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We Dont Want Official Forums - EAMythic Wimped Out on the Casual Customer..
tikovoo
Member Posts: 289
So I was on warhammeralliance.com and was doing a bit of catching up when I came across this post by Mark Jacobs..
McQuaid Flashbacks anyone? Be prepared.
| Folks, The age we are living in is definitely a different one. I've gone from moderating forums with hundreds of people to seeing forums that are supposed to support games with millions of people. I wish it was as simple as set a few rules, apply them fairly, be honest with the players and then everything will be all right. It just isn't that way, no matter how much we would like it to be. Heck, even on our own beta forums we have people who refuse the follow the rules, break NDAs, ignore stickies, etc. and we do all the right things. No matter how well-intentioned the mods, unless a company is ready, willing and able to devote a ton of staff to the forums (24x7 mods, ruthless enforcement, limited topic creation ability, large staff), there are simply too many people to handle unless you have either an incredibly thick skin or so few available posting venues (as opposed to reading venues) to make it less than worthwhile. Scale is a wonderful and terrible thing and I'm sorry but you can't compare a game(s) that are small to games like WoW or even what we hope WAR will be in terms of number of subscribers. Also, the type of game has a direct effect on the style of the community. Let's face it, in a game like WAR or DAoC in which conflict between the races, sides, etc. is a main selling point, the forums for these games will be rather, hmm, enthusiastic. Lots of screaming and yelling, lots of false reports and tons of exaggeration. Whether it is WAR, WoW, DAoC or any other game in which RvR or PvP plays a major role, all these games share a very similar community. And I've seen more than enough from DAoC and WoW alone, to tell me that I am indeed right in my assessment. And I am happy to make a prediction here, when AoC launches, if they have official forums (I don't know their stance on it), they will have the same kind of behavior that the aforementioned games have had, count on it. If I'm wrong, I'll be also happy to admit it. From my perspective, I'm not as concerned with the cost in terms of dollars (but the players should be) but rather what I will have to put my people through to run those forums. If WAR is as successful as we hope, we will have more users than any other MMORPG other than WoW. If that is true, we will be flooded by good users and bad. When things turn ugly, and they always do, my people will be insulted, yelled at, cursed at, threatened and told the vilest things possible. When we launched DAoC, one of my rules for our Customer Service Reps was that they didn't have to sit still and be abused by customers. I believe it is every customers' right to complain about the service but I also do not believe it is every customers' right to treat other human beings as people that they can dump on and treat in a manner that I know they wouldn't want to be treated themselves. I've said this before but unless you have worked the backend for one of these games, you do not really understand how ugly players can get when dealing with CMs/CSRs. I've seen more than my fair share of this ugliness directly and no amount of wishful thinking will make it otherwise. I care greatly about providing my customers with a great game but I also care deeply about my people, whether developer or CSR, and I don't want them to have to go through what I've seen happen both in other games as well as our own. While the percentage of people that are truly abusive is small, when you get to the kind of numbers we hope to have with WAR and given the type of game we are, that small percentage can suck up a lot of time and energy if you want to run forums properly. Just so you know, I would never want to have official forums that we ignore just so we could say we have official forums. That is, quite frankly, BS. As I've told our CM people when we talked about this issue, if we are going to do it, we would have to do it right. Now, this doesn't mean we won't communicate to the community directly. Our Herald system was the best in the industry when we launched it for DAoC and we want to take it to the next level with WAR. We will have internal tester forums and we might have what we had with DAoC in terms of outside, specifically focused forums to help the players as well as to get additional feedback for us. However, even those had their share of false reports, exaggerations, etc. which diminish their usefulness and cost us time and money. We will also continue to post in places like these and make ourselves available to the community where we can. I want to reiterate that both official forums and internal forums, we have misspent a fair amount of time based on what users have sworn said happened, they saw, etc. At least with internal forums (and they can get heated at time), we know that the people there actually want to be there and help and not just post something