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

[cevik]

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."

A vast majority of the posters here have never worked on or seen the internal workings of a mmog.  If the criteria for having an opinion is such that you need relevant internal data in order to make a post, then you'll see this place dead within an hour.

Having said that, Mythic doesn't have any relevant internal data either, since they've never released a game with an official forum.  So I'd say Mark and I are just about the same level of qualified to talk about it.

[HaemishM]

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".

Just because the execution of entrants in the medium is shitty, derivative schlock peddled on the ass of a bump-mapped skank whore doesn't mean MMOG's aren't a medium. Massively-multiplayer online games can be any type of game, it's just that most developers are anus-spelunking retards obsessed with making a better D&D in their oh-so-cool-campaign-world-I-totally-created-myself-in-high-school-when-girls-wouldn't-talk-to-me.

Games like Planetside, Eve and Jumpgate show the medium has lots of potential without resorting to the same bland formula, just like television as a medium can have lots of genres as well. For all its shittiness and sensationalism, reality TV was an innovation, and that same kind of out-there thinking should inform MMOG development. But again, anus-spelunkers and navel-gazers.

[Ingmar]

One more little thing I forgot in the list of all the other reasons it is dumb not to run your own forums:

Accountability for forum behavior. If I want to be an anonymous retard and post a bunch of ASCII porn or whatever on VN, it costs me absolutely nothing but my forum account. Big deal, go make another one, continue being an asshole. If I do it on an official forum with my login associated with a game account, suddenly I can suffer real consequences for being a dick. Part of the reason VN (DAOC's 'official' unofficial forums) was such a god-awful hellhole was there was no real accountability for people lobbing whatever vile calumnies they felt like. Companies that run their own forums provide a much more pleasant environment for their new users, their people who need tech support, etc.

People who talk about how terrible the WoW and CoH forums are must never have seen the DAOC General forum on VN at the height of its "power". (Thinking about it, I'm not sure the CoX forums were even account-linked, but if they weren't that was a mistake.)

[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."

A vast majority of the posters here have never worked on or seen the internal workings of a mmog.  If the criteria for having an opinion is such that you need relevant internal data in order to make a post, then you'll see this place dead within an hour.

Having said that, Mythic doesn't have any relevant internal data either, since they've never released a game with an official forum.  So I'd say Mark and I are just about the same level of qualified to talk about it.

Point 1.  Granted, express an opinion.  But, I am just wondering how smart it would be for them to listen to our opinions in this matter.  Fact is I have never managed a forum for ANY product I have released.  I HAVE played several MMOs over the last decade or so and seen their subscription numbers and other data.

Point 2.  But, they Have released a game w/o an official forum... and felt good enough about it that they have decided to do it again.  What they are saying be default is, "we are happy with the results we got the first time and hope to have similar results this time."  In order for them to host their own forums they would need their data to have said, "Lack of official forums was a major factor in the long-term success of the game... don't do this next time."

[Lakov_Sanite]

There's no way to know how much BETTER their game could have done with official forums. On that train of logic I also own a rock that protects me from tigers, I've never been attacked by a tiger so therefore it must work.

"we are happy with the results we got the first time and hope to have similar results this time." -  This isn't a good thing.

[Khaldun]

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.

First off, don't assume about people posting here or anywhere. You may have no information, but you don't have any idea about what the  rest of us know or don't know.

Second, this basic kind of argument about any cultural product always annoys the crap out of me, because it asserts that audiences and customers are fundamentally incapable of knowing what is good business practice, what is good technical work, what functions and doesn't function. This is the same sort of retarded argument that pops up when some fan of a movie gets pissed off at people who are critical of a film: "You can't criticize this film unless you've made a film yourself, you have no idea what's involved, yadda yadda yadda". Please. Give me a break. People who consume a great deal of any kind of cultural work gain a lot of quite specific knowledge of that work simply through the act of viewing, reading, playing. Beyond that, many critics become pretty acute at knowing how and why something works or doesn't work. It may not mean that they could make a work of that kind themselves, but it doesn't mean that their knowledge is without value.

