Development Cycle Archive

Very good thoughts there in the first post and I hope they will be executed all soon.

Although it took you guys pretty long to figure the problems out and I hope this is like a fresh start for you.

::EDIT:: Oh and by the way - I think the dev team has proven themselve a bit allready on JTL

Message Edited by -TRITAN- on 01-11-2005 07:44 PM

Hmm one thing that I haven't really seen mentioned, is the Correspondents system. A great tool for increasing communication between players and Devs. But as it is it only goes one way most of the time. Community > Correspondents > Devs. And we don't see much in the way of that communication coming back Through the Correspondents. Most of the time they themselves don't know anything as they haven't been told. And the rest of the time they can't tell us what they have been told.

Are you re-examining the Correspondents system, along with these community relations changes ?

If we have the wrong idea about how that system was supposed to work, could you please tell us how you view it working, and it's usefulness as a Communication tool, both from and to the playerbase ?

Maybe an evaluation from the Devs view on how well they think the system as it was first set up is working or not working ?

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BleuDestiny wrote:

Having no GENERAL DISCUSSION FORUMS is not a surprise, since they were cut in the first place under the same regime.

However what you have left us with is more of the same ole same ole lack of feedback mechanism, because as you acknowledge, if players have issues with the game,the bottom line is that if its not a specific issue to a Profession (Forum), there's no appropriate place to post about it, and that's a fact.When we try to post about it in forums where its not appropriate, which is, again, basically anywhere other than specifically related to a specific profession, we're deleted, locked, and suspended for doing so, and our feedback, issues, and comments are shut out.

That, sirs and madames, is no communication at all, and you have failed.

If you're not going to provide a GENERAL DISCUSSION FORUM, then seems like you can provide some other forums around broader gameplay elements, such as "Game Economy & Balance,""Game Interface," and "Game Performance," for examples. Give us SOMETHING to work with, anything. It's not all about Professions when we have issues to bring to the table. You just hita strike out on your first time at bat.

We have a new relations group, but it appears we still have the same ole management making decisions in the same ole way. That is a major blow for the future of our game.

Further, Forums feedback issues aside, your initial post sounds like a bitching session from the Devs, and is 3/4ths what you're going to hold players accountable for in behavior, and not what you're going to do for the players, and more of what you're not going to do for the players.

Honestly, you get a 2 out of 10 for this first post. Very disappointing.

Message Edited by BleuDestiny on 01-11-2005 09:53 AM

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Novock wrote:

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Calandryll_SOE wrote:

Stricter moderation
Yes, this is a good thing. One of the biggest problems we face as community representatives is sifting through flames in order to find the useful posts. We are going to be more diligent with our moderation. That doesn’t mean you can’t post constructive criticism, but calling us Nazis, writing rants, and posting off-topic in an attempt to derail threads where we ask for specific information doesn’t help us or help you. In truth, we aren’t changing our board posting guidelines at this time (if we do change anything we’d let you know) we are simply going to start enforcing them a little more diligently.

Another change to moderation is we are going to be tying board accounts directly to in-game accounts. What I mean by this is infractions for board conduct can become a mark on your account. To be clear, NOBODY is going to get a mark just for writing criticisms or posting negative feedback. These marks will act just like an in-game infraction and will be used to determine if an account needs further discipline or not. Understand that we are not out to “get” anyone. We aren’t going to mark someone’s account just because they post a topic to the wrong board once or anything like that. But in order for moderation to really have an impact it must have teeth.

Note that the Community Relations team and board moderators will NOT be making decisions on whether an account is actually banned. That will be left up to the same people who have always made decisions on player discipline in order to ensure that we are consistent. Our primary job will remain to communicate with you and take your concerns to the Development Team. We WANT your constructive feedback, positive or negative, and we want to make these boards the best tool possible for you to give us that feedback.

An official announcement will be posted to the site in the very near future once this policy goes into effect. I expect this will cause some people to bristle, but I can promise you it will make the boards a better place to visit and post ideas, criticisms, and feedback for those who are genuinely interested in affecting positive change for SWG.

