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Are some people paid to post here ?
Shadanwolf
Member UncommonPosts: 2,392
To me it seems that certain games engender an inordinate amount of posts.
EQN at this time would fit that description for me.Yet, though we know practically nothing...there is an unceasing barrage of questions about what players like and don't like and would like to see in this unknown game.
CAMELOT UNCHAINED displayed the same barrage of questions and statements which seemed designed to keep the game on page one of the forums sheet.
ESOL seemed to have the same questions and pov espoused over and over and over again.
Of course it's highly unlikely we would ever know...but I would be curious to see if others have had similar questions about the patterns of some posting.Perhaps some game company's are conducting market research/or push polling on the cheap ?
Comments
Currently bored with MMO's.
There may be some paid people that post here, but I don't think that's the deal here. You'll find that every now and then people get really excited about an upcoming MMO or two. It seems to happen every year. "This one is the real WoW-killer!". "This game is the true EQ successor!".
There's the themepark crowd and the sandbox crowd and they both latch on and lift up on pedestals any game that looks promising.
I sound jaded...
Current: None
Played: WoW, CoX, SWG, LotRO, EVE, AoC, VG, CO, Ryzom, DF, WAR
Tried: Lineage2, Dofus, EQ2, CoS, FE, UO, Wurm, Wakfu
Future: The Repopulation, ArcheAge, Black Desert, EQN
Whenever i step outside, somebody claims to see the light
It seems to me that all of us have lost our patience.
'cause everyone thinks they're right,
And nobody thinks that there just might
Be more than one road to our final destination--
Yes, 100% gurantee it.
Also, I suspect that there are people who work for online reputation builder/protectors that fill forums up with negative comments, then offer their services to the people its aimed at. Makes for an easy sell : "just google your product or game, see all these negative comments and reviews...we can protect your online image from unwarranted negative attacks" ect
Believe it or not, this site use to have a majority of the threads and discussion being about the game itself. Stuff to do in game, what people are doing, questions about mechanics ect. I think it was around 2006 or so if my memory serves me, when things started to be 100% love the game vs 100% hate the game flame wars.
Soon after this site kicked into high gear its banning of members (though I think that was to boost registerd memebers since they know people just make a new one and they never delete the old account that's banned).
Once the increased moderation happened they seemed to kick only the people who enjoyed the game but were baited into arguments. One thing led to another and this site is 99% why a game sucks and the company is worse than hitler, and 1% super defensive fanclub and nothing inbetween...except for that one subforum for that one game that you get insta banned for anything negative...ehm...
Its basically a site for counter marketing/adspace now. Same goes for steam forums and a few other 3rd party sites. There are still a few sites that offer reasonable discussions and tolerant moderators...but im sure if those sites ever get enough people the hate will flood in.
I dunno I try to post a moderate viewpoint but im either a fanboi or a troll based on others opinions on how good or bad a game is here. Sometimes its fun to wade in the sewers I guess. If I had a game I certainly wouldn't want it listed here
If I was working on a game (and not completely burnt out), I would have a very hard time resisting the temptation to log into forums and say some nice things about it or at least name-drop it from time to time.
Perhaps I'm naive, but I like to believe that overt astroturf tends to be self-defeating in the end. I did once have an employer (not in the game industry) who attempted to arm-twist employees into astroturfing on their off-hours, but the result was just a lot of very creative demotivational memes posted around the office.
Im 100% sure there are groups of some games that are send to forums or social media to start a hype or propaganda for the game they work or play.
And these dayz with so much info and easy acces to internet im sure many just spread opinions on forums even its just made up to just hype the game.
I am sure there are, some have done threads explaining they are making a new MMO and want some feedback. I see nothing wrong in that.
There is an element of a MMO's publicity department that as others have said has the job of spreading the word on social media. We are old school social media, they would only bother with us unless the game was a MMO. It is not full proof, but if you see a new poster that raves about a game from post one, that is likely a company plant.
Then we get those posters who work for a MMO but come on here to post as they are interested in the MMO world. They are going to be bias sometimes, hard not to when you work in an industry, but they contribute a lot.
So in summation, yes there are but I doubt its as many as you think, Facepalm and Twitless are what they concentrate on.
Hehe, BrownAle is partly right. OP there is a name now for this activity:
ASTROTURFING:
That said Camelot Unchained has a HUGE DAOC fanbase if you consider all the players who ever played that game and want 3-faction successor (GW2 apparently failed with it's WvWvW).
Everquest has a similarly huge following given the time and 1st kid on the block so to speak.
I think though that's dangerous for expectations particularly for those game designs which probably need to evolve more now. EQN seems to be doing that going sandbox. DAOC seems to be doing it by increasing the scale of battles and adding castles and a crafting economy - though I'm more worried that sticking to 3-factions is only marginally better than the binary 2 factions borefest.