Yes, there are things that people involved in producing cultural work know that people who haven't done it don't know. One thing that I've often pointed out at academic game studies conferences is that academic critics are overprone to asserting that particular styles or modes of presentation in video games are meant to create a particular mood or feeling in the player, when in some cases, the choice of those styles is simply a technical necessity, that there wasn't any other way to do it given the capability of processors, the graphical engine used in the game, the code libraries being relied upon, etc.  There are things you learn by doing that are unique, and some of them are very hard to communicate to anyone who hasn't done it.

But the very fact that most MMOGs do have official forums is sufficient to raise questions about the wisdom of foregoing them. No specialist knowledge is required.

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.

Seriously, bite me. I'm arguing that the decision to rely on external forums is a revealed preference against listening to the players, which I take to be a form of incompetence. Having your own forums is not a guarantee of competency at doing the same: you have to do it right. I am saying that in all likelihood, you cannot do it right without your own forums, and that it makes it vastly easier to do it wrong, maybe even without specifically intending to do so. If you have a community manager who is maintaining an official forum who reports weekly to the live management team about threads that he or she has had to directly manage and process, that vastly increases the odds that you won't be able to ignore bad news that you'd rather not hear. It doesn't guarantee it: there are past and existing MMOGs where the dev team clearly either did not listen to what their own community managers told them or didn't understand what they were being told. But if you hire somebody and say, "Go listen to the Internets, and tell us what you hear", the probability that this someone will use a very selective heuristic that ignores uncomfortable information goes way up, especially if that person's bosses on the live management team don't want to hear the bad news. It is simply easier to mentally filter an entire site for which you have no responsibility than it is to refuse to  hear one's own paying customers. If it's your forums and you require forum participants to be subscribers, those ARE your customers. If it's some external site, and you have no idea who people are, it's a lot easier to shrug and say, "It's just a bunch of WoW fanbois over there, I'm not even going to bother reporting on the threads there".

[Mrbloodworth]

Simmer down nah!

Less we become like official forums!

[MahrinSkel]

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.

You're skipping over a lot there.  WW2O, MCO, TSO, E&B, Majestic, UWOO (UO2), I think there were one or two more, not to mention a rash that got cancelled  in the summer before our launch but after those.

--Dave

[Johny Cee]

Most of the contents in the last two pages are fairly humorous.


From DAoC:

- The Herald had stats programs, regular announcements and a "knowledge database" tool that you could search for in game issues and/or technical issues.

The Herald was regularly referenced in game.

The few times I had technical problems, I got fixes on the Herald.

- The Vault was the Official Unofficial Board.  The General Forum was mostly outrageous bitching and post farming, but it was viewed regularly by the Community Management staff.

An ongoing joke was made of how they would pop in,  post something like "I'll forward this info to the appropriate staff" and pop out.

The Class Boards were pretty solid, usually with very good presence by a TL or the TL Team who would chime in with regular testing and comments on the class.

The Server Boards were pretty fun, as well.

Unique features:

- The TL Program:  Depended on the TL,  but was mostly pretty good with some being excellent.  The TLs wrangled the community, sought and kept track of opinions on the classes, had regular reports to Mythic on class issues,  and sometimes had their own specialist forums to focus on class specific issues.  

Specifically,  I remember finding the Champion TL and the Friar TL very good though on the other end I seem to remember a couple of classes having AWOL TLs for extended periods of time.

- Log in polls:  Mythic regularly did polls at character log in,  especially about large or long term directions ("which server type would you like next?"  was an interesting one)

- Fan Roundtables:  Mythic did alot of fan get together type deals.  

______________________

I am MASSIVELY in favor of not having official forums.  I just feel that they tend to reward the type of player who is a forum warrior rather than the majority of players who play casually, for fun, and who tend not to enter the forum cesspool.

