(UO expansion) You'll all scoff, but I'm still going to jizz.

[Lum]

Reading a recent article on mmorpg.com about official forums and rereading Jeff's article and opinions on official forums has me about ready to write my own blog post on them.

To do that, you would need your own blog.

/peer

[sinij]

Make sure to drop link here on f13 when you put it 'on paper', I'm too lazy to actually check blogs but still curious to see what you have to say.

[sinij]

How about he uses Schild's blog and posts it here?

[Dundee]

Heh. I'm on the fence when it comes to things like correspondents. To really utilize them effectively, you almost need a full time community coordinator who does nothing but work with them and collect their feedback.

I think the idea was that it'd be more efficient to deal with player representatives, who could find the signal in the noise for their constituency. e.g. once I asked correspondents to compile a list of things (I don't recall what it was, but something different than just the top bugs list they'd been making. "Annoying little things", or "Stuff that would increase enjoyability" or something like that).

It just wouldn't have happened otherwise, since I didn't have time to hit every forum, read hundreds or posts, compile lists, and then still I'd have missed things they wanted but just weren't talking about much. There were a lot of things on that list which were trivial to fix, change, or implement.

One opportunity wasted there was in not allowing the players elect their own representatives, so when they felt neglected they would have someone to fire. The elections, campaigning, debates, and discussions surrounding that would have created a lot of depth for the forum game, too. That side-effect either wasn't realized, disbelieved, or measured to be of less worth than the control afforded by appointing correspondents.

Especially for a big, complicated game. The problem is, most companies aren’t going to approve the budget for a person who does nothing but that and even if they do, that person almost always gets tasked with other things, diminishing how effective the correspondents can be.

You always have people tasked with community relations, though. The idea was they'd be easier to relate with if they had some spokespersons.

Biggest problem was where we had our own Puerto Rico's and DC's: areas important and inhabited, but unrepresented.

The other issue relates to the almost inevitable feeling of entitlement (especially when you don't agree with their feedback - and yes, it's okay to disagree with the players), but that's partly solvable through rotating the ranks to prevent burnout and doesn't happen all that often.

That'd definitely be worse if they were elected.

Reading a recent article on mmorpg.com about official forums and rereading Jeff's article and opinions on official forums has me about ready to write my own blog post on them. Not in direct response to either, but every time I read someone imply that official forums exist to gag players or control their opinions (especially when it comes from someone in or related to the industry) it just makes me cringe. The notion that Community Representatives moderate all (or even most) negative criticism, even in companies where feedback isn’t a priority, or that moderation isn't a good thing for players is laughable. The evidence to destroy this belief is right in front of you, in every official forum, for every mmog that has one.

Not that official forums exist for that reason, but it is a perk.

Not necessarily as ham-fisted as "moderation" (by which you mean deletion?) of negative opinions, but more subtly, official forums (really just dev presence) enable companies more control of the conversation. Without controlling the opinions, we can control what the opinions are about. Reply to A, don't reply to B, done. The players are talking about A. Left to their own devices, they might not be.

Just examples. You've actually done this for a living and probably know more than I could ever imagine. But no matter how you slice it, management is control. If the company is managing the community site, then the company is controlling it.

If OCR people are gagging players or deleting all negative posts, wouldn’t that mean official forums would have nothing but positive, flowery posts in them? Funny enough, despite the black helicopters and armies of nazi community people stamping out free speech, they’re not. Go read any official forum – I challenge you to find one that doesn’t have a majority of critical/negative posts after going through the posts that express an opinion.

Second Life. :)

I would have pointed to Eve Online's, too, but dammit.

In my years of community relations, I’d say I maybe moderated around 0.01% of the posts. Probably less. I’m totally guessing with that number, but the point is it’s a very, very, very small number compared to the total posts. Interestingly, I’d say at least 75% or more of those moderated posts were reported by other players who were basically saying “We’re trying to give our feedback and enjoy the forums, please remove this post because we don’t want to have to read this profanity and hate-filled crap.” In fact, taking it a step further, I’d say of the posts that were moderated, most were posts that had nothing to do with the game or the developers; rather they were attacking another player. And I don’t care how valid your point is, if you attack another member of the community, your post is going away. And I'm considered one of the more strict moderators.