to waste our time. And we've had our time wasted so often that it is ridiculous (even with QA sometimes you have to pass things on to devs quickly if it is potentially serious enough). However, if you are looking for Mythic to provide wide-open official forums where people can threaten, curse, vent, etc., we have no intention of doing that now or in the future. There might be a hybrid solution but for now, I'm choosing to err on the side of caution. Oh, BTW, I've said this before as well, I also post as myself, never an alias. I do this so people know who they are talking to and what I stand for, even if they think/know I'm wrong. I do believe if people posted under their own names the Internet would be a lot more polite. Anonymity is a very good thing at times but when it comes to issues like these, it isn't. It certainly is not true for everybody but it couldn't be much worse than it is and has become over the years. Twenty years of dealing with online communities has taught me many lessons, one of which is that most people (not all) will say things under an alias that they would never do under their real name or in person. I've lost track of the number of people I've met who on the boards/Internet were angry, vicious, unreasonable and nasty but in real-life, the exact opposite. Heck, even some people say that I'm a lot nicer in RL than I might appear to be at times here. In closing, I do wish I believed that having official forums would be a great move for WAR. Even with the jerks/griefers/flamers/etc., I love online communities, I just cannot be convinced that in 2008, the right way to launch an MMORPG like WAR is with wide-open official forums. Mark |
This shows to me that Mythic dont care, its a Service Industry, they just don't care for the consumer.
Obviously Jacobs felt the need to mouth off, again.
I know we have gone over the official forum thing a few times, but this is new news, a new post addressing yet again negative connotations ~ rumblings in the public.
What I want to know are:
Why do developers expect that 3rd party communities will be more successful with no professional community managers, less official clout and overall less resources than the developers did?
Fans will flock and give more credence to whatever fansite forums that they perceive gets the most of Mythic's staffs attention. What will Mythic do to balance this?
Financial reasons why WAR will not have official forums of the type that other MMOs have - why is that now they sport the EA badge?, its different now to the Daoc times.
There should be official forums because it is unfair to foist all the work onto the community. Why should the fans be made to carry that burden with little more than a 'thank you' from the Devs and the Community. Voluntarily labour is as exhausting as forced.
So what happens when a server goes down?? anyone? ok, i'll answer. You post on the forums and then if the company is nice enough the community manager or someone will pop on and post a "sorry its going to be down a while" - thats cool now I know where I stand for the rest of the day. Having no offfical forums = me trapsing around the i-net for info, and then the developers / community representatives (who mark wants to wrap up in cotton wool) needs to find where a problem is...
"If WAR is as successful as we hope, we will have more users than any other MMORPG other than WoW. If that is true, we will be flooded by good users and bad. When things turn ugly, and they always do, my people will be insulted, yelled at, cursed at, threatened and told the vilest things possible" - poor little baby, should you not explain in the contract of employment "welcome to the industry this is what will happen" or are "your people" socially inadequate and lack training?
Is it me or cant the man take crititism? just like on the VN boards...
Official forums give the customer a chance to voice their opinion formally to the company. I don't really see how much less work it would be to have to shift through a variety of different community unofficial forums to get a sense of what players want or think about the product. Maybe EAMythic just doesn't care about consumer opinions or wants but we'll have to see how well this decision plays out I guess. Forums and the internet is serious business but if you’re in the MMORPG business you have to take the good with the bad and that would be maintaining some sort of official forum
on the flip side though, the Camelot Herald was pretty cool, I expect the War one to be too. The herald can deliever good amount of info, but the direction is all one way. Or I am lost in a sea of people wanting their own question asked in a 'grab bag' even today Camelot Herald still puts out noob info. These things could be covered just as well in one spot on official forums and then we as the community might feel we are contributing to it. Mythic has done an incredible job in providing information, especially podcasts, I just wonder though. Game launch comes, the masses will be lost.
I still think the playerbase will want more interaction with the devs as opposed to a form submission.