[Ingmar]

The TL program was a massive failure for most of its existence. Filtering all player feedback through a single player who was not thoroughly vetted for competence (Los Ortiz anyone) and who might leave out your feedback if he disagreed with it is an iffy start but could still have been useful, but for the most part they pretty much just ignored TL feedback anyway. Worse, they didn't even give real answers as to why a given suggestion wouldn't work. It was just 500 lines of a TL report and then a few one-word replies from Mythic saying "No."

I note that recently (not really that recently, but post-WoW when the big crowds have already left) there are tons of changes to spell and skill lines that were mentioned in TL reports years ago and ignored or denied; I guess maybe the roadblocking Mythic folks are all gone? A bit of hope for WAR there.

[Khaldun]

Right, right, so this is why TOA came along. No forums = pure win! I'm not even going to talk about a lot of other examples of unresponsiveness since that one is so paramount. But as I said, having forums is no guarantee that you'll be involved in a productive relationship to the players. It's just an important declaration that you intend to be.

[IainC]

Right, right, so this is why TOA came along. No forums = pure win! I'm not even going to talk about a lot of other examples of unresponsiveness since that one is so paramount. But as I said, having forums is no guarantee that you'll be involved in a productive relationship to the players. It's just an important declaration that you intend to be.

Just because I'm feeling contrary, I'll point out that before TOA was released a huge number of players on many forums were all complaining that the game needed a lot mor ehigh end PvE content. Up to that point the challenging level 50 content consisted of a dragon and an epic dungeon per realm plus a few encounters in an RvR dungeon that you didn't always have access to. In many ways TOA was what the players were asking for.

[Ingmar]

Right, right, so this is why TOA came along. No forums = pure win! I'm not even going to talk about a lot of other examples of unresponsiveness since that one is so paramount. But as I said, having forums is no guarantee that you'll be involved in a productive relationship to the players. It's just an important declaration that you intend to be.

Just because I'm feeling contrary, I'll point out that before TOA was released a huge number of players on many forums were all complaining that the game needed a lot mor ehigh end PvE content. Up to that point the challenging level 50 content consisted of a dragon and an epic dungeon per realm plus a few encounters in an RvR dungeon that you didn't always have access to. In many ways TOA was what the players were asking for.

It certainly was never a priority complaint on our server forum. I don't remember it ever coming up much, and then getting thoroughly mocked when the expansion was announced. "Civilization... failing... must... build... obstacle course!"

[Johny Cee]

The TL program was a massive failure for most of its existence. Filtering all player feedback through a single player who was not thoroughly vetted for competence (Los Ortiz anyone) and who might leave out your feedback if he disagreed with it is an iffy start but could still have been useful, but for the most part they pretty much just ignored TL feedback anyway. Worse, they didn't even give real answers as to why a given suggestion wouldn't work. It was just 500 lines of a TL report and then a few one-word replies from Mythic saying "No."

Huh? 

1.  All player feedback DIDN'T go through the TLs.  The TLs were one of a bunch of different programs,  YOU KNOW, LIKE THE PILE OF ITEMS I MENTIONED IN THE PREVIOUS POST.   

2.  You're making a broad statement that the TL program was a failure despite the fact that,  you know, I specifically mentioned a couple TLs that did a bang up job.  Jubal,  the friar TL who ran "The Drunken Friar" website, etc. 

3.  So....  a format where the player community could submit ideas to the Devs on where there class should be in a structured manner, and the Devs would respond on the items, is bad?

**Every major point had a response.  Every one.  Sometimes the responses were "Not at this time".  Sometimes the responses were "We'll be looking this in an upcoming patch"  or "Looks interesting.  Could you flesh this out"

I specifically saw a bunch of champion improvements made because the TL treated the process seriously, provided logs and testing,  and proposed reasonable solutions.

4.  Los Ortiz was a dipshit.  He was also a TL for less than a month?

That was also the case where a notoriously vociferous Vault Troll who demanded he should be considered as a TL was made a TL,  and he massively embarrassed himself.

