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So ANET can't afford a forum? Why?
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QFE; so long as Anet has a way for players to get tech support outside of game everything else can be handled within the client. The majority of posts I've seen on official forums reek of entitlement and/or trolling.
The largest argument against it has to be, that to build a good community, you need to allow the userbase to diversify and create the community itself.
Individual communities within each servers won't form in the same way, if there are official server forums. For competition, and creating excellence, the input and work must come from the players. In return, the average player who just wants to be a part of it, will not settle for the mundane standard boring "official" forum whatever, but then go to to the creative, different subsites.
There will be an mobile app, there will some sort of armory. these tools, will probably be able to be extracted to third party forums, thus increasing the chance for community to make impact in their own way. if you throw fansites a bone, by allowing them to influence, then they will get more traffic, and in return working harder to make better websites.
The way I see it, not creating forums, will bring out the intelligence and creativity in people. It's a poor notion to think that somehow the game is under control if there is an official forum were everyone can share the ideas. First of all, ArenaNet should mainly listen to the voices in the game. They say that they play the game themselves as much as the players. Many people who browse forums, are not even playing the game, but will never be satisfied because they only will settle for utopia or perfection - then they are reduced to bitterness, trolling, and "ArenaNet lied to us" arguments, hailing down the entire community.
Kind of like how the GW2Guru forums are now.....
But not all GW2 forums. And from all the people who dislike the conservative way Guru chooses to handle their discussions, some awesome individuals will pop up come launch, and make their own websites - and they will run those websites without the bias of being paid and affiliated like a propaganda machine - even with good intentions a mod that is paid by a company has a bias, and cannot do anything about it. but a neutral fansite can.
Guru choose their path. other people will run their forums in other ways. I'm absolutely sure of it. these sites might pop up regardless - WoW has many splended fansites and blogs and forums dedicated to individual servers, and classes - their are even websites only for certain types of talent builds (or ways of playing) and those small sub communities often have the best content.
the problem is that, because official forums exist, the average user will never take the time to discover these much superior intellectually, funny, creative sites that has lots of work and love put into them, because the average user is lazy and posting an angry "im quitting" thread is just much easier.
it's a false lie to presume that the developers will see and listen on the official forums. there always pop quality threads up there. but many of those gets derailed over time. a thread post owner, will often provoke a thread or allow it to be derailed.
example;
a guy who is angry about a nerf makes a thread. despite the quality of his arguments, he think his issue increases in priority if he gets 1500 replies. but half of those replies might be meaningless content, memes, chuck norris jokes, QQ whining. even threads that get a mod response, might be something trivial.
It's poisonous, to put the eggs in that basket.
When people want guides, and faqs. and theory crafting in their own class forums - I get that its easy and simple to get from compiled lists in official forums. However, I think its much less compared to what the community can do on there own. all this info, builds, guides will all be made on wikis, youtube channels. thanks to twitter and facebook, individual sites can take flight.
i want to see a website for guardians. just an entire community, full of people who are just interested in the guardian profession. a forum and website just for them, - done by a staff who cares. I think trolls will be fewer. I think you will kill all the self-important elitists. there will be no "LISTEN TO ME ARENANET" mentality like an official forum will.
But another thing - I want people to talk, discuss, and communicate in the game. call me old fashioned, but I liked it when people discovered stuff about the game - in the game.
I think dynamic events and all these things are done this way so we wouldnt need to use thottbot. Most MMORPGs are so complex, and game breaking if not researched probably that a player often needs to do things the right way, at the right time - or he will ruin his character, or at least "waste" a lot of time.