Don't forums really equate to customer service? When your customers have questions you want them to find the relevent information quickly. Does Walmart want their customers going to Target for customer service questions? Sure eventually sites like Thottbot and such will be up and running, but I still think relying on others to help your customers is lame. As is the excuse I'm worried about my staff having their feelings hurt by morons on the forums.
Official forums are a non-issue as long as the game works out of the box on all computers, never has any bugs, and we have a community of players that don't mind helping each other. But Jacobs thinks that the game is going to get massive numbers, and it might just get them, but he is also scared of that population having the ability to speak to the company he works for.
Because Mythic's Herald system works in DAoC (a very mature game) doesn't mean today it is still the best model. Lets also assume for a minute or two that Warhammer wont be the same size as DAoC. If this game stays the same size as DAoC then perhaps that system is fine. I guess.
Example, when I bought a game and I installed it - the graphics were whacked. I posted my spec's on the support forum and said what my problem was. 5 mins later there was a post telling me the issue was with my vid card and linked a fix for it. Sorry, but a knowledge base won't help me there. And some filling out some form for something a K.B. doesnt have could mean waiting a long time.
Well there wont be an official forum, lets hope it turns out ok then for all our sakes. Just my opinion, based on this latest post - there are good and bad points mark puts around but on the whole I think its a bad thing.
Comments
Simply put, no official forums = none of my money on this WoW clone.
Currently playing: No MMOs. They all suck.
Everyone's known and talked about this for months...I even think there's various threads related on it atleast when I searched it after seeing this one. Personally I'm glad their devs & tech people won't be tied up with 1 billion and 1 complaints, elitists listen to me, and other massive problems caused by official forums.
I don't even bother going with the WoW forums because they're so out of control. I'd rather the Company be tied up working on additions & fixes to the game based on well writen customer feed back they'll get from heavily controlled boards like Warhammer Alliance. I guess thats just me though...anyone thats familiar with Sony Knows how rough things get there..infact things get so nasty the Dev's rarely talk with you at all anymore.
btw MChavez if you aren't going to bother to learn anything about the game perhaps you should troll elsewhere.
OMG NO OFFICIAL FORUMS?
hey maybe people will actually read thier guilds forums instead? It could just be me but honestly do you need an official forum if you know how games work? I mean really its just a bunch of people who have no idea what they are talking about giving out advice, since most of the "experienced" crowd doesnt bother. Thats just my experience though.
Thats why I goto warhammer alliance - nice one! still not perfect though.
And thats why on the whole fan sites owners or moderators dont have the industry knowledge or legitimate face to face customer service as potentially one in an official capacity.
Its about the feeling of direct relations with the public and not some "post every now and then" on some 3rd party website where people don't know how to moderate.
Old topic, but one Mark Jacobs decided to thrust his recent thoughts into the public spotlight. And one where he feels he wouldn't want to talk about it on forums with the warhammer official logo and connection to - just in case his poor staff had to endure some trollish posts.
WHC - well represented my friend.
Still for me no official forums is a big question mark i dont get why they wont have one i dont beleave there exscuse why they shouldnt have one its total b******t and all this c**p about read the wow forum well for f*** sake thats god dam wow not war go check out eq2 forums there fine not every god dam game is like god dam f****** wow !
If im paying a sub i should be intitled at least a tech forum with dedicated staff thats all theres no if buts or why we shouldnt have one its a given.
dont even try tell me other wise its just a given.
{ Mod Edit - Toned down the profanity }
[Geriden here i was also very drunk at the time and the drink sent me into a typing frenzy i get anoyed when everything is constantly compared to wow also a paying customer for a mmo should have a certin level of customer service and there current stand in my opinion comes of as a way to ignore there customer i also said this way back when they anounced they will not be having any forums]
Total uncalled for. He brings up a topic he feels concerns about, thats all. No troll baiting, not a controversial topic or a total irrelevant off-topic message. He even end it "Well there wont be an official forum, lets hope it turns out ok then for all our sakes. Just my opinion, based on this latest post - there are good and bad points mark puts around but on the whole I think its a bad thing.". Doesnt feel so "trollish" to me.