I note that recently (not really that recently, but post-WoW when the big crowds have already left) there are tons of changes to spell and skill lines that were mentioned in TL reports years ago and ignored or denied; I guess maybe the roadblocking Mythic folks are all gone? A bit of hope for WAR there.

The changes were ongoing the whole time.  This is just inaccurate.

[Johny Cee]

Right, right, so this is why TOA came along. No forums = pure win! I'm not even going to talk about a lot of other examples of unresponsiveness since that one is so paramount. But as I said, having forums is no guarantee that you'll be involved in a productive relationship to the players. It's just an important declaration that you intend to be.

Just because I'm feeling contrary, I'll point out that before TOA was released a huge number of players on many forums were all complaining that the game needed a lot mor ehigh end PvE content. Up to that point the challenging level 50 content consisted of a dragon and an epic dungeon per realm plus a few encounters in an RvR dungeon that you didn't always have access to. In many ways TOA was what the players were asking for.

It certainly was never a priority complaint on our server forum.I don't remember it ever coming up much, and then getting thoroughly mocked when the expansion was announced. "Civilization... failing... must... build... obstacle course!"

I bolded the relevant part.

If login polls proved anything,  it was that the consensus of the forum warriors was different from what the non-forum population wanted.  Server forums tended to revolve around RvR smack talking,  as well.

I knew far, far more people that talked about sending questions in to grab bag,  or sending in feedback on the Herald, than I ever saw post on the Vault.

Shit,  I never posted on the Vault.  Large scale game forums are lowest common denominator meta-social hegemony games that never particularly interested me.

[Ingmar]

All I can say is my multi-year experience with DAOC left me with a far, far different impression than yours. Many, many classes had great, committed TLs who were good at collecting and summarizing information and providing useful suggestions, and they were completely blown off for years. One that comes to mind in particular was the wizard TL, who did a fantastic job and was constantly ignored. (It is getting to be long enough ago for me that I can't remember the names of most of the people involved anymore, and no, I didn't play a wizard nor was I even an Alb.) Several had really crappy absentee TLs who lingered for months being useless or worse than useless (quickness helps run speed!)

Its not like I'm coming to this conclusion based on being some my-server-only VN troll (though I'll admit to probably more than my share of that), I was a beta tester on two or three expansions and a Pendragon board guy for a while. The feedback process for DAOC was fundamentally broken, because a) it was for insiders only, and b) even for them it was pretty much a uni-directional conversation. The sum total of Mythic's communication with their normal everyday players was basically the grab bag. The only dev who communicated with even the internal private board testers on a regular basis and gave any kind of real feedback was the woman in charge of items - she was awesome (once again more name remembering failure). If they'd had more devs like her back then, and less Mackeys, they might even have been able to save TOA. I remember seeing a few Lum posts and a few from Copper but I don't think either of them were in a position at the time to give people what they really wanted as far as that interaction goes anyway.

All those changes I'm talking about that I can go to and look at on the Herald, happened somewhere post-Catacombs, when it was already too late.

(I just wish I'd realized all this stuff at the time instead of only through hindsight.)

[Fordel]

I remember being told ToA wouldn't effect RvR balance.

I also remember being told the Relic and Master level grind in ToA was so we could "smell the roses".


 

[Ingmar]

I remember being told ToA wouldn't effect RvR balance.

I also remember being told the Relic and Master level grind in ToA was so we could "smell the roses".


 

You needed something to do while you were waiting for the style review anyway.

[Johny Cee]

All I can say is my multi-year experience with DAOC left me with a far, far different impression than yours. Many, many classes had great, committed TLs who were good at collecting and summarizing information and providing useful suggestions, and they were completely blown off for years. One that comes to mind in particular was the wizard TL, who did a fantastic job and was constantly ignored. (It is getting to be long enough ago for me that I can't remember the names of most of the people involved anymore, and no, I didn't play a wizard nor was I even an Alb.) Several had really crappy absentee TLs who lingered for months being useless or worse than useless (quickness helps run speed!)