Surely there's more to community management than deleting posts...

Official forums are good. Moderation is good. Both for the developers and for the players. And I say that having been on all sides of the fence, community, developer, and player.

Oh, unofficial forums are not unmoderated. The question is why players feel they are better served being moderated by the company, rather than by themselves.

But maybe the answer is just that simple: In spite of how little they trust us, they trust each other even less.

[eldaec]

I think ever since Calandryll was forced to close UO.com boards and was moved to other projects Community Managment of UO was abandoned and was picked up by Stratics mouth breathing idiots. I think you need CM even if all they do is say "maybe" or "not sure" in 100+ word posts. Your subscribers are not as likely to cancel when they can love/hate/stalk/try to bribe/whatever a person instead of a faceless company that doesn't talk back.

Mythic's approach, where they simply give you an email address to mail questions/feedback to, then have a weekly Q&A article seemed to cover that just as well.

As regards offcial forums, I guess I see it as a balance between acting as a sink for noise that might otherwise appear in game, in your inbox, or on useful unoffcial forums; and acting as a breeding ground that actually increases the amount of pointless crap people feel they need to post. In most cases I don't think the positive effect as a sink outweighs the problem of breeding more inane and indignant crap.

Beta boards are an exception ofc.

[Dundee]

As regards offcial forums, I guess I see it as a balance between acting as a sink for noise that might otherwise appear in game, in your inbox, or on useful unoffcial forums; and acting as a breeding ground that actually increases the amount of pointless crap people feel they need to post. In most cases I don't think the positive effect as a sink outweighs the problem of breeding more inane and indignant crap.

Beta boards are an exception ofc.

Ok, imagine this:

Front page blog-style news, etc. Actual community stuff, not a marketing site labeled "community". Every dev post anywhere showing up there as a news update (among other things) written so as to be comprehensible when read out-of-context.

Then, every update there with a link to a forum thread.

But, every server has its own "update discussions"-forum. So you aren't reading and replying to a mass of strangers: the people posting here are the people who play on your server.

Devs have a meta-view so they can see all the discussions as they do now: mass of replies from everyone. If they reply, it gets posted to all the servers' forums and as a front page post, again with a link back to that "update discussions"-forum (with the magical link, which take an individual player to their individual servers' view on that forum).

I think people would behave better, if they were posting on a forum with players they actually played with (at least on the same serve). Dev posts would be comprehensive and easy to find. Devs would still only need answer a question once for everyone to see it.

Basically your whole view of the community site could be filtered to present your preferred server as "the community", rather than a mass of strangers.

[Endie]

How come it's WUA's necro-by-nature post that gets the heavy-hitters?

[eldaec]

As regards offcial forums, I guess I see it as a balance between acting as a sink for noise that might otherwise appear in game, in your inbox, or on useful unoffcial forums; and acting as a breeding ground that actually increases the amount of pointless crap people feel they need to post. In most cases I don't think the positive effect as a sink outweighs the problem of breeding more inane and indignant crap.

Beta boards are an exception ofc.

Ok, imagine this:

Front page blog-style news, etc. Actual community stuff, not a marketing site labeled "community". Every dev post anywhere showing up there as a news update (among other things) written so as to be comprehensible when read out-of-context.

Then, every update there with a link to a forum thread.

But, every server has its own "update discussions"-forum. So you aren't reading and replying to a mass of strangers: the people posting here are the people who play on your server.

Devs have a meta-view so they can see all the discussions as they do now: mass of replies from everyone. If they reply, it gets posted to all the servers' forums and as a front page post, again with a link back to that "update discussions"-forum (with the magical link, which take an individual player to their individual servers' view on that forum).

I think people would behave better, if they were posting on a forum with players they actually played with (at least on the same serve). Dev posts would be comprehensive and easy to find. Devs would still only need answer a question once for everyone to see it.

Basically your whole view of the community site could be filtered to present your preferred server as "the community", rather than a mass of strangers.

I guess the problem with all of this is that you are spending a lot of time, money, and effort on something that will never be 'cool', and which still won't attract the mass of non-forum reading players.