Mythic has made up their mind, no official forums. I myself dont really care for a official forum. I think the fan sites works really good (except one of them that got a little out of hand in the moderation). But then again I can understand the people that would like to have one official forum. Im not gonna deny them that.
The Second Day Vet
DAoC did not have Official forums and the community still functioned very well.
There is no reason to get bent out of shape. There will be a site that everyone congregates to and you will most likely hear about it in game. (ex. DAoC Vault, DAoC Catacombs, etc etc) There are already some good Warhammer info/fan sites out there, so just find the most populated one and sign up.
Official forums don't work for actual information gathering. They turn into a cesspool of whining. I am glad there will be no official forums because I hate the cesspool that are WoW forums. And Of course no Official forums means EA Mythic can't delete all of the topics they don't want to see like Blizzard does.
Currently playing:
LOTRO & WoW (not much WoW though because Mines of Moria rocks!!!!)
Looking Foward too:
Bioware games (Dragon Age & Star Wars The Old Republic)
We can't tell if the DAoC model will work with an estimated 5 times as many subscriptions as that game imo.
Is it fair for one unofficial site to have all the devs post there?
Thats nice assuming DAoC will be the same size as Warhammer Online though. Warhammer will bring many new people to the genre. The official warhammer site gets about 60k hits per month, but we all know the game is played and miniatures are brought by many more. A lot of these people will come online to play this game.We can't tell if the DAoC model will work with an estimated 5 times as many subscriptions as that game imo.
Is it fair for one unofficial site to have all the devs post there?
The Warhammer community is more than capable of running multiple fan forums.
The devs understand this and have decided to let things unfold as they may. Look at the bright side, Mythic will have more time to focus on in-game additions and improvements rather than have to mop up the forums floors day in and day out.
Yeah, I never really understood Mythic's stance on official forums for their games, it was like this in DAoC. They've always been of the opinion, for gods know what reason, that a scattered, non-centralized community is better. It honestly doesn't make much sense, although I will admit that they did do a good job of answering feedback you sent them through the Camelot Herald, even if it was just through the Grab Bag or some such. But still, it IS nice to have a central, official spot where you can go to chat, and maybe get in a convo with some type of company representative. They said that official forums made it more difficult to gather accurate information from the players b/c of the tendency of people to over-react and start flaming.
I sadly don't see their stance on forums changing anytime soon, but I wish they would change it.
Thats why I goto warhammer alliance - nice one! still not perfect though.
And thats why on the whole fan sites owners or moderators dont have the industry knowledge or legitimate face to face customer service as potentially one in an official capacity.
Its about the feeling of direct relations with the public and not some "post every now and then" on some 3rd party website where people don't know how to moderate.
Old topic, but one Mark Jacobs decided to thrust his recent thoughts into the public spotlight. And one where he feels he wouldn't want to talk about it on forums with the warhammer official logo and connection to - just in case his poor staff had to endure some trollish posts.
WHC - well represented my friend.
It's not a question of whether fansite owners or moderators have industry knowledge etc. The "gold" version of the game isn't out yet, and I find it laughable that so many whiners are crying "doom" over something that hasn't even happened yet.
You compared WAR having no official forums to the Vanguard fiasco. There's no comparison . . mostly because WAR hasn't happened yet. I'm glad EA Mythic is worrying more about producing a finished and polished game - not spinning its wheels debating their decision not to have official forums. Official forums have nothing to do with the coding of the game.
I was a part of the EA family from 1999-2005 as a tester. I was also a Community Leader from 2004-2005. So, if you want to talk "industry" with me, I'd be more than happy to oblige. I can not only tell you about the industry - but we can also discuss EA's mindset - at least up until the time I moved on.
Even so, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to cry foul over something that hasn't happened yet. I'm not one to rush judgment against EA Mythic's decision to forgo official forums. Right now there's no lack of communication between EA Mythic and its prospective customers. In fact, I've never seen so much information about a game in pre-release. I'm sure all of this info that EA Mythic is releasing is causing EA Marketing and EA Legal to work overtime!
