount of data sharing going on. To use this very thread as example? You have one external WoW forum cited as "everything that Designers would need"... that's the natural tendency to try and filter input sources. Things (and forums) are being mentally catalogued as potentially more or less useful and from that it's very small step to ignoring some of them (and hence part of the playerbase that happens to post there) altogether.

[Khaldun]

Again, if it's external, you can cherry-pick as your ego and your conflict-avoidance impulses allow you to do. Don't like what they're saying at one external forum? Go read one that's maintained by sycophants. Don't want the bad press of having your own forum mods crush the living shit out any dissent of any kind? Find a desperate third-party site, agree to occasionally have some dev chats there to help them build traffic, and make it clear that if the forums are too negative, you're gone. Watch what happens when the modding equivalent of a mildly retarded crossing-guard is given unrestricted authority over the forum and is told to get rid of anything too negative. Again, live management for the game keeps their hands clean: they're not the ones doing that, it's just those guys over there at that place. And so on.

Yes, yes, all asynchronous forums have an unfavorable noise-to-signal ratio, lots of forum posters are mental defectives, and so on. But saying that you're just going to put your ear to the ground and listen to the chatter is turning your back on a basic responsibility you have as a live management team. Live management is service work AND it's about being responsible rulers or owners of a world where people carry out all sorts of social and cultural activities that go well beyond whacking the foozles you've provided. Players want to know where the game is going and what kind of stewards the developers are, and they want to be in a conversation with the developers, however half-assed and filtered through community management that conversation might be. When the developers have less than zero responsibility to be anywhere that talk is happening and total deniability about whether or not they know or care about common issues or criticisms, when the developers never have to man up and be responsible to their players in a forum designed for that purpose, when the developers believe that communication is optional--and that's what not having forums means--the developers really don't get it.  None of this prevents Warhammer from being a good game at first, but I do think it is a terrible sign for whether the live management team are going to be good stewards for the product that makes it to marketplace.

[Venkman]

Last time we saw flop after flop, people were telling the investment community MMO's were destined to be a minor and unimportant internet fad.  It was DAoC that broke that one, and many circumstances have lined up the same way this time.

Wuh? UO to EQ1 to AC to AO to DAoC. The only "flop" in there was AO as the first three were the Big three. It was well after that, in the 2003 time frame through the launch of EQ2 when the flops were rolling in. After DAoC made it's most notable achievement (launching playable on day one), it was EQ1 that continued the March into half a million, Curt Schilling, Shawn Woolley and what people considered "MMO" at the time.

MMOG's should be considered a MEDIUM, not a genre.

But not all MMORPG's need to have the diku at their core, yet all but Eve and UO do.

That's why MMOs are a genre and not a medium. A few years ago we were headed towards broader definition, but WoW kiboshed that. Like EQ1 before it, the "genre" was defined by the big hit that the money people (VC, management, publishers) thought of when people talked about "MMOs". Nobody says to the uninformed: "We want to make a massively multiplayer online game" without the suffix "like EQ1|WoW|Club Penguin". And I throw in CP because while it isn't on the radar of the core MMO player, it's still the biggest one for people targeting tweens with browser-based MMOs.

It isn't technically right, but it's the reality that affects almost any topic, and for the same reason: the people responsible for giving the money are not accountable to the execution, so they don't need to be deeply invested in all things on a topic. By extension, they don't even need to ignore the history they don't know. To them, the genre began with WoW, and while the informed would laugh, they're either so far out of the discussion to not be heard, or not going to laugh because they want the money for their project 

[Slyfeind]

That's why MMOs are a genre and not a medium.

This doesn't even make any sense. "Western," "Sci-Fi," and "Fantasy" are genres. If "MMO" was a genre, then we'd have MMO-themed plays and music and novels. And before we even go there, "Cycle of Hatred" is not an MMO-themed novel. It's a fantasy novel based on a world expressed in an MMO. I don't know if I'd call it a "medium." Sure, why not. But it's not a genre.

This is where language breaks down. For example: Ray Bradbury is a genre writer. How can he possibly write in the MMO genre? That very sentence looks like I'm asking Ray Bradbury to write text for an MMO. But it's not; or at least that wasn't my intent. It's defining a novel as not "sci-fi" nor "horror" but "MMO," and asking Ray Bradbury to write that novel.

[Ratman_tf]

Man, WoW is ugly.

Ugly all the way to the bank! Amirite?

...

 

[schild]

Man, WoW is ugly.

Ugly all the way to the bank! Amirite?

...

 

Zubaz pants made the creator a good deal of money also.

[UnsGub]

That's why they put in shit like this.

It got some attention sounds like a good reward to give a player.  Uniqueness is often valued more then looking good or bad.

[Lantyssa]

Oh and by the way, it totally is a cost saving measure. It may not be the primary reason for not having official forums but one of the more obvious benefits is right there on the balance sheet.

The community is worth the resources invested into it.

Since community can make or break an MMO, it's really not an area to skimp on.