Unofficial boards can and do carry server forums. When the community adopts an unofficial forum it feels like the community building something. When the faceless corporation does it, it will always feel like it is made out of plastic and not community driven. You say 'actual community stuff', but how do you actually make that happen without incurring reputational risk and making it look like the company is approving of one faction or another inside of the community? This is espeicially important as more and more games have pvp or rvr elements. You either end up with anodyne event reports or potential controversy, either way, it doesn't help.

Choosing the forum is part of community politics. Community politics are best left to the community. The producers have to remain aloof from most practical community discussions. The easiest way to maintain that separation is just to not have an official board in the first place.

[Falconeer]

Oh, unofficial forums are not unmoderated. The question is why players feel they are better served being moderated by the company, rather than by themselves.

But maybe the answer is just that simple: In spite of how little they trust us, they trust each other even less.

Community management isn't, I think, about actually managing posts or money or whatever. It's just about managing moods. And that is done through information management.
My guess is that players feel that if the info management is officially in developers' hands, than there's a higher chance of such info being true. Or more, a higher chance of developers actually listening to player base.
I could say that it's a psychological thing, but you can't deny that should you be a user/player/customer.... the less filters you have between you and the target of your pleas (the devs), the more you feel like you are being listened.
It's like going to a shop to return a broken computer. If the clerk at the counter doesn't satisfy you, you want to talk with the head.
The closer you feel to the head, the less frustrated you think you are.

Recently Vanguard went the "no official forum" way, and from the user point of view I fail to see any good in it. Devs are doing a great job trying to answer lots of questions across multiple unofficial boards, but that's not easy for them (as one revealed), and it's even harder for us to know if a certain problem has been addressed maybe on a different board from the one we are watching.
This can be less true for the stratics-uo board, but you always have the feeling that you are not on the right place.
The unofficial nature of it give the (probably)false idea that if you aren't getting answers is probably because you are on the wrong board or, worst, start blaming the lack of an official board (where you could be ignored anyway but you would know for sure that it's the right place to ask/be).

As I said, it's psychological, but from a customer point of view I strongly oppose the lack of official forums.

anyway, I'd love to hear Moorgard say something about this. He's been my favourite Community Manager ever for a long time, so I think its point of view would be very valuable. Especially considering he led the EQ2 boards across the hardships of the first months (the bugs, the delusions, the cries, the two revamps) and managed to always have a great, functional, loving forum.

[Dundee]

I guess the problem with all of this is that you are spending a lot of time, money, and effort on something that will never be 'cool', and which still won't attract the mass of non-forum reading players.

True. looking for a way to deal with the mass of players who do post, though. There are too many servers to cover all of them as separate forums from the dev side, and too many players posting when they're all mashed together.

Seems like more people would find them worthwhile if the people they played with were there (not drowned-out by all the strangers), and if the tone were a bit less .. whatever anonymity+audience equals.

Unofficial boards can and do carry server forums. When the community adopts an unofficial forum it feels like the community building something. When the faceless corporation does it, it will always feel like it is made out of plastic and not community driven.

No question, my preference is to let the players build their own community sites rather than this crazy many-and-one forum scheme, but "Let's not do official forums" is a proposal that very few profession community managers like, from what I can tell.

You say 'actual community stuff', but how do you actually make that happen without incurring reputational risk and making it look like the company is approving of one faction or another inside of the community? This is espeicially important as more and more games have pvp or rvr elements. You either end up with anodyne event reports or potential controversy, either way, it doesn't help.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'actual community stuff' as it relates to that... what I mean is, most official game websites are for marketing, even if they say they are community sites. By "actual community stuff" I mean putting content on that website for your current players, rather than content mostly for shoppers.

Vanguard: Order Now! as compared to Vanguard: Community Site essentially.

Choosing the forum is part of community politics. Community politics are best left to the community. The producers have to remain aloof from most practical community discussions. The easiest way to maintain that separation is just to not have an official board in the first place.

That seems unlikely to be an option in many cases... it is certainly the minority view right now.

How, do the players speak to the devs, and how to the devs pretend to listen, without devs posting even on the player's own fan forums? (if I understand you right, there).