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I ceratinly understand a desire to keep things in line but i inherently see a problem with this to which you didn't address and would hope that you would. In the past i have had some negative feedback posts deleted. They contained no offense language name calling or Nazi comparisons. they were simply a critique of what I believed was wrong and need to be fixed. They were then deleted by a moderator. The problem is I recieved no message as to why they were deleted.It seems if you are going to have a policy of deleting posts you deem "flaming" as opposed to "constructive criticism" you are implementing a very subjective policy. What maybe be consisder constructive-criticism to one Mod maybe going to far to another one. Anywho thats the nature of the beast, my problem is when we get a post deleted we recieve no notice of why the post was deleted. If you are going to delet a post I believe you should tell us why and not just say it was inviolation but say exactly what in teh post was in violation. i believe that to be only fair otherwise how do we know in such a subjective policy that we are not simply being silenced for bringin up something SOE doesn't want brought up. I had a post deleted why, all it contained was quotes from TH's posts LOL

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Keep in mind that we aren't going to mark someone's account every time we have to delete a post. Marking accounts is mostly reserved for really offensive stuff or continual poor behavior. So if someone posted off-topic in a post asking for specific feedback, we might delete the post and leave it at that. If that same person did it over and over again and was repeatedly temp-banned for doing it and just kept doing it, eventually that would lead to a mark.

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DarkY0da wrote:
Hmm one thing that I haven't really seen mentioned, is the Correspondents system. A great tool for increasing communication between players and Devs. But as it is it only goes one way most of the time. Community > Correspondents > Devs. And we don't see much in the way of that communication coming back Through the Correspondents. Most of the time they themselves don't know anything as they haven't been told. And the rest of the time they can't tell us what they have been told.

Are you re-examining the Correspondents system, along with these community relations changes ?

If we have the wrong idea about how that system was supposed to work, could you please tell us how you view it working, and it's usefulness as a Communication tool, both from and to the playerbase ?

Maybe an evaluation from the Devs view on how well they think the system as it was first set up is working or not working ?

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Well we are going to be posting their top issues/bug lists, so that's a start. I haven't decided to change anything about correspondents mostly because I haven't had much of an opportunity to chat with them as much as I'd like to yet. My first focus is looking at big picture changes such as those in the post.

Well done! I hope to see things like this implemented. Couple of quick responses-

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Quick hits
Some other issues I wanted to address include:

• Tuesday Tip – some of you felt the Tuesday Tip wasn’t always very useful. What do you think of the idea of letting players submit tips directly to us through a special e-mail to use in this feature?

I have no problem with the Tuesday Tip, I think everyone is just misunderstanding it (then again, maybe it's just me misunderstanding it). I always thought it wasn't supposed to be TH just posting "here's your weekly tip". I always saw it as a common thread for players to share tips, not developers. TH just posts a tip to kick it off, but the focus of the thread is what other players are saying, not what he says. If someone doesn't think the Tueday Tip is useful, then the way to fix that is for them to submit something useful!

• Off-topic Posts – Some of you mentioned you didn’t want off-topic posts to show up in the Dev. Tracker. I don’t know if we can do that, but in the meantime we’ll try to limit our off-topic posts. I don’t think it’s a bad thing for us to “chat-it-up” with you all from time to time though.

I would hate to see this happen . It has been my wish since release that the devlopers would just come in and chat with us more often, and I'm overjoyed to see tiggs and others doing so. I think it's great being able to get to know the devs in an unofficial context. I'll be be very disappointed to see those posts off the dev tracker. I suppose the ideal solution would be the tracker to have a flag for "off-topic" posts that a dev could activate on posting, but I realize that's a reworking of a forum you don't have control over. My request is just that neither encourage devs not to post off topic nor keep off-topic posts of the Dev Tracker. If anything, I wish there was more off-topic communitcation.

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My Comments in RED

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Calandryll_SOE wrote:

First, I wanted to thank all of you again for your feedback. Now I’d like to discuss some ideas and plans that Thunderheart, Tiggs, and I have. I know I won’t hit every issue brought up in the original thread, but hopefully this will be a good start. Some of this may be less detailed than I'd like as we are still in the very early planning stages so bear with me.

Communication
You (our players) want us to communicate more. As far as community relations goes, I can’t think of a more important issue. So let's start with that.

We’re going to make it a point to follow-up in threads that we start. This means at the very least we’ll post something that says “Thanks for the feedback folks!” so you know we’ve been reading the thread. Often the posts will be a lot more than that though, like this post or Gordon’s recent follow-up. Not every thread will need a follow-up response, but those that do will get at least one or more as often as possible.

All promised communication updates must occur. If something is delayed, we will post and let you know it has been delayed along with an ETA if we have one. So no more wondering on your part if we forgot or if something else came up. I want to get to a point where if the Community Team says we are going to update you about something on a certain day that you can bank on it either happening on that day or us informing you that there has been a delay and telling you why.

Lastly we are going to be working on getting more information out to you earlier (In Concept, Development, Testing, etc.) than we currently do. This is a big step for us, it’s not going to happen overnight, and it means a few things. One, things in these updates are going to change and some things may get delayed or even cut altogether. Two, this will give you more time to give us feedback. Three, the early version of the update may be an overview and may not include all of the details – which will come later. And four, things in these updates are going to change and some things may get delayed or even cut altogether.