Its not like I'm coming to this conclusion based on being some my-server-only VN troll (though I'll admit to probably more than my share of that), I was a beta tester on two or three expansions and a Pendragon board guy for a while. The feedback process for DAOC was fundamentally broken, because a) it was for insiders only, and b) even for them it was pretty much a uni-directional conversation. The sum total of Mythic's communication with their normal everyday players was basically the grab bag. The only dev who communicated with even the internal private board testers on a regular basis and gave any kind of real feedback was the woman in charge of items - she was awesome (once again more name remembering failure). If they'd had more devs like her back then, and less Mackeys, they might even have been able to save TOA. I remember seeing a few Lum posts and a few from Copper but I don't think either of them were in a position at the time to give people what they really wanted as far as that interaction goes anyway.

All those changes I'm talking about that I can go to and look at on the Herald, happened somewhere post-Catacombs, when it was already too late.

Great post.  

I don't think your argument is what you think it is,  though.  The previous argument was that Mythic never even got the feedback it needed, because of no official forums or what have you.

They obviously got it.  They just kept their comments on it to a minimum.


The real argument is that people like to feel like someone is holding their hands,  that the bosses care.  It's the special snowflake argument,  really.

We love it when the Red Name swoops in to a thread,  posts something like  "Good to know!  We'll get right on this problem!"
and swoops out.  Maybe posts an update in 2 months about how it's "in process".  Shit,  look at all the love that Sanya got for popping in and posting a couple lines (except for the Guin server LA nerf fiasco).

We eat that shit up.

Official Forums means there's a place we can go, where hope of hopes,  the folks that run the game we enjoy playing will wander in and address us specifically.

Hell,  I'm the same way.  One of my favorite gaming moments is, right after the release of Avara by Ambrosia Software, I got to play a bunch of games against Andrew Welch and bullshit with him about his games.  (He kicked my ass,  I tried to convince him he needed to add a gambling plugin to his game so you could bet on matches.)

And it's really the same thing as the old Grab Bag.  Literally?  People were PUMPED when their question came up in the Grab Bag.


And those same people?  They wanted fucking HATS.  Shit ya.

[Ingmar]

Well, what I'm asking for personally is a little more than that. I don't just want "we'll look into it" from a red (or blue) name. I want stuff like we're getting on the WotLK beta forums, where, say, Ghostcrawler shows up and says, 'here is this change we are thinking of making and this is why, <goes on to provide some actual crunch>.' It isn't just the 'special snowflake' issue (at least not for everyone), I think people don't want to feel like they're just shouting into an empty void when they give their feedback.

It is the difference between being talked to like you're an 8 year old, which the Grab Bag too often felt like to me, or being treated like an adult with something to contribute. And it is pretty nice that Blizzard (and Cryptic before them, and from my more limited experience, Turbine as well) is not only willing to do that, but they're willing to do it without the protection of an NDA.

[UnSub]

As I've said before, I think official forums are warranted due to 1) control and 2) scale. Mythic got feedback regarding DAOC, sure, but as far as "listening to the community" went, it was a limited attempt*. But I find it interesting that quite a few reasons used to justify both having and not having official forums appears to treat players who post on each forums and nearly mutually exclusive.

1) Players post nasty things on an official forum and complain. They do the same things on unofficial forums too, just with 1MB animated avatars and half a page of sig files.

2) That official forums aren't representative of the player base as a whole. This is true. It also applies to those who post on fansites too. Forums are the voice of the self-interested and / or the self-important.

3) That official forums only attract forum warriors looking for redname approval. That's a draw card too. But a fansite that gets a red name visit is a huge thing that the members all gush over. And fansites that don't get blessed by the Pope visited by rednames tend to get pissy about it.

I agree with Khaldun's predictions. IF (big if) WAR has some factors that hinder its game play, not having an official forum will likely hurt retention to some extent. Will it hurt a lot? A little? Don't know. The problem is that MMOs that have been launched lacking official forums - TR and Vangard - suffered other problems that meant players didn't stick around.