Mind, I'm closer to sharing your opinion than most. Maybe any. I'd like for a massive amount of data to be spewed-out via RSS, so that fan-made sites could aggregate and present the sort of info you only get from a dev-run site now (and better: the server-level data which is generally ignored in favor of tri-level view of individual, guild, and then everybody (even though no one plays with everybody). So essentially the official site is - but deliberately now - a 'plastic' data-source.

Then community sites can be MyBlog, which auto-updates if I set it to grab my individual character's accomplishments feed (and where I can subscribe via feed reader to friends that I want to keep track of). Or My Guild Site, grabbing a guild feed and filtered member-accomplishments feeds for automated in-game news updates, plus manual updates from guild officers. Or My Preferred Server Site, grabbing a server-wide newsworthy accomplishments feed as well as filtered guild feeds. And maybe important game-wide announcements get spammed-out in all of those feeds.

That is, rather than just having character and guild pages with server leader boards (at most) on an official site only (with or without forums).

But the odds of that seem pretty low, too... there are scary gold farming companies waiting to buy-up those sites, too, plus it's not very "sexy" to just pump out RSS feed data. Maybe not too secure, either, in terms of keeping the company subs secrets.

[Dundee]

Recently Vanguard went the "no official forum" way, and from the user point of view I fail to see any good in it. Devs are doing a great job trying to answer lots of questions across multiple unofficial boards, but that's not easy for them (as one revealed), and it's even harder for us to know if a certain problem has been addressed maybe on a different board from the one we are watching.

I don't think it a good idea to post anything anywhere without also making a news update on the official blog/site. And those, with links to the forums on which they posted originally.

It seemed like many news sites specific to a single MMO did this already, even with all the dev posts being on the official site: they repost everything as a news update with a link to the forum from which they found it.

That way you're not out hunting for them, they are rewarding the sites they are using, and they're pointing you to a community to join (which they are listening to).

This can be less true for the stratics-uo board, but you always have the feeling that you are not on the right place.

Oh, and I also think that "unofficially official" boards are sort of the worst of both worlds.

The unofficial nature of it give the (probably)false idea that if you aren't getting answers is probably because you are on the wrong board or, worst, start blaming the lack of an official board (where you could be ignored anyway but you would know for sure that it's the right place to ask/be).

As I said, it's psychological, but from a customer point of view I strongly oppose the lack of official forums.

There always needs to be a clear, definitive way to send your words to the devs. Email or comment-submission form on the official website, or whatever, which they need to reply to 100% of the time to let you know you've reached them. Unless you want to speak to the devs and insist that they publish your commentary to all of their users, you shouldn't be made to feel frustrated in that way due to forums being official or not (I think this is necessary even with official forums).

[Calandryll]

Reading a recent article on mmorpg.com about official forums and rereading Jeff's article and opinions on official forums has me about ready to write my own blog post on them.

To do that, you would need your own blog.

/peer

Yea, yea. Truth is I don't have time to update a blog on a regular basis. But I really do want to write something based on all of this. So maybe I'll need to find someplace to host it.

[Dundee]

Yea, yea. Truth is I don't have time to update a blog on a regular basis.

Trust me, you don't have to!

But I really do want to write something based on all of this. So maybe I'll need to find someplace to host it.

If you put it on MySpace, you can use a glitter-font and give it a cool soundtrack.

[Signe]

Cal is one of those lovely people I believe should have glitter and theme music. 

[Calandryll]

I’m usually not a big fan of responding point for point because sometimes the sum of the parts of a post gets lost that way. So Dundee, I am going to just post my thoughts on your comments here...

Regarding Correspondents. Overall I agree if done right, they can be very effective. I think SWG’s was pretty close and certainly a good starting point for future developers to look at. I don’t like the idea of electing them however because really they have no power and most of them would wind up losing their position when the development team failed to implement designs for whatever class/gameplay they represented. Which relates to your last point about Correspondents… you made the comment that one of the problems you faced was that you had groups of players that were under-represented. Unfortunately, that will always be the case. Always. No matter how big your development team is, there will also be functions of the game that don’t get attention, possibly even for years. There are lots of good reasons for this, which could include the developers not agreeing that the system needs work, management having data to show that part of the game isn’t a big selling point so doing more work on it isn’t worth it, or simply that changing it is super complicated and the team isn’t ready to tackle it right now.