We are excited about the changes and updates we are making to this game and hope that you are as well. Again, this will change slowly over time but we hope to find a happy medium.

Stricter moderation
Yes, this is a good thing. One of the biggest problems we face as community representatives is sifting through flames in order to find the useful posts. We are going to be more diligent with our moderation. That doesn’t mean you can’t post constructive criticism, but calling us Nazis, writing rants, and posting off-topic in an attempt to derail threads where we ask for specific information doesn’t help us or help you. In truth, we aren’t changing our board posting guidelines at this time (if we do change anything we’d let you know) we are simply going to start enforcing them a little more diligently.

Another change to moderation is we are going to be tying board accounts directly to in-game accounts. What I mean by this is infractions for board conduct can become a mark on your account. To be clear, NOBODY is going to get a mark just for writing criticisms or posting negative feedback. These marks will act just like an in-game infraction and will be used to determine if an account needs further discipline or not. Understand that we are not out to “get” anyone. We aren’t going to mark someone’s account just because they post a topic to the wrong board once or anything like that. But in order for moderation to really have an impact it must have teeth.

Note that the Community Relations team and board moderators will NOT be making decisions on whether an account is actually banned. That will be left up to the same people who have always made decisions on player discipline in order to ensure that we are consistent. Our primary job will remain to communicate with you and take your concerns to the Development Team. We WANT your constructive feedback, positive or negative, and we want to make these boards the best tool possible for you to give us that feedback.

An official announcement will be posted to the site in the very near future once this policy goes into effect. I expect this will cause some people to bristle, but I can promise you it will make the boards a better place to visit and post ideas, criticisms, and feedback for those who are genuinely interested in affecting positive change for SWG.

Stricter Moderation in the Core forums, such as the Core Systems and Professions is a wonderful idea, but the level of moderation currently being displayed in the Galaxies forums, is totally overboard. Those forums are, as I see it, a communications link out of game for those on a server. Locking, Deleting, and Suspending accounts on things that most game companies use their server forums for is a bit over the top... In my opinion that is the place for Guild Recruitment, On topic, and even off topic discussion between players on a given server. Specifically in Guild Recruitment, the single Stickied thread at the top is a nice reference fo ra quick list of guilds, but not a place for recruitment.

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Customer Service Integration
Many of you mentioned a lot of customer service issues when replying to my original post. Although I do not manage the CS department, I do understand the issues. With that in mind, we are going to get CS more involved with interacting with all of you here.

We’re going to be opening Customer Service message boards. These will be a place for you to post CS concerns and these will be read by the CS team who will also post on these forums. These forums will NOT be a place for anyone to attack customer service representatives or post inflammatory rants, but they will be a place to get clarifications and ask questions.

Our Customer Service Representatives are also going compile weekly “Top 20 Issues” reports that will be posted in these forums. These can be anything from bugs to common customer call issues. These will let you know what we are working on and what the status of these issues is.

I don’t have an exact ETA for when all of this will start, but I do expect it will be very soon. The CSR folks have also made some changes to their structure to help customer support that we’ll be detailing at a later date.

I think the biggest issue with Customer Service...well 2 actually is that the player base sees them as..

1. Uninformed... seems to me that they don't have the answer alot, and possibly have no way of getting the answer.


2. Apathetic... they just don't care, all the customer is to them is a number in a Queue, espically when you get a canned response.

I was formally a volunteer CSR in another game, and in my dealings with Paid CSRs there I can tell you that #1 is generally true, and #2 is not, but we aren't talking reality here we are talking preception.

Quick hits
Some other issues I wanted to address include:

• Tuesday Tip – some of you felt the Tuesday Tip wasn’t always very useful. What do you think of the idea of letting players submit tips directly to us through a special e-mail to use in this feature?

Great Idea!

• Knowledge Base points to other games – Working on getting this fixed.

Cool!

• Off-topic Posts – Some of you mentioned you didn’t want off-topic posts to show up in the Dev. Tracker. I don’t know if we can do that, but in the meantime we’ll try to limit our off-topic posts. I don’t think it’s a bad thing for us to “chat-it-up” with you all from time to time though.

We love off topic dev posts, it just makes it harder to sift thru the junk to find the meat.. same thing you guys said about the General Forums. How about this for a solution.. Devs have 2 IDs one for "Official" posts with a Red name and One for Un Official Posts with say a Purple or Yellow or Burnt Sierra, or any other color you can come up with.. Or add a check box to the message screen for those that would make official like posts, Make this post appear on dev tracker, then have the dev tracker filter for that check box.