[UnSub]

Why is it less important if it is on an external forum? If the community is in uproar about something or a measure is unpopular, why would the fact that the players are having their revolt somewhere external make it any easier to write off? We have people who spend all day listening to the playerbase (that would be me and my colleagues for the slower ones on the page), why should we somehow inherit a worse work ethic just becasue we aren't hosting the forums ourselves? Seriously, stop with the projecting and hyperbole.

They aren't your forums. If things turn hostile - like EQ2Flames, for instance - you can just write them off as someone else's problem. So if EQ2Flames gets in a bunch about something that might be correct, you can still write them off (or even officially blacklist them and tell devs / CMs not to post there).

I don't get people can say that official forums are hives of scum and villainy, but unofficial forums are a great way of obtaining player feedback. The unofficial forums I've seen have generally been worse run and allowed a lot more bad behaviour than the official ones ever would. So your newb player experience on the 'main' forums can be a lot more hostile than it needs to be. Someone else already mentioned DAOC's VN forums - is this not a lesson for why unofficial forums have major downsides?

The two key issues are 1) control and 2) scale. You have control over official forums, for better or worse. Unofficial forums are admined by the kind of people who WAR would apparently fear on an official forum. Personally I think official forums should hold people to higher standards and be more liberal with the banhammer than some have been (and also force people to post under real names or close to it, but that's another story). Centralisation means you have a greater scale to play with, so that the majority of players come to one place and discuss everything, which means you might get a maths nerd reading a post from a casual RPer that means something clicks and they can solve a problem that the MMO may face.

Also, from experience, official forums are a great place to go and ask about a technical problem and get a quick response. Going through official channels ends up being a lot slower and often starts with a form letter despite me telling them that yes, I've already updated my drivers and every other step doesn't work because I already tried that. Unofficial forums generally don't have the technical people (or enough people cruising the technical forums) to provide that kind of service.

And I won't even get into what devs / CMs posting on one set of fan forums over another does to how forums behave, but that is a major issue too.

I'm not meaning to challenge how you do your job IainC, but I can't see how unofficial forums are better than official ones most of the time. Jacobs' "they called us names" defence is a weak one and suggests that he shouldn't be reading the official forums, not that his titles shouldn't have official forums.

Oh and by the way, it totally is a cost saving measure. It may not be the primary reason for not having official forums but one of the more obvious benefits is right there on the balance sheet.

I can accept that. But don't then pretend that building community is important when you expect a bunch of volunteers to provide your key infrastructure in this area.

Thus far, DAOC, Tabula Rasa and Vangard appear to have been the major MMOs not to have official forums. Two of those names aren't synonymous with success and had trouble building any kind of community around their games. Not having official forums probably didn't help.

[Arinon]

MMO gaming is a service industry and you have customers expecting this sort of service as a baseline.  An official forum’s purpose isn’t to get coherent feedback from your community.  It’s about making them feel important. 

Forcing someone to run around to various fansites for official responses to customer concerns is some serious bush league support.  Developer letters or Herald style diatribes don’t have nearly the same tone or turn around as regular forum posts.
 

[Lakov_Sanite]

In short, someone didn't want to pony up the money for forums. Jesus people, do you even CARE about being competitive? It smacks of amateur hour, FFS dozens of NON mmo's have official forums to provide player support, hell my local power company has official forums. I don't understand how you can have an online company and NOT have forums, this actually annoys me more than the minor stuff in warhammer.

[naum]

In short, someone didn't want to pony up the money for forums. Jesus people, do you even CARE about being competitive? It smacks of amateur hour, FFS dozens of NON mmo's have official forums to provide player support, hell my local power company has official forums. I don't understand how you can have an online company and NOT have forums, this actually annoys me more than the minor stuff in warhammer.

Absolutely.

In 1998, there could be (I still would disagree) a valid counterargument.

Not in 2008.

Any business should have a forum and/or wikl.

[Cylus]

How well have y'all localized in Europe; that is, have y'all translated text completely, support Unicode, combo of both, etc...? I'm not attempting to call the game into question (have already pre-ordered), I'm just curious regarding potential customers and all :) 

If you feel offended, realize that I could never convince VG co-workers to spend the time to, at the very least, support Unicode so I really have no room to talk 

Edit: I apologize if I missed the answer already or if it's readily available...saw the Euro tag and figured that it'd be easy to ask.

[Khaldun]

Since we're predicting numbers over in another thread, here's another prediction.

If there turn out to be serious issues with Warhammer that Mythic has trouble managing, the lack of official forums will hurt their retention worse than if they had them. Because the players who aren't forum rats who want to find out what's going on when their character class doesn't seem to be working or want to ask about why Chaos is so underplayed on their server or talk about whether other people find that combat seems laggy and unresponsive will get even more frustrated when they don't even know where to go to find some basic information.