I think DAOC got away with it because it was launched at the right time. It will be interesting to see what happens to WAR.

* In all seriousness, if DAOC really wanted to "listen to the community", they'd be randomly asking members of their player base every month their reaction to some core systems and recent issues. That'd be a better way to gauge community opinion since you'd get your hardcore mixed with casual, your 'post every day' forum warriors and those who never looked at a forums in their lives. Forums aren't the best way of gauging overall community opinion, but they are a great way of evaluating the stronger opinions / voices in the community.

[Ratman_tf]

As I've said before, I think official forums are warranted due to 1) control and 2) scale. Mythic got feedback regarding DAOC, sure, but as far as "listening to the community" went, it was a limited attempt*. But I find it interesting that quite a few reasons used to justify both having and not having official forums appears to treat players who post on each forums and nearly mutually exclusive.

1) Players post nasty things on an official forum and complain. They do the same things on unofficial forums too, just with 1MB animated avatars and half a page of sig files.

2) That official forums aren't representative of the player base as a whole. This is true. It also applies to those who post on fansites too. Forums are the voice of the self-interested and / or the self-important.

3) That official forums only attract forum warriors looking for redname approval. That's a draw card too. But a fansite that gets a red name visit is a huge thing that the members all gush over. And fansites that don't get blessed by the Pope visited by rednames tend to get pissy about it.

With non-official boards you also keep them divided, to a point. There are no huge threads about how "my class sucks, and I've done the math! I'll sue!" posted every week by the same crowd of pinheads who have to have a red-named response RIGHT NOW!oneone! With all the popularity contests and cults of personality. And the magnifying effect of having them all in the same place flinging poo at each other. 

Instead they eat each other on non-official boards, like Stratics. It's like the sink trap of forums. 

[Khaldun]

UnSub is certainly correct that if you really wanted to know some of the things that you can't find out through mining lots of quantitative data about gameplay, what you'd do somewhat systematically is basically an ongoing anthropology of your player communities. E.g., not read forums, but go out there in the game and talk to people a lot, get your own dev people playing in a context where they are playing in order to understand the game and its communities, collect survey data regularly (not unlike the fairly well-designed Beta questionaires that Mythic has been using in Warhammer, but more detailed and subtle in the information you were collecting). That might be even better than forums as far as getting to know what's really going on in the game and among the players. For those of you who are going to claim that live management teams for MMOGs routinely do this anyway, I would say that most who claim to do it do in a very non-systematic, often careless way.

In the absence of that kind of research, forums can provide you a lot of information if you know how to scan over them quickly and ignore all the useless stuff. Reading the forums for SWG in the six months after launch, I could get a very systematic knowledge of: 1) skills that were not at all implemented; 2) skills that weren't working as intended; 3) systems that were badly thought out such as the early PvP between flagged Rebels and Imperials; 4) major bugs and exploits. I was never clear whether the devs knew about a lot of this stuff. At least some of the exploits that most players knew about seemed to catch them by surprise (say, the way that some early weaponsmiths levelled up very rapidly using factories.)

But forums, official and otherwise, are not just about information. They're about communication, and not just the static, mute, one-way kind that you do through a MOTD. I don't think it's even about the ego-gratification of a red name replying to a player. An official forum reassures even players who don't typically read it or use it that the developers are involved in a two-way conversation with the players about the future and fate of the game. Some developers breach that implied covenant when they introduce poorly thought-out changes or ignore what they're hearing from players: an official forum is no guarantee that this will all work. But it's a declaration of intent, a recognition that a live management team isn't just the utility company that turns on your service and turns it off again, but are the gods and rulers of a world that you play in and socialize in and invest time in. An official forum is like having the Oracle of Delphi, an approved place where the citizens and worshippers of your world can come and sacrifice to the gods, and perhaps hear hints of what is to come. When you turn your back on that,  you aren't serious about what Jacobs says he's learned as the main lesson of this business. Hence my skepticism about whether he's actually learned that lesson at all.