In GW2 they tried to kill griefing, and making wrong choices. if you do a poor choice you can almost always alter it. if you picked a wrong gathering profession, you dont need to start over when picking a new one - same with traits. they tried to make this game not punishing for being ignorant. its supposed to be friendly for the guy who does not want to read the manual or play the intro, but just play and discover.
the best way to build a good community is letting it police itself. ArenaNet/NCsoft represenatives will only put on a larger workload, more responsibility by doing this. even if GW2 becomes a thousand times bigger - remember that gw1 was already pretty big, with 6 million copies sold, and that game was fine without in-game mods.
finally, happiness or game quality will not increase with spreadsheets and guides and so on. thats not what will make a game memorable. its the experiences inside of the game. the ingame bug reporting tool, feedback tool and so on, will take care of a lot. lots of other problems will best be illustrated in videos captured by players.
finally, ArenaNet will play this game every day post launch, and they will see the problems too. they are right in it with us. do not fret that they wont listen any less. they might listen more than in other games, because trolls wont have a central hub to go to. trolls will be scattered and easily banned.
See, that is how I view what has happened with GW2Guru.
The developers/community manager post there, and outside of the occasional interviews, they really don't do anything else with regards to other fansites. That sort of 'monopolization' doesn't really work if you are trying to promote a network of fan driven community sites over having an 'official' one. It isolates individuals that dislike Guru's 'operating procedures' and the growing toxicity of it's community, and it also isolates other fansites who will end up receiving little to no Arena Net fueled community support as long as one site essentially has the monoply.
If Arena Net are happy to throw their 'community' weight behind one site, instead of sharing the love, I would prefer one of their own design and administration over having to endure dealing with a bunch of volunteer forum police.
With all the hype GW2 has recieved and all the other fanbased forums out there, I would agree with the above quoted.
//
But not all GW2 forums. And from all the people who dislike the conservative way Guru chooses to handle their discussions, some awesome individuals will pop up come launch, and make their own websites - and they will run those websites without the bias of being paid and affiliated like a propaganda machine - even with good intentions a mod that is paid by a company has a bias, and cannot do anything about it. but a neutral fansite can.
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How exactly, is GW2Guru being "conservative"? And "conservative" of what? It is of relevance to ask those questions, since GW2 itself is about drastic change from the norm, which is not a conservative view on MMORPG game developing. If Arenanet would have had a conservative view on game developing, we would have seen yet another WOW clone.
No fansite is "neutral", they are actually per definition biased since they are called "fan"-sites. While fansites, in general, have no economical reason (some can in theory; specially in connection with ads and partaking in exclusives) to speak good of the company, they are usually also not being paid by their forum members and therefore the members have less means to do meaningful protests against things they deem to be wrong.
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Guru choose their path. other people will run their forums in other ways. I'm absolutely sure of it. these sites might pop up regardless - WoW has many splended fansites and blogs and forums dedicated to individual servers, and classes - their are even websites only for certain types of talent builds (or ways of playing) and those small sub communities often have the best content.
the problem is that, because official forums exist, the average user will never take the time to discover these much superior intellectually, funny, creative sites that has lots of work and love put into them, because the average user is lazy and posting an angry "im quitting" thread is just much easier.
\
Do you really want such people to be a part of your niche forum community? You talk so badly about the average user, but yet you want them?
//
it's a false lie to presume that the developers will see and listen on the official forums. there always pop quality threads up there. but many of those gets derailed over time. a thread post owner, will often provoke a thread or allow it to be derailed.
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That I agree with. Just because there is an official forum, it does not mean the actual developers will read and listen.
//
When people want guides, and faqs. and theory crafting in their own class forums - I get that its easy and simple to get from compiled lists in official forums. However, I think its much less compared to what the community can do on there own. all this info, builds, guides will all be made on wikis, youtube channels. thanks to twitter and facebook, individual sites can take flight.
i want to see a website for guardians. just an entire community, full of people who are just interested in the guardian profession. a forum and website just for them, - done by a staff who cares. I think trolls will be fewer. I think you will kill all the self-important elitists. there will be no "LISTEN TO ME ARENANET" mentality like an official forum will.
