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SOE needs to be more involved with the community if this game is gonna work.
avian5
Member Posts: 12
Im not one of them but from what i read on the posts SOE has pissed off a lot of customers and theres a lot of bad blood. I read a lot of bitterness about SWG. I think it would be to SOE's finacial interest to be more involved with the community in making this game and give the community more imput on what goes into the game. I believe in this present time the community is more experienced and more knowledgable about what they want from a game genre than in the past. The community will often have a better games played resume than the people they hire. The community has done this and done all that, and knows what will make a game work. SOE failed when they didn't listen to the community when it came to SWG and they lost BIG. Creating a game like buying a gift. You are not buying the gift for yourself so dont get what you want, you have to get a gift that the reciever will want. With SWG, SOE wanted power tools while the community wanted a sports car. SOE should make themselves more available and known on forums and game site interviews. At least make believe that they care what the community thinks.
You can sheer a sheep many times but skin him only once, SOE has skinned a lot of people and need to build back up the peoples confidence in them. I would think it would help with the trust factor if they come clean and put out in the open what we will and will not see in the game and what they will and will not do. For instance, they say that the world will change from the time you leave and get back on. Weeelllll, getting stuff or missions done by operatives is not changing the world when i come back to play. EVE has that already and players of that game would never call getting skills and making star ships changs in the world. Are buildings going or not going be in places when i leave and come back. Are faction groups going to pop up and or disappear when i leave and come back. What exactly is going to change in the world when i leave and come back.
Comments
It is true that communication is key to success. I understand that companies have an agenda and sometimes they are told do this and only this in regards to certain aspects of a game. However that is not always the best case
SWG's Dev team in the past let the players down with lax communication. Recently, they are on the boards daily and talking about this that and the other as far as future deveolpments, new additions, player questions, and more. They have really stepped up recently to inform the community of changes and taking players suggestions into play.
I hope they learned there and Smedley wrote that communication will be increased from their staff to the suscribers and I do hope that continues into their future games,
Please Refer to Doom Cat with all conspiracies & evil corporation complaints. He'll give you the simple explination of..WE"RE ALL DOOMED!
Yeah, the "letting go" part of something that happened so long ago is not developing at all.
my forum handle on SWG is MasterCosmo and I talk to the DEVs everyday it seems. they are always talking.
would you really eat your shoe if BIOware made a SW:MMO? is that good or bad to you lol
Last week there were some discussions about SOE's statements about trying to redefine its market strategy and to broaden appeal to a wider market (women, console gamers, asian residents). I point that out in this context because I am not sure that the regular MMORPG community is their sole (or even main) audience. Because of that strategic difference, they may use different ways of getting input (market testing, etc.) than the traditional MMORPG gaming forums.
"You must be either retarded or a fanboi..."
nothing wrong with giving them chances. if they can produce and create a good game I dont care what the company is that did it. Why hold grudges when you can just enjoy a game for what it's worth?
This isn't true. SOE had major communication problems starting with EQ1 after Brad Mcquaid left and SOE focused more on raiding and forced grouping expansions.
It got so bad when Gorden "Abashi" Wrinn was managing the official forums and alienated a lot of players, that they completely shut the forums down except for Tech support and anyone who tried to start a thread about game changes in Tech support was banned.
Not gonna be able to blame LA for that mishandling of communication.
Honestly, I don't think SOE needs more communication during development. These games are developed by designers with a vision they want to see implemented. While management and marketing can play a role in the game's outcome (for better or for worse), player contributions would be largely minimal. Sure that's a cynical attitude to take but every player has an idea of what they want to see but they all can't be satisfied. It's better to leave it to the developer to do their job and craft what they think is fun, then use tight focus groups for tweaks and gradually let more people into alpha/beta as the story goes.
I think players need to temper their expectations of how much feedback they can give and what is reasonable about it.
I am not talking about general feedback during development. SOE has a track record of changing long standing fundamental design aspects of their games without consideration of what the players who invested time and would be effected negatively by those changes, think about it. That is at best rude and at worst fraudulent marketing of a product. It's not minimal effect when most of the players quit, as was the case with SWG. The focus groups they used in EQ1 were uberguilds who clearly are a minority that are insatiable because of the speed at which they devour content. When they focused EQ1 on more and more raiding and forced grouping, they lost many players who were soloers and small group oriented.
I am not talking about general feedback during development. SOE has a track record of changing long standing fundamental design aspects of their games without consideration of what the players who invested time and would be effected negatively by those changes, think about it. That is at best rude and at worst fraudulent marketing of a product. It's not minimal effect when most of the players quit, as was the case with SWG. The focus groups they used in EQ1 were uberguilds who clearly are a minority that are insatiable because of the speed at which they devour content. When they focused EQ1 on more and more raiding and forced grouping, they lost many players who were soloers and small group oriented.
First, you're talking about eq1 -- back in the day, customer service was almost nil and stealth patching (patches without any release notes) was the norm. Mythic and Dark Age of Camelot radically re-defined/arguably defined the modern day concept of community management.
Second, we won't see another SWG fiasco for a long time -- that writing is on the wall and everyone is reading it. The OP is talking about direct community feedback during development, not post release changes. I'm in absolute agreement with you that companies can't abandon their current user base and cannot cater to a vocal minority. Perhaps in the future, companies will enable a type of voting system based on active accounts (literally logging into the game to click on a design decision that could have such a huge impact like the nge --- crazy I know but atleast people aren't blind-sided and they get accurate feedback.)
Lastly, and this is a rehash of two but, the OP was talking about development and what was being put into the game and that's what I was responding to. I don't see any relevance to your commentary (although it is important and should be a lesson learned) with repsect to mine.