[Fordel]

With non-official boards you also keep them divided, to a point. There are no huge threads about how "my class sucks, and I've done the math! I'll sue!" posted every week by the same crowd of pinheads who have to have a red-named response RIGHT NOW!oneone! With all the popularity contests and cults of personality. And the magnifying effect of having them all in the same place flinging poo at each other. 

Yea, VN really prevented that from happening 


The fact ToA even existed, shows whatever means of feedback they were supposedly using were either ignored and/or horribly flawed.


How did the plea of
"Please oh please make PvE suck less, I just want to hit 50 already"
turn into
"Hey, please disrupt the entire balance of the game by mandatory mass PvE raids that break all the previous limitations put in place and do nothing to improve said shitty PvE at all!"

</HRose>

[Vinadil]

We have some points about games without official forums possibly suffering because of that (TR/Vanguard).  What we don't have is any causal evidence suggesting that these games would have done better had they chosen to have official forums.

We also have One successful MMO that does have official forums (I am talking about WoW here.  I know EVE has forums too, but most people would not consider WAR successful if it ended with 250k subscribers).  So, it seems that some interesting numbers would be:

1. How many subscribers have visited the official forums at any time.

2. How many times/(day, week, month) does the average subscriber visit the forums.

I think in my 2.5 years in WoW I visited the forums maybe... 10 times?  That was generally if they were linked from my guilds forums in some discussion we had that someone else was following.  I realize that forums can be a good place to get answers from questions and such, but at that point they become secondary to the real issue, which is a Game Breaking problem that I cannot fix without leaving the game and searching for information elsewhere.

I don't suppose Blizzard publishes records of their forum user numbers?  But, they seem to be about the only real test-case that I would be interested in were I Mythic.

[Khaldun]

Again, it's not just use: it's what the existence of official forums says to players who may rarely or never use or post in a forum, or who may only go there if they have a problem. You'd have to find a way to measure that subtle but crucial difference in mindset to really understand what it means to not have a forum. For some players, an official forum is like a fire alarm. You may never use it, may never want to use it, but you'd get nervous being in a building that didn't have one, where the building owner told you, "Don't worry, there are phones and the fire department is only half a mile away".

[UnsGub]

committed TLs who were good at collecting and summarizing information and providing useful suggestions, and they were completely blown off for years. One that comes to mind in particular was the wizard TL, who did a fantastic job and was constantly ignored.

Testers, that are paid to test, typically have 50% of their bugs result in a change.  The other 50% are not ignored but it could be viewed by some as being ignored since no change was made.  Dupe, No Repro, Works for Me, Already fixed, 3rd Party, Postponed, By Design, etc. just do not have visibility outside of the organization.  The speed of the feedback loop is also important.  Do bugs sit for 7 months, 7 days, 7 hours, or 7 minutes?  There are software service that do have minutes to hours turn around on issues and released to production\customers, just most companies are not there yet.  There is a movement to make all software products document all known issues at the time of each release but the industry is resisting.

[SnakeCharmer]

O forums are a waste, and it gets worse with every new MMO released.  The signal to noise ratio is just too damn high these days.  If it's not lolcats, it's "L2play n00b" or some variation.  It degenerates to everyone trying to one up the person that posted previous to them.  Plus, that "community feeling" is overrated.  I don't think anyone would argue that WoWs forum community is shit; it just takes a good game to overcome it.

I would love to just see a blog or something similar updated as need be with new or upcoming stuff.  If the studio needs feedback, then have in-game polls with the options they are considering or whatever.  Let the CMs float to whatever the biggest / best player run forums are.  Devs aren't community people, they aren't trained in community management, and they shouldn't ever have to go to the boards to begin with, IMHO.  They generally develop a habit of responding to a handful of 'normal' people that alienates the others (ZOMG U HATE ME AND MY CLASS AND U ALWAYS IGNORE WUT I SAY!!!). 

