Development Cycle Archive

Shutting down the discussion forum makes a lot of sense, as right now it only exists as a breeding ground for bandwagonism. The problem, however, is that if you lose this forum you do lose a vital area for players to discuss the game in general. Specific feedback on development ideas is important, but you never know the community may have the next "killer" idea and be about to post it to the general forum.

The solution, I think is to change the way the discussion forum is moderated; run it so that any new topic has to be approved by a community co-ordinator before it can go live, with responses to that topic moderated in the usual fashion.

Set down hard and fast rules and to what will and will not be considered an acceptable post (no petitions, no "I quit" threads, whatever you deem fair). A word of warning though - censoring every post that raises a concern that reflects a negative aspect of the game will do you no good.

By doing this you can keep the forum, and turn it into a useful tool rather than the mess it is now.

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KaiAzreal wrote:

TH,

The closure of the Gen Discussion forum is a move in the right direction. All of the proposed Forum changes work, except forone small change. Let's open "In Concept" to everyone. Customers need a place to post their non-profession ideas and suggestions. To raise above the clutter make Developer's posts sticky.

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You mean like a SWG General Discussion board??

My God how many freakin Fanbois are going to come here and proclaim "great idea closing the Gen Disscusion forum" and in the next breath state but we still need a place to post our non-profession ideas and suggestions?

YOU MEAN LIKE HAVING A GENERAL SWG DISCUSSION BOARD!!??

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KaiAzreal wrote:

TH,

The closure of the Gen Discussion forum is a move in the right direction. All of the proposed Forum changes work, except forone small change. Let's open "In Concept" to everyone. Customers need a place to post their non-profession ideas and suggestions. To raise above the clutter make Developer's posts sticky.

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My God how many times are freakin Fanbois, with thier heads stuff up SOE arses, going to come here and proclaim what a wonderful idea it is to close the gen discussion forum and then in the very next breath state "Customers need a place to post their non-profession ideas and suggestions"!

YOU MEAN LIKE A SWG GENERAL DISCUSSION FORUM!!??

W T F??

VolatileMan

Sorry bout the repost, though i lost the first one

VolatileMan

No fanboi, but he's already mentioned open threads (that I expect to be completely bloated) on In Concept, as an example. That would be a place to give constructive ideas, non-profession related, yes?

"As for the SWG discussion forum, it was a really tough debate, but for now, we're moving ahead as planned and closing it."

I see, so when you said in your first message in this post that the comment period would last through Friday, you meant that it would last through the Tuesday where you summed everything up and took it to make the final decision? A decision running counter to the wishes of your paying customers, I might add.

I keep going back and forth on whether closing communication lines to improve communication is Orwellian, in a newspeak/Animal Farm sense, or Kafkaesque, in the vein of The Castle/Trial. The comment period upon this question will be open for the next 48 hours.

Okay, comment period closed. Orwellian wins.

Well we all knew that they will close the discussion forum no matter what we say anyway.

As most of us pointed out, the whole point of this change is to close down the discussion forum and nothing else.

Kinda makes you wonder tho'

They close down discussion forum where we can start our own discussion of currently live server issues and open up forum in which only Dev can start a thread.

Seems like they don't think we'd ever come up with a significant enough thread on our own doesn't it?

Probably think the bad thread so vastly out number the good thread and the loss of few good thread is irrelevant considering it is coming from players.

If they don't trust us to come up with good ideas on our own when we are left with no restriction, what make them think we'll have better ideas when we are told which specific issues to think about?

They expect to get better result by saying

"we want your input, but just on this thread"

instead of simple

"we want your input"

wonder what the issue was. couldn't be the bad publicity since they already made all these forum "members only"

And it couldn't be the retention issue. fraid their players are running away (especially new ones from buddie code) after visiting these forum because of negativety since very small percentage read these forum anyway and if the game is good and people are having fun playing it, you can't drive them away with stick even if every forum is fill with rants.

And as previous half dozen pages have pointed out this definately isn't to "improve communication".

I gotta say I am stumped on this one.

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Thunderheart wrote:

As for the SWG discussion forum, it was a really tough debate, but for now, we're moving ahead as planned and closing it.

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*sigh*

Here's to another two steps back.

You guys have a real love of shooting yourselves in the foot, you know that?

I think the "in-live" board is a good idea. But WE should have the ability to post on it. Who spends more time on the live servers? the collective thousands of us or you devs? I think the answer is obvious.

We run into the bugs and issue. We report to bugs, and usually never hear a thing (and on more than one instance were blatantly told we were imagining thing when if fact we were right). Having this kind f strangle hold on discussions will cause many issues and bugs to be overlooked and ignored. It will also serve to widen the gap between us and the devs...unless you devs increase your responciveness by several 100 times., and I doubt that will happen.

Shouldnt ideas go to In Concept before they reach In Development?

What i'm saying is why is the ID#2 out already when it was never In Concept

Ack, they're hearding us!

I am not sure who posted it, but he had a great idea. Maybe instead of just complaining here (which is always ignored) we should all send an email to a few popular gaming magazines. Inform them of all the issues, the poor customer service and get these issues in a magazine article. I garauntee that they will start getting issues fixed if SWG starts to get negative reviews in these magazines.

I can't believe the whining in this thread. You know, the devs don't even have to provide us with a forum. We should be grateful they haven't followed in EQ's steps completely and closed the entire thing. We got spoiled pre-launch with the amount of information and attention the devs gave us, and now every random forum poster expects the virtual equivalent of a pat on the head for some game idea they came up with.

The fact remains that the devs are the designers, not us. I'm glad they finally remembered that. Maybe these changes will give them a chance to focus on their real work instead of babysitting us.

I'm glad to see the forums returning to the concept of focus threads. It worked really well on the old Beta boards, and I'm excited to see it again. I wish that everyone complaining about having their voice stifled would realize that the focus threads ensure that every single response WILL be read by the devs. If anything, players have even more exposure for their ideas now then they had in the old cesspool of the Discussion forum.