\
Isn't entitlement and attentionwhoring the very reasons why fansites can sometimes have more info than the ones found in official forums? Because, people want to tell the world "Hey look at me, and look at my awesome guide in my awesome forum", rather than just being one of many "rather anonymous" guides in an official forum.
As for the "self-important elitists" in the official forums: at least we can argue back and point out the flaws in their argumentation while enjoying the increased protection of individual member rights that comes with actually paying the company who hires the staff and the fact that the staff actually has to take their job seriously.
Fansites leave too much important aspects about individual protection and corruption-prevention to chance. We can only hope that every fansite staffmember has an incredibly great moral compass and that they volunteerily put systems in place to deal with problems with the staff that may arise. Because if they don't, then the moment they do something wrong, you have little if any means to complain about anything. With official forums, at least we can at least vote with our wallet and gain protection that way.
//
But another thing - I want people to talk, discuss, and communicate in the game. call me old fashioned, but I liked it when people discovered stuff about the game - in the game.
I think dynamic events and all these things are done this way so we wouldnt need to use thottbot. Most MMORPGs are so complex, and game breaking if not researched probably that a player often needs to do things the right way, at the right time - or he will ruin his character, or at least "waste" a lot of time.
In GW2 they tried to kill griefing, and making wrong choices. if you do a poor choice you can almost always alter it. if you picked a wrong gathering profession, you dont need to start over when picking a new one - same with traits. they tried to make this game not punishing for being ignorant. its supposed to be friendly for the guy who does not want to read the manual or play the intro, but just play and discover.
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Then you don't really like wikis. However, it don't see how it is related to an official forum. However, I do agree with you in that just learning about the game through playing it, should be a viable option.
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the best way to build a good community is letting it police itself. ArenaNet/NCsoft represenatives will only put on a larger workload, more responsibility by doing this. even if GW2 becomes a thousand times bigger - remember that gw1 was already pretty big, with 6 million copies sold, and that game was fine without in-game mods.
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Why can't we have both? Why can't we have both an official forum where we can feel rather safe due to the power of our wallets, and also have fansites that provide less safety but more information and flare?
//
finally, happiness or game quality will not increase with spreadsheets and guides and so on. thats not what will make a game memorable. its the experiences inside of the game. the ingame bug reporting tool, feedback tool and so on, will take care of a lot. lots of other problems will best be illustrated in videos captured by players.
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A lot of EVE players would disagree with you, spreadsheets and calculating is the game for many people.
//
finally, ArenaNet will play this game every day post launch, and they will see the problems too. they are right in it with us. do not fret that they wont listen any less. they might listen more than in other games, because trolls wont have a central hub to go to. trolls will be scattered and easily banned.
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It is too much to ask if I were to require that ArenaNet knows the difference between a troll and honest poster? Because if they can't see the difference, are the trolls really trolls?
Edit: Can someone post the command for quotes in this site? The regular [quote] text [/quote] does not work.
You must put it in proper context.
As GW1 aged, interest dwindled, and 3-4 years after release there was mainly two big fansites, Guru, and GWonline. GWOnline became a part of incgames (if i remember correctly) and that site lost a lot of followers.
what happened was that not much content was being released, and while gw1 was quite popular, there was not much to talking about. SF got released after a year, and the buzz was big on many fansites. Many settled with IGN and gamespot fansites. this was around the F and NF days. By EoTN interest had just dwindled.
back on 03-04 they ran "fansite fridays" were every website got their own questions answered. it was all sorts of fansites. many being in different languages.
So, it's pretty natural that the community, when not much was happening just flocked to one fansite, since the developers was in hiatus for so many years. I think they understand there is a dislike for guru, and that they want to promote other sites, come release.
Gailie was very active on the IGN forums in the past. I had lots of discussions with her. And this was a long time before GW1 came out.