Better in game Guild, LFG, and knowledge base tools via an ingame browser of sorts would go a loooong way towards solving the aforementioned 'community is overrated' problem.

[Ratman_tf]

committed TLs who were good at collecting and summarizing information and providing useful suggestions, and they were completely blown off for years. One that comes to mind in particular was the wizard TL, who did a fantastic job and was constantly ignored.

Testers, that are paid to test, typically have 50% of their bugs result in a change.  The other 50% are not ignored but it could be viewed by some as being ignored since no change was made.  Dupe, No Repro, Works for Me, Already fixed, 3rd Party, Postponed, By Design, etc. just do not have visibility outside of the organization.  The speed of the feedback loop is also important.  Do bugs sit for 7 months, 7 days, 7 hours, or 7 minutes?  There are software service that do have minutes to hours turn around on issues and released to production\customers, just most companies are not there yet.  There is a movement to make all software products document all known issues at the time of each release but the industry is resisting.

Sup? Felt like quoting your post there.

I like to work, and thus make no comments.

[tmp]

With non-official boards you also keep them divided, to a point. There are no huge threads about how "my class sucks, and I've done the math! I'll sue!" posted every week by the same crowd of pinheads who have to have a red-named response RIGHT NOW!oneone! With all the popularity contests and cults of personality. And the magnifying effect of having them all in the same place flinging poo at each other. 

The magnifying effect applies to the useful feedback, too. With the ratio of useful and dumb people being steady when you have them divided you wind up with few reasonable voices on each smaller forum, and they have limited ability to exchange opinions and/or come to useful conclusions on their own that way.

[Ratman_tf]

The magnifying effect applies to the useful feedback, too. With the ratio of useful and dumb people being steady when you have them divided you wind up with few reasonable voices on each smaller forum, and they have limited ability to exchange opinions and/or come to useful conclusions on their own that way.

I've said this before, but I wonder (highly suspect) if in-game gathered metrics (how many times did people do this quest?) are much more valuable than even well thought out message board posts.

[Numtini]

There are no huge threads about how "my class sucks, and I've done the math! I'll sue!" posted every week by the same crowd of pinheads who have to have a red-named response RIGHT NOW!

My experience with DAOC was that people did exactly that, but substituted the Team Lead (who often agreed with them) for the Red Name.

Which might explain why every class lead I can think of quit the game while they were TL.

[tmp]

I've said this before, but I wonder (highly suspect) if in-game gathered metrics (how many times did people do this quest?) are much more valuable than even well thought out message board posts.

Can't really make mind about that one tbh; i suspect the metrics can be of great use yes, but on the other hand have to keep in mind the 90% idiots rule -- that is going to have some impact on the metrics results, i'd imagine. It has of course effect on the forums posts too, but i suspect the brighter posts stand out better on the forums than the brighter players stand out in the bulk-based metrics...

In short, metrics to check the players' practices, the forums for the analysis "why" but also for the insight that potentially goes beyond what the majority of playerbase has caught up with, yet.

[Calandryll]

I've said this before, but I wonder (highly suspect) if in-game gathered metrics (how many times did people do this quest?) are much more valuable than even well thought out message board posts.

The problem is metrics without context are just as useless as context without metrics. If you know that 80% of the players do quest A but not quest B, you still have to know WHY that is the case. It could be that quest A is better written, it could be that it gives better loot, or it could be that quest B is just hard to find but is actually the better quest. If you don't know that and you just assume that players prefer quest A, you could start creating quests that they actually don't like. Without the context it's very easy to misinterpret the metrics. The only way to get the context is to ask people.

So basically, you need both.

[SnakeCharmer]

Have the devs actually play the quest and they'll probably figure it out.  Does Quest A take 30 minutes and give 5K xp, does Quest B take 5 minutes and give 4K xp?  Is the item reward for Quest A crap compared to Quest B?  Is it broken?  Does it just flat out suck as a quest to begin with? 

Don't need too much in metrics to determine that...