Anybody who bought the 4th edition of D&D recently might have seen an interesting case of this, and that's *with* official forums of a sort. WOTC advertised the living shit out of their online, digital toolkit in the product, but it wasn't and still isn't available. But finding that out took going off to a buggy, badly run forum, digging down to find out the correct area where the information of non-availability was visible, and registering to use the forum if there were any questions about non-availability. For about four weeks, there was a constant dribble of people who'd bought the D&D books, were excited about the digital content advertised, and were posting their first post in the official forums to ask, "Um, where are the tools? I can't find them." There's your average player: not a forum rat, but needing forums when they have issues.

So prediction #1: if Warhammer struggles technically, with design problems, with live management crises, they will lose more money from non-retained subscribers than they would have spent having and managing official forums.

Prediction #2: If there are issues, Mark Jacobs' official communications about those issues on the website will increasingly follow what I think of as the "Smedley cycle": prolonged silence followed by evasive manager-speak bullshit followed by semi-detailed agreement that the problem exists followed by fulsome apology and promise to improve. All of which will be aggravated by the lack of official forums.

Prediction #3: If there are issues, at some point one of the fulsome apologies/promises to improve will include a commitment to set up offical forums. Since that wasn't something they budgeted for or planned for, they'll do it badly if they get around to it.

Just about all of the big publishers, including at first Blizzard, continue to think of service and communication as an afterthought. They still think of MMOGs AS published products. I don't know what makes it so hard to break out of that misconception, but it has caused them all grief at some time or another, and in many cases, probably played a big role in killing their product off or at least in its major underperformance.

[naum]

If there turn out to be serious issues with Warhammer that Mythic has trouble managing, the lack of official forums will hurt their retention worse than if they had them. Because the players who aren't forum rats who want to find out what's going on when their character class doesn't seem to be working or want to ask about why Chaos is so underplayed on their server or talk about whether other people find that combat seems laggy and unresponsive will get even more frustrated when they don't even know where to go to find some basic information.

Anybody who bought the 4th edition of D&D recently might have seen an interesting case of this, and that's *with* official forums of a sort. WOTC advertised the living shit out of their online, digital toolkit in the product, but it wasn't and still isn't available. But finding that out took going off to a buggy, badly run forum, digging down to find out the correct area where the information of non-availability was visible, and registering to use the forum if there were any questions about non-availability. For about four weeks, there was a constant dribble of people who'd bought the D&D books, were excited about the digital content advertised, and were posting their first post in the official forums to ask, "Um, where are the tools? I can't find them." There's your average player: not a forum rat, but needing forums when they have issues.

Matt's WWW security riddled, bug infested, 1990s Perl script forum software would be an improvement over WOTC abomination…

[cevik]

If there turn out to be serious issues with Warhammer that Mythic has trouble managing, the lack of official forums will hurt their retention worse than if they had them. Because the players who aren't forum rats who want to find out what's going on when their character class doesn't seem to be working or want to ask about why Chaos is so underplayed on their server or talk about whether other people find that combat seems laggy and unresponsive will get even more frustrated when they don't even know where to go to find some basic information.

Anybody who bought the 4th edition of D&D recently might have seen an interesting case of this, and that's *with* official forums of a sort. WOTC advertised the living shit out of their online, digital toolkit in the product, but it wasn't and still isn't available. But finding that out took going off to a buggy, badly run forum, digging down to find out the correct area where the information of non-availability was visible, and registering to use the forum if there were any questions about non-availability. For about four weeks, there was a constant dribble of people who'd bought the D&D books, were excited about the digital content advertised, and were posting their first post in the official forums to ask, "Um, where are the tools? I can't find them." There's your average player: not a forum rat, but needing forums when they have issues.

I agree, people who go to non-official forums are a small niche segment of the entire MMOG population.  Depending on non-official forums as a means to communicate with your player base means that you'll only be communicating with a small segment of your player base.  That will make your product a niche product.

MMOGs are such complex beasts that you need a lot of communication with your player base to really pull them off well.  MoTD type popups and patch notes, while useful, do not fulfill that need for communication (nor do they come close).  If players do not have an officially sanctioned place to go to get real communication lines with other players and the developers, the communication will be so spread out that it will not be easy to find nor easy to use, with the end result being that you have a worse product because of it.

[Vinadil]

Funny thing to me about this whole "OMG you don't have your own forums" thing is... the people who are making the decision are probably the only ones with REAL data on the issue.  As far as I know Mythic has already launched a game, seen it bring in subscirbers, watched its lifespan, and measured those things.  Now they are doing it again and with said data are saying, "We think it is better for us NOT to have our own forums."

I suppose I can see the "It is unprofessional" argument, though again... I wonder why they would listen to us and our lack of data instead of themselves and their greater amounts of data.

The argument that is truly laughable is the "You can IGNORE things if they happen on Other forums!"  You are basically saying here that a team that would be competent running their own forums is now going to be incompetent watching other people's forums.  That just does not make sense.  The team is either competent or not... where the information comes from has little to do with anything in that matter.

On a side note... its been a while so I don't remember for sure, but I seem to recall the main DAoC webpage listing several different forums in different languages right there on the front page.  I was an internet noob at the time and did not even realize those forums were not "official".  Go figure.