Those Correspondents and the players they represent won’t care about any of those reasons. All they care about is the part of the game they enjoy isn’t a priority for the developers. You will never avoid this, you can mitigate it, but you’ll never remove it. If one is going to have Correspondents, they need to have a plan in place to deal with this inevitable and mostly predictably backlash. Focusing the community on the designs you are working on right now is an extremely difficult, but vitally important aspect of Community Relations. The better you are at it, the better your game will be and the happier your community will be. I’ll get into that later though.

Regarding official forums. Here I will quote something you said and hope doing so doesn’t remove it’s context.

Without controlling the opinions, we can control what the opinions are about. Reply to A, don't reply to B, done. The players are talking about A. Left to their own devices, they might not be. Just examples. You've actually done this for a living and probably know more than I could ever imagine. But no matter how you slice it, management is control. If the company is managing the community site, then the company is controlling it.

This is a good thing. No really, it is. And it happens regardless of whether you are on an official forum or not anyway. The developers control this simply by deciding which threads they respond to and which they don’t.

You used the word control; I’ll use the word focus. It’s the community manager’s job to focus the community on the topics most relevant to the development team and doing so is beneficial to both the community and the developers.

The benefit to doing this in an official forum is that the Community Managers can take it a step further and help the community focus on the topics that the development team wants to focus on. Why is this good for the community? Because it means they are commenting on stuff the development team is actually working on and their comments have a FAR better chance of being heard and acted upon in that situation. Now a good community manager would never tell players to “stop talking about archery bugs because the development team is working on melee bugs right now, so shut up!”, but letting them know that “we aren’t working on archery right now, feel free to talk about it, but our focus is going to be on the melee threads for now.” is GOOD for the community. You have far greater ability to manage that on official forums than you do on unofficial forums and the better you are at doing that, the more you can lessen the backlash from players who feel they are being ignored.

As an aside, I’ve always felt the topics for that focus should be set by the development team, not the community managers. All too often, the development team doesn’t get involved enough in that aspect of the service and it’s a HUGE missed opportunity and it makes the community managers job infinitely more difficult. But that’s another topic.

One last quote:

But maybe the answer is just that simple: In spite of how little they trust us, they trust each other even less.

I think that is truer than you may realize.


On another note, I was talking to Tisirin at lunch today and he said something that I thought was pretty profound. A lot of people in the industry (even those in OCR) still see Community Relations as a social exercise. It’s not. It’s a business exercise. The sooner more people come around to that the sooner OCR will become a stronger and more efficient component of the online services of MMOGs.


By the way, I agree 100% with your comments that other technologies could be used to supplement or even take over some of the things that we are currently trying to do with forums or other text medium. The comment about doing a Podcast vs. an IRC chat in your blog is spot on.

[WindupAtheist]

EA needs to shitcan Stratics and either go without forums, or go back to hosting their own.  Fucking UO developers and CM people shouldn't be posting inbetween "Interview with so-and-so at WoW Stratics!" threads and below banner ads for EQ2 and gold-seller sites.

Stratics is a miserable, ugly, outdated site with piss-poor performance.  It survives only by happening to have become the main UO site, and is constant in it's frantic unsuccessful struggles to branch out into other games.  I may just go tubgirl them again for the hell of it.

[Reg]

Lum used to have such fun torturing Stratics in the old days when they were going through their trademark and copyright everything that moves phase. :)

[sinij]

Let me guess, Peaches still posts? *shudder*

[eldaec]

The benefit to doing this in an official forum is that the Community Managers can take it a step further and help the community focus on the topics that the development team wants to focus on. Why is this good for the community? Because it means they are commenting on stuff the development team is actually working on and their comments have a FAR better chance of being heard and acted upon in that situation. Now a good community manager would never tell players to “stop talking about archery bugs because the development team is working on melee bugs right now, so shut up!”, but letting them know that “we aren’t working on archery right now, feel free to talk about it, but our focus is going to be on the melee threads for now.” is GOOD for the community. You have far greater ability to manage that on official forums than you do on unofficial forums and the better you are at doing that, the more you can lessen the backlash from players who feel they are being ignored.