Well, i'm not a GW2 Guru mod, but I suspect they get annoyed over already-discussed subjects, or they pressume to have seen similar threads and posts, and want to stop them before they turn into a wildfire. That at least has been my impression. I don't think they have a problem with people asking questions - They have a problem with repeated questions, when there are already threads on it.
Sometimes, people also just post jail bait that will make fanboys angry, so they close the threads immediately. Some subjects are banned to talk about. I recall a thread about mounts. The discussion just derailed into yes - no arguments, so a mod closed the thread. Some people who had invested a lot of their time in that discussion got angry, because they just closed it. However, the mod who closed it felt that no good would come out of it, before some official response had come. Still that mod was made the bad guy.
Personally I don't think a forum - official or not is a democracy. A person signing up doesn't have any rights. They sign an ToA basically giving up any rights. They choose to sign up - The rules are not theirs. That's how it is. Even on official forums.
Conservative; Guru seems conservative in that they feel like they know what is best, and thus react and police things before they think they get out of hand. They don't advocate crazy discussions that can turn into flame wars because they don't want to deal with it. They would rather send out warnings and try to stop it, than letting it run it's course.
A liberal forum would most likely let it go on for much longer, to see if the flame fest would sort itself out or turn into something better.
I don't try to speak badly about anyone. I am merely generalizing, about how the average user needing to be pushed to find greatness instead of settling for mediocrity. A couch potato can become awesome if they are just exposed to the awesomeness.
No of course not. Attentionwh**ing has little to nothing to do with running a fansites. Running a fansite is very difficult and time consuming, and games with official forums, and who announces everything on their main websites, merely undermine the work of all those creative individuals who put love, blood and sweat into the game.
If taking WoW as an example - All the efforts of the folks at theorycrafting merely gets copy pasted into the official forums, and that undermines the effort of those folk who spend their time. its too bad that so many people who get a lot of good knowledge out of theorycrafting never even went to their site, because people just copy pasted it in a guide in the official forums.
If you played GW1 and used the wiki, you can see how people used it to post guides and builds - inside the wiki. everyone can contribute. basically you can do a lot of your community building on the wiki. thats the beauty of it.
And I like Wikis. I recognize that there are people out there who really dont like to discover anything but just want it on-rails. That's fine. wiki is specific information gathering. it doesn't advocate trolls and self-important individuals.
True. But GW2 is not EVE.
Furthermore I merely meant that ten years from now, when GW2 is old and gone, I doubt that most people will think fondly about GW2 in the context of their interactions with and against other players,not about the damage ratio of elementalists with certain traits.
For all Guild Wars 1's mathmatics-wizard-hardcore-crunch-numbers-balancing, the community never became what it could have become due to the steep learning curve. it never became the next competitive starcraft game like they had hoped it would be before release.
Yes. Just because someone can't see the difference, doesn't mean that a troll is any less of a troll.
Some people are not trolls, but just have a crappy life, and put their bleak outlook on live across the entire game. you cant ban people for being annoying douchebags. hence battle.net and world of warcraft forums. and AoC, LoTRO, WAR, Aion, and all the others. it's the same pattern in all of them.
At the end of the day you can never see the true intentions on someone behind the screen. that is why every official forum fails. lots of people just simply use official forums to vent out their frustration.
community never was in control. "they are not listening" or "they are listening" will always happen. they are not possible to please, because many different people who want this game have different ideas on how it should it pan out, and if these groups are allowed to anonymously vent on an official battleground, it will reflect poorly on arenanet - because they are lieing, they didnt hold their promise, people expected too much, they wanted everything for free, they expected something else, they think they are entitled.
for whatever reason they will think that arenanet will poop their pants when they watch petitions, "Open letters to arenanet", "i am quitting threads", "this new game will kill gw2" and so on. furthermore, there is no fee in gw2 - so the investment to troll and rile up fans of the game is much larger.
stakes are higher with a subscription based game, were your game account with 2000+ hours of gameplay can be closed. gw2 is just a 40-50 pricetag, and then a new account. people might think that a good trolling attempt is worth it.