But as I said, I don't mind giving you my MSN or even calling you on the phone if you want to talk about the industry. That, my friend, is how WHC represents. I'm not trying to be a jerk. I'd actually enjoy talking to you about this subject matter privately.
I have mixed feelings about no official forums. On one hand it's nice to have a place where official in-house community managers can provide official information and gather feedback. Yes, official forums can turn into a cesspool of flamers and fanbois, but at the same time, so can any forum.
At the same time, I also have enjoyed many of the fan communities that I've been part of back during the early mmo days. We had good interaction with many devs, but at the same time, the communities were much smaller.
Also, having an official forum would in no way affect anything when it comes to the day to day running of the game. It's not like the devs would be posting, typically you'd hire on a team of community managers who sole purpose is forum interaction with the fans.
They act like its some crazy mess running a forum, all it takes is some organization and a couple of Mods. Yes, you get the occasional complainer but that can be dealt with, and without the customers complaint whether it be calm or angry, how will the community know whats going on? Also official forums are a good place for customers to congregate in a very "official" organized manner. 3rd party forums can easily go down due to lack of funding or other problems. Lastly, I love how he states that they will have more members than everyone... except WoW. What a way to say you can't even compete.
Excellent you won't be playing.
Cudos to Mythic for not allowing 8 yos to cry cry cry and worry about retarded non-constructibe forums and inastead put more time and effort working on real issues from intel gathered from testers and mature players.
I hope this means all your friends won't be playing either, you still have mash button I win wow to play.
The main problem I have with Official Forums is that it tends to not be very diverse. Opinions are often deleted because it hurts the pride of the developer. I've seen some very valid thoughts - presented in a very nice manner - deleted and ignored.
The good thing about the WAR fansites is that more opinions are stated. You might have the same discussion at Warhammer Alliance and WAR-RvR, and you'd see totally different points being made. All of them valid. This simply wouldn't happen on an official forum - at least, not frequently.
The difficult thing is getting these opinion to EA Mythic. But since the game isn't out yet, it's much too early to speculate. I will say this - Robert Mull, James Nichols and Missy Hatch are very approachable. They tell it like it is. I've corresponded with each - and they don't pull punches. They tell it like it is, That has been my experience with them. They've told me that they are going to establish a presense on the various WAR fansites . . . and I have no reason to believe otherwise.
Honestly I don't care either way, if there's forums yay, if there's no forums oh well, I care about the game and as long as Mythic can keep in touch with the customers and address problems/listen to suggestions, I'll be happy.
--------------------------------------
A human and an Elf get captured by Skaven. The rat-men are getting ready to shoot the first hostage with Dwarf-made guns when he yells, "Earthquake!" The naturally nervous Skaven run and hide from the imaginary threat. He escapes. The Skaven regroup and bring out the Elf. Being very smart, the Elf has figured out what to do. When the Skaven get ready to shoot, the Elf, in order to scare them, yells, "Fire!"
Order of the White Border.
Well, it is ignorance like this that somewhat makes me glad that they will not be adding official forums. An eight year old is still a customer who's opinion of the game matters, or should matter to the developers. In the case of WAR that opinion does not matter.
I like the way it is like this. For example, on an official forum there are one to three guilds that get deemed "favorites" on the forums and they tend to get all their questions answered and it discourages other players and guilds from posting. I am a part of around 24 Warhammer Online forums and I see the trend of guilds sticking to other sites. I see a couple that tend to post on WarhammerAlliance, another set posts on Only-WAR, another that posts on WarhammerConflict, and so on and so on. I like it being diverse and I feel like it helps spread the love around. On the terms of service issue, if you even need to contact Mythic directly you can always go right to WarhammerOnline.com and use the contact EA Mythic link to email them. If it is something valid and not just spam or begging, they typically respond. You won't go ignored by them, but there truly is no reason to need an official forum.