Now onto the stuff that we are not going to do:

Quick Hits

Some other issues:

• Giving new players ability to edit posts – this is actually a moderation issue. Problem posters will sometimes come to the boards with a new account, post a bunch of flames, and then use the edit feature to attempt to hide them. For now we won’t be changing how this works.

No real issue here.

• Posting images – this is a moderation nightmare. Not gonna happen.

Images for Sigs should be allowed and should have to be approved first, thus eliminating some of the moderation nightmare you speak of. I knwo boards that are 100% Donation supported (in other works the site owner pays 100% of the costs out of his pocket) that do this. This is a subscription service.....

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BleuDestiny wrote:

Having no GENERAL DISCUSSION FORUMS is not a surprise, since they were cut in the first place under the same regime.

However what you have left us with is more of the same ole same ole lack of feedback mechanism, because as you acknowledge, if players have issues with the game,the bottom line is that if its not a specific issue to a Profession (Forum), there's no appropriate place to post about it, and that's a fact.When we try to post about it in forums where its not appropriate, which is, again, basically anywhere other than specifically related to a specific profession, we're deleted, locked, and suspended for doing so, and our feedback, issues, and comments are shut out.

That, sirs and madames, is no communication at all, and you have failed.

If you're not going to provide a GENERAL DISCUSSION FORUM, then seems like you can provide some other forums around broader gameplay elements, such as "Game Economy & Balance,""Game Interface," and "Game Performance," for examples. Give us SOMETHING to work with, anything. It's not all about Professions when we have issues to bring to the table. You just hita strike out on your first time at bat.

We have a new relations group, but it appears we still have the same ole management making decisions in the same ole way. That is a major blow for the future of our game.

Further, Forums feedback issues aside, your initial post sounds like a bitching session from the Devs, and is 3/4ths what you're going to hold players accountable for in behavior, and not what you're going to do for the players, and more of what you're not going to do for the players.

Honestly, you get a 2 out of 10 for this first post. Very disappointing.

Message Edited by BleuDestiny on 01-11-2005 09:53 AM

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LOL... you got a one star for your post because you are wrong and your tone is rude.

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Saabotage wrote:

Stricter moderation
Yes, this is a good thing. One of the biggest problems we face as community representatives is sifting through flames in order to find the useful posts. We are going to be more diligent with our moderation. That doesn’t mean you can’t post constructive criticism, but calling us Nazis, writing rants, and posting off-topic in an attempt to derail threads where we ask for specific information doesn’t help us or help you. In truth, we aren’t changing our board posting guidelines at this time (if we do change anything we’d let you know) we are simply going to start enforcing them a little more diligently.

Another change to moderation is we are going to be tying board accounts directly to in-game accounts. What I mean by this is infractions for board conduct can become a mark on your account. To be clear, NOBODY is going to get a mark just for writing criticisms or posting negative feedback. These marks will act just like an in-game infraction and will be used to determine if an account needs further discipline or not. Understand that we are not out to “get” anyone. We aren’t going to mark someone’s account just because they post a topic to the wrong board once or anything like that. But in order for moderation to really have an impact it must have teeth.

Note that the Community Relations team and board moderators will NOT be making decisions on whether an account is actually banned. That will be left up to the same people who have always made decisions on player discipline in order to ensure that we are consistent. Our primary job will remain to communicate with you and take your concerns to the Development Team. We WANT your constructive feedback, positive or negative, and we want to make these boards the best tool possible for you to give us that feedback.

An official announcement will be posted to the site in the very near future once this policy goes into effect. I expect this will cause some people to bristle, but I can promise you it will make the boards a better place to visit and post ideas, criticisms, and feedback for those who are genuinely interested in affecting positive change for SWG.

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Good luck LOL! You do not seem to understand where you work now buddy! We dont care (most of us) if you ban us or not LOL. Go ahead and ban me if it will make you happy. Ill take my time and patronage to another game that just came out! Hell, you lucky ive stayed with this game this long! AFTER SMUGGLERS WERE LIED TO FOR OVER A YEAR AND A HALF! What you fail to understand is (sense your new), we quit caring weather we get banned or not ALONG TIME AGO. So go ahead I dear you ban me from the game! (of course I could be somebody else on this account, (Like a little brotherm ( or have multiple accounts to say what ever it is I want too))) LOL I think we as a community have been alittle to nice to you sense you got here!

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Usually I'm the type of person that gets upset about certain 'rips' towards devs....but after following the smuggler revamp for awhile, I agree with Saabotage. I know flames aren't always useful posts, but I think they sometimes do help with the feeling of players towards the lack of changes that have been taken place. You must understand that paying for something that's broken will cause flame posts. Now I do agree that the really BS posts, of course, should be moderated since they really do nothing. But I think if some things don't get some fixes within the next couple months, even the quiet posters are going to start up.