Community Relations Archive

You appear incapable of hearing the point, so I'll address yours first to get it aside.

Yes, its better to get publishes later than bugged. Good, done. OK, there's proly not a lot of controversy on that.

Back to my point now.../wave... "over here," SOE said we interpret their conceptual ideas as commitments or promises. We don't get conceptual ideas, we get statements about what they are going to deliver; specific, and with timing that refers to monthly deliverables and "this year" deliverables. The customers didn't twist their arms to say these things. The customers just want them to deliver on what they say (or otherwise forgive them because we are so immersed and enjoying the game overall that we let them ride, which has not been the case.) SOE cannot in good faith claim that we hold them to the carpet over conceptual statements, because they don't offer them.

The way people barf up unfocused, unsolicitedideas on the forums is testament to the fact that SOE does not share or seek our input on design concepts, in the conceptual stage, before committing them to code, and offering us the opportunity to give feedback before its too late to change the design. We would welcome conceptual-stage participation to form and storm ideas around SOE's leadership and focus; which has been a non-existant process.

A recent and new example of this was the 50,000 foot level objectives they just published for Combat Upgrade, even though it still doesn'thit the mark because weA) dont see the details to form opinions on and offer our feedback, and B) its already too late to influence the final product at the fundamentallevel, they have the direction they're heading already set in place now before they decided to enlighten us with a high-level overview. How much better might the process have been if that top level list of objectives was put out to the community before committing any of it to code, so that we had input and they had feedback. Preface those objectives (Yay, objectives!!!) with the statement, "we are seeking community feedback about these conceptual objectives around a combat upgrade, we will gather the communities feedback for the next 30 days, including dialogue and replies from the dev team to storm and clarify statements, then we're going back to the design table and begin the development phase. Please read the following combat upgrade objectives, and give us your feedback about related design elements likes, dislikes, details,or concerns that help toform the product going into development."

Wow would that have been nice to have had to focus and brainstorm around months ago, but now we're getting it at the tail end. OK. We can do better.

We are only given the opportunity to sound off, for the most part, after its far to late to influence change in plans. So for SOE to claim that they can't talk about things because we take them as promises is misinformation. It's a copout, its an excuse for poor communication, poor community input into the conceptual phase of design elements, and poor accountability in the offices of SOE wherecommunication and feedback performance issues on the businessside of the fenceare not challenged by better leadership. First one to challenge in the back offices... the falacy of the statement, "A lot of the problem with responding to an idea is that often gets taken as a promise that we will impliment it. We've all seen that happen and a general suggestions forum won't change that."

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