The key point here is that you don't need an actual forum to do this.

Mythic's 'Herald'/blog structure is just fine.

And I don't think you can ever say 'our focus is going to be on the melee threads for now' without official forums working themselves up into such a tizz that they generate enormous amounts of melee noise and so much melee expectation that everyone ends up disappointed.

Now you might just about get away with 'we're looking at melee issues next week, so this is a good time for you to give melee feedback through our feedback mail system'.

[WindupAtheist]

Oh yeah, Peaches still posts.  I mean everyone around here calls me the UO fanboy because I still manage to like the game, but Stratics is so full of vapid cheerleaders that it makes even me want to strangle someone.  The developers could announce how their new expansion is going to be a box full of their own shit, and Peaches would proudly post that she bought three boxes to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Just be glad you don't know who Lord Kynd is.  He has a huge "Say no to PVP!" forum sig with a picture of a drow elf in it, objects to even the sort of consent-based Trammel guild wars I've been involved in, thinks the new race should be dwarves so that people can roleplay them as children, and happily tells everyone that he's crippled and does nothing but play UO twelve hours per day.  He gives me pedo vibes.

Mark, just in case you're still reading this thread, I'm going to tell you that you need to have the UO team withdraw from Stratics completely and just handle CM the way you do for DAoC and whatever else.  It's a sewer, and it makes your game look bad.

[Falconeer]

Agreed.
Plus looking at comments from some people I know that keep wondering every year how can UO still be alive (they never played it), they often use the lack of official boards as a proof of the lack of support and a hint to the forthcoming end of the game.
They don't know shit, of course, but THEY represent the average human/customers, not the f13-ers.

[Endie]

Just be glad you don't know who Lord Kynd is.  He has a huge "Say no to PVP!" forum sig with a picture of a drow elf in it, objects to even the sort of consent-based Trammel guild wars I've been involved in, thinks the new race should be dwarves so that people can roleplay them as children, and happily tells everyone that he's crippled and does nothing but play UO twelve hours per day.  He gives me pedo vibes.

Well, I didn't know who he was, 'til you told me.  Now I'm getting creepy pedo vibes as well.  Ta for that.

[Moorgard]

It’s the community manager’s job to focus the community on the topics most relevant to the development team and doing so is beneficial to both the community and the developers.

I very much agree with this sentiment, with the following proviso: It is also the community manager's job to make the development team aware of the community's current focus.

To be blunt, MMO development is a shit-ton of work. Most devs focus so much energy on the work they do that they don't have bandwidth available to scan every corner of the message boards. (Note: Hartsman is one of the few exceptions I can name. That dude can run a game team, placate execs, churn out code, and still find the time to scour message boards. Pretty sure he's a robot powered by Diet Dr. Pepper.)

The community manager walks a very fine line and is usually underappreciated for it. They often either hear that "they aren't a real dev" (they are) or "they're just a marketing shill" (they aren't). The CRM is the best advocate of both the player and the developer--whether either side knows it or not.

What forum moderation comes down to isn't trying to stomp out negativity, but to help the voices of reason stand out from the noise. To do that, sometimes you have to ban people. Not because they slagged your company or hurt your feelings, but because they are unable to interact with other humans in a reasonable fashion and need to shut the hell up. The message you're trying to send and the assistance you need to provide is more important than any single person's self-proclaimed desire to be a jackass.

I understand Sigil's desire to allow fansites to blossom and drive the community. In a perfect world, that would be the ultimate foundation for a healthy player-dev interaction. But the world isn't perfect, and more often than not you need to cut through a ton of noise to help the majority of players get the info they need. While you could do that without official forums, it becomes much harder (needlessly so, in my opinion) to provide the focus needed to pull it off.

That's why I support official forums, though if I had it to do over again (and come to think of it, I do) I would offer tighter, leaner forums that encouraged fansites to fill the niches by growing their own communities.

[Dundee]

I understand Sigil's desire to allow fansites to blossom and drive the community. In a perfect world, that would be the ultimate foundation for a healthy player-dev interaction. But the world isn't perfect, and more often than not you need to cut through a ton of noise to help the majority of players get the info they need. While you could do that without official forums, it becomes much harder (needlessly so, in my opinion) to provide the focus needed to pull it off.