Mark Jacobs used World of Warcraft as a great example in terms of forums. In their game suggestion/bug forum, the highest amount of VIEWS ( so it would definitely be higher than posts ) for any single thread in there is around 500k. We have no idea how many times on player views the thread so I doubt it is even near 500k unique views. Now this is their game suggestion forum, and they have 10 million total players. You do the math of 10 million players and likely 120k unique views on a stickied thread for the suggestion/bug forums. The majority of the community actually ignores the forums altogether. I would rather EA Mythic focus their resources elsewhere rather than having to pay people to moderate a forum that has absolutely 0 impact on the game itself.
The bottom line is they are avoiding a valuable resource to customers as they do not want to deal with the hassel of moderating the forums. EA brings in millions of dollars a year. There are forums out there that sustain a multi-million member database and run with absolutely NO profits and stay organized just fine. Because EA Mythic does not want to deal with some complaints seems a petty reason to not have official forums. So for some of you saying that by not having an official forum, they can focus on doing things more useful is not a valid argument, it takes little effort to maintain a forum. I am speaking this way as I myself have maintained forums on InvisionFree in the past, it is not hard.
Quote: "When things turn ugly, and they always do, my people will be insulted, yelled at, cursed at, threatened and told the vilest things possible."
Basically, he's saying his people are pansies who won't be able to take criticism without crying. What a laugh.
And they'll have more customers than any other mmorpg besides WoW ( he stated wishfully ), and that's a reason not to have forums? Maybe someone should tell Blizzard, since they've had 'em from the beginning.
Everytime I've seen a game that had no official forums, it was because they didn't want people to see when paying players were angry, or that a game was in trouble. Vanguard was a good example, as is Fury now.
What resource are they denying people that isn't already offered somewhere else? We have tons of forums, tons of community, and they told us where we can directly contact them.
EDIT: Played Shadowbane, DAoC, FFXI, and WoW for over two and a half years each, as well as playing DAoC and FFXI for over four years and not once did I ever go to an official forum. It has always been guild forums and fan sites, and places like this. Do I feel like I was denied anything? Nope. The only "official" forum I am a part of is Age of Conan official boards and I stopped posting there except for bumping the Acolyte guild thread because there are far too many vocal idiots on the forums and I would rather not have to deal with them every single day. If you don't play a game because of lack of official forums than that is a shallow reason to not play but I would have to respect your decision. We have known there will be no official WAR forums for YEARS now, I don't know why this is still getting brought up randomly here and there. I guess people need their reasons to complain.
QQ more forum whiners.
I played WoW and never went to the forums cuz all it was full of was bashing and crying and people calling each other names. Actually I think the majority of the playerbase in WoW doesn't even go to the official forums and they function just fine.
So QQ more kids.
The only thing I worry about is that a lack of official forums means a lack of official technical forums as well.
Not having forums for player feedback is one thing. What about if new players run into technical problems with installation, or bugs, or some other issue? Without some kind of official place to let the devs know, and to get feedback and/or some kind of interaction with a dev or programmer that can help, some players might well decide that EA Mythic don't care, and they'll leave the game without ever giving it a chance.
I don't know many people who want to waste time hunting across a bunch of different guild sites or fan sites looking for tech help when a post on an official tech forum would at least be seen by the right people who could help.
They are denying the resource of having an official forum, as I said previously, 3rd party websites can easily go down due to lack of funds (i.e. Jimmy running WAR-COOL-KIDS runs his own WAR fansite and it gets way overpopulated because there are no officials forums and he cannot continue to pay for the bandwidth). Also 3rd party websites lack official replys from dev's. If there is something I know about being a customer it is that you like to read something written from an official staff member, not from some unknown source. If the servers are down I prefer the professionalism of an official forum, not a 3rd party website. I think it is the responsibility of the developers and staff to actively reply to customer needs and concerns via an official forum, whether they like criticism or not. Where will I go when say, the servers go down? And all I can get from a 3rd party website is "dude, shit crashed dunno how long its gonna be yo". No, I expect an official response with an estimated time of reboot or uptime, and a official explanation as to why, ie update, patch, etc.