ive seen friends quit the game due to the negativity of official forums and how it spreads into the game. I know that GW2 will get lots of angry people. i know because the hype is way too high for its own good, and fans are posting wishlists like they are facts. a large number of people are out there thinking that gw2 will run with large free game updates every month, and it will never cost anything outside of small silly cosmetic things. they refuse to believe that there is always an off balance to something. they dont take a step back, and realize that with everything is consequences, and for all gw2s great things, there is an offset to that.
all this will be portrayed in the official forum discussions.
removing these, you are left with fansites, and the hatred has no place.
just go to any game forum. epics forum, or biowares forum. Bioware has a terrible forum, full of angry people. it's horrible. if they had not had them, I am sure some great bioware fansites would have popped up. they would have been run by people who enjoy bioware games, and because they are not official very few haters would bother going there.
There's an excellent chance that there will be an official GW2 forum, so all the bickering will likely be for naught.
When Martin Kerstein was asked point blank on Gamebreaker.tv if there would be an official forum, his reponse was the typical "I'm not at liberty to discuss that", that ANet uses whenever they have something they aren't ready to disclose yet. That tells me that issue is at the very least, on the table. If it was already decided that there would be no official forum, there would be no reason not to confirm it.
With public beta near and full release not far off, they would have to know right now, whether or not they were going to be putting up an official forum. If they weren't, he would have clearly said so since there is nothing they need to prepare and polish, that would warrant playing coy. Because Martin wouldn't give a straight answer, it's likely that the forums are right now in the works, and they are just getting everything nailed down before launching them. ANet doesn't do anything half-assed, so I think they are just polishing everything to a perfect gleam.
Why not just announce that they are coming and quiet the debate? To give people more to talk about. To keep the hype train rolling. The more discussion, the better, even for a topic that is somewhat removed from the game itself. It's still keeps ArenaNet and Guild Wars 2 threads active, which will pull in more people just to have a look. Just look at the length of this thread. It's part of the marketing strategy and pretty clever from my perspective because even if people have a negative feeling about the lack of an official forum, that in itself isn't enough to cost any sales. The game still stands it's ground as it's own best advocate.
So when will they launch? I have two guesses. The first date will be just prior to the beta weekend coming at the end of this month because the beta feedback board would likely be incorporated into it. The second would be just before the pre-purchase program goes live and the major public beta activity begins.
So yeah, that's still pure guess work, but judging from Martin Kerstein's response and listening to similar replies from ArenaNet over the last couple of years (and now knowing the results), I think it's pretty likely that official forums are in our future.
WAR attempted at first the no official forum stupidity - how'd that work out ?
Won't last long here either even if at all ,
Most folks want a central , official , place for tech support issues to asking general questions , not 15 fansites.
I am one of those people. I prefer an official forum to get my information, not a fansite.
And you are in the vast , if silent , majority (like tons of other folks who don't even ever post but want an official place ot go and read dev posts/discussions/look for tech support, etc)
Mark Jacobs though this was a grand idea to not have official forums also , his grandiose ideas of this lovely fan community sites being a better way to do it helped usher him out of the building
Honestly , I still wonder how the Mythic team made DAOC as good as it was considering MJ to others were able to ruin WAR in such horrifying fashing.
All right... this is stupid..... as bad when people were saying EA lied with SWTOR and the sub info........ ANET can afford one...
lol at 25 paiges of absolutly nothing
http://www.arena.net/blog/building-community
Ok everyone move to http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/post/4824741/GW2-Will-Have-Official-Forums-Arenanet-blog.html#4824741 and start complaining that they now will add a forum.
http://www.arena.net/blog/building-community =D for those that didnt see it.
Which of course is just your personal opinion
It doesn't matter anymore, one side already won.
Due to the news about the official forums coming, locking this thread.
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