I'm glad there are different strategies being used by different companies. There are strengths and special challenges regardless of the approach, I'd think, so there's an opportunity to compare and contrast.

[Calantus]

Oh yeah, Peaches still posts.

...

[eldaec]

That's why I support official forums, though if I had it to do over again (and come to think of it, I do) I would offer tighter, leaner forums that encouraged fansites to fill the niches by growing their own communities.

I find this interesting.

By tighter, leaner, what do you mean?

Because surely the massive, overblown, one subforum for every imaginable subject and subset of players, is the only way to create nooks and niches small enough for sensible conversation?

Isn't 'general discussion' always going to be a mess?

[Falconeer]

I wanted to get back to UO so I did some research and asked a few questions in the stratic boards. Especially about the state of PvP and Factions (which, on paper, sound great).

This is one of the replies I got:

>>Hello, I am an old noob. I played in 1998 and I am considering getting back to UO.<<

Dont... The game you enjoyed in 1998 is LONG LONG LONG gone. Factions is a system that died 5 years ago and isnt comming back.

There are many new online games that take player vs. player interactions seriously. UO isnt one of those anymore. The Developers are of a breed that would rather wear neon yellow underwear while riding pink horses eating virtual cheese then do anything competitive. Exodus forbid we do anything that pits a person against another.. They took communities of people and turned them against each other. People like yourself that came from the original world became bad, evil, dirty. They then proceeded to spread out the communities further and further. Sadly those that took the reins after garriots departure lacked the ability to understand the community dynamic. It was totally foreign to them. The choices made by them in the following years stand out as an example of what not to do.

Factions was the sole little beacon that we old timers hung onto. A place where a community could form and battles could be waged. Factions was too successfull. It didnt fit in with the new hug a virtual tree world that was being forced on us. So they stomped it out by refusing to allocate manpower to fix bugs and exploits. They refused to add content and they converted something that required players to work work into something much more PC. Something any trammy could do.

Trust me when I tell you.. Hang onto your memories and play something else.

Dig

Mythic, if you are still reading this, say something PvP.

[Merusk]

And yet, 9 years later he's still there.  Now who's the idiot in the equation?

[Falconeer]

Uh?

What's your point man? Nevermind. Got it.

[Soln]

excellent chat -- thank you rednames  :-D

I think the providers that are successful with community management realize it's as much a responsibility to manage a forum etc. as in-game activities.  They know there is a unique meta-game going on, and the main losers are the provider and the uncommitted player when irrational members gain attention.  That is, it's easier to put a casual player off a game permanently with negativity than it is to moderate a hard core player, who can be at any time either pro or con the development team.  FWIW, the sense of community I got from the EQ2 forum was one of the reasons I kept resubbing, and in the exact reverse, why I'm done with Eve. 

This stuff matters -- how communities are managed become an indication to players for how the provider regards their customers and in short, how they might develop the game.  Those inferences aren't always correct, but players still take how the providers care & feed their community as an overall signal for how a player's time and money investment is regarded.  It's all pretty visceral, but the savvy providers know that.  Thx.

[Sky]

The Developers are of a breed that would rather wear neon yellow underwear while riding pink horses eating virtual cheese...

Like that's a bad thing?

[Falconeer]

It is if the virtual cheese is so good that you forget to finish the PvP system you were working on.

[Sky]

It is if the virtual cheese is so good that you forget to finish the PvP system you were working on.

Dude...it's UO. The PvP system has been 'finished' since 1998.

[Falconeer]

I wish. But they felt like it needed to change and screwed it.
Then I read this factions thing that sounds pretty cool and that, apparently, it's broken and never fixed/completed/upgraded since forever.
 

[Driakos]

I wish. But they felt like it needed to change and screwed it.
Then I read this factions thing that sounds pretty cool and that, apparently, it's broken and never fixed/completed/upgraded since forever.
 

The Faction system was very cool.

Factions are broken and need an overhaul now.  It's such a large project though, it never gets to hitch a ride on a publish.