For the information provided (little) and the number of fans (large) it's a good equation for disproportionate hype. Also KS sorta thrives on word of mouth and fans pushing the agenda so fair do's. By comparison I have a little hunch EQ:N is going to blow the mmorpg genre wide open and hurt wow and other mmorpgs seriously. I know this has been said about other mmorpgs before, but I never could see why. Even with little info, EQ:N sounds like it's really NEXT GEN in TECH & DESIGN.
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014633/Classic-Game-Postmortem
Add me to the I believe so column as well. And thank you BrownAle for pulling just about everything else I would have said on the matter out of my head and typing it here so I didn't have to.
Early on it actually used to frustrate me because a lot of the negative comments that a lot of these people make about the games are completely unfounded and usually based on some kind of mis-information. Then I realized that some of that stuff seemed even contrived towards eliciting a response from those who actually liked the game (reverse marketing where you are tricked into supplying the positive comment to my negative) and I just gave up.
Bottom line, as the OP noticed, it just seems to be about keeping your title on the front page. And the shame of it is that it works! The same people who fall for just about everything else in the world fall for this kind of stuff too. But what are you gonna say if it puts food on someones table you know? I just try to stay ground in reality. If I think a game is good I'll play it and I'll try to talk others into playing it because we all know that population is what keeps an MMO alive and kicking. If a game sucks though, it would have to suck pretty badly for me to feel like I had to come here to say so.
And that's how I think a lot of other people are as well.
Though I doubt anyone will admit it, I would bet money that there are hundreds of posters here paid to post for any given game. Sometimes it is obvious. You have a new poster to the site forums and they are always posting about how great X is. They are in the beta and have all the inside details too. Of course it can be negative comments about a rival game too.
That is just the name of the game now. It is not even contained to the gaming industry, it affects almost every industry as people will do anything for the almighty dollar. I was reading any article this weekend about how the medical industry has hired bloggers to talk up certain doctors!
Think about how Sega and Nintendo would take shots at each other way back in the day in videogame magazines and commercials. It was a time when the internet medium did not exist, so now that it does exist of course companies will use it to further their success.
Myself I think its less about paid posters and more about the type of people this forum attracts in general. Most, not all, but most people here are looking for an MMO to play, or even if they are currently playing an MMO, its a short-term game and they are just hopping around games from week to week or month to month.
Gamers who have found the "right" MMO for them tend to spend their free time playing that MMO, or at the very least posting on that MMO's boards rather than a place like this. So what we end up with is a large base of gamers who want an MMO to play, or rather more than that, they want an MMO *to fall in love with* to really, really get into and enjoy long-term. And they don't have one that suits their particular tastes.
The result of this is that most are looking for "the next MMO" - that perfect game that's juuuuust over the horizon. Nevermind that the last MMO was going to be the "next big thing" or the MMO before that. Or the MMO before that, or the one before that. Or that one back in 2012, or 2011, or 2010, or 2009, or 2008, etc. etc. Nevermind any of that. The NEXT MMO is going to be *The One* for sure.
And thus the hype and all the discussion about games that don't exist yet and aren't even in pre-pre-early-Alpha or in some cases don't even have game engines. Games that won't be coming out anytime soon even under the best of circumstances. Most of the gamers here aren't happy with any MMO that currently exists, so the only thing that's interesting for them to talk about is hypothetical future MMO's.
No matter how cynical you become, its never enough to keep up - Lily Tomlin
EQN is such a game i wonder...
I think those recent spam gold seller posts may be made by some sort of employee....
But the rest....
The rest of incessantly hatefull, or unbelievably fanfull posts are made by "rabids" I believe.
To coin the old saying: there is no such thing as bad publicity. I'm just as likely to believe that the guys attacking a game are the ones paid by companies. They are still generating conversations about a product and by extension hype. Tell me that doesn'take you a little paranoid.
No matter how cynical you become, its never enough to keep up - Lily Tomlin
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
Sometimes yes, if they fail what they wanted to achieve.
In other cases, developers use it as a way of damage control as well.
And it pays off, how often do you see a game where noone knows what it is gonna be win E3 awards without even showing something?
So yes, there are forum squads hired to boost hype, it pays off in the end, no matter how bad a game is, the initial launch sales often go through the roof before the harsh reality sinks in and players cancel, but that's when those developers have earned their money already.
Also biased game magazine reporters are pressured to hype/give very positive previews of games, otherwise they end up on the short end of the stick in invitations for future games and interviews.
Money talks.
"going into arguments with idiots is a lost cause, it requires you to stoop down to their level and you can't win"
Professional hypers. I didn't think they existed until the Camelot Unchained kickstarter thing.
Looking back it all, it appears to have worked.
I don't think people are paid to post here, my guess would be sometimes friends, family, or maybe even the Devs of a game themselves make an Anon account.
If I'm wrong and people do get payed to post, my opinion is easy to buy and I have a lot of free time at work,
give me a shout.=)