Community Relations Archive
Thread: General forum hostility to the Developers and SOE
If you go to sites like amazon.com and eb.games you will see page after page of horrible, aggressive reviews of SWG games by former and current SWG players.
If you read the reviews, you will find that most of them have the same theme: that the reviewer actually loves the game but has been soured against it by what the reviewer deems to be very poor and sometimes dishonest communication betweem the player base and SOE. This sourness then seems to descend into anger and abuse against the developers and mods of SOE. Obviously, such insults and abuse are counter-productive.
However I strongly believe that those same devs and mods should ask why ordinary people playing a game would be so angered and frustrated that they are reduced to anger and insult.
The communication between SOE and its customer base is poor. I believe that Tiggs is in a zero-sum game. She does her best with good intentions to handle over 40,000 posts a day. At the same time, I believe that she is not told about the major game decisions made by the producers so, when they break, she is left to handle them alone. Obviously, as one person, she simply cannot do that adequately.
If the producers were clear with us - and honest too - there would not be so much ill-will between SOE and its players and between the SOE representatives we can 'get at' and forum posters.
For example, the reason for this current XP adjustment is - we all know - to pace the Jedi grind. If someone had simply told us this, rather than to hide the change in a minor publish, at least we would have been able to argue and analyse the change so you could see all sides of the argument. As it is, the forums are ablaze once more with the same level of hostility as was provoked by the CU. And, once again, SOE earns itself poor PR amongst the online gaming community.
Great post.
Unfortunately, it has become abundantly clear that the *only* thing that causes SOE to listen is $. The only way they will listen is if enough players quit. As long as they are making a certain amount of profit, they will feel that whatever they are doing must be correct because the money is there.
SOE will be an interesting case study for a business school someday. Like so many companies before them, they essentially "invented" an item - became complacent with their succes - refused to innovate - and watched competitors who *did* innovate and *did* listen to their customers surpass them.
It is amazing to see the company that *dominated* the MMO market just 2 years ago slowly become an also-ran.
A recent example is 3Dfx - anyone remember them? In the late 90's they *dominated* the 3D card market, primarily with daughter cards. But they were slow to move to all-in-one 2D/3D card combos, slow to add new features (anti-aliasing, shaders), and in the span of 3 years then went from having a market share of greater than 80% to filing chapter 11. NVidia and Radeon were the upstart competitors who listend to consumers and software developers and continued to innovate and meet the market needs. Will SOE eventually fall as 3Dfx did? Only time will tell....