Development Cycle Archive
Thread: In Develepment #2004-1: Changes to the Official Forum Take 2
You know this is absolutely rediculous.
I am a community memeber, and place a post in here with no profanity just my opinion and they delete it?!! Can you say Forum nazi! The truth of the matter is that they are doing this so that when people visit the so called "NEW FORUM" they will not see for themselves the majority of negative feelings that is the mood of most players.
Everyone in this forum needs to start going to an independant forum involving SWG so the moderators can just delete their post becuase it is something they don't like to here. I say we all start posting on swgcenter.com forum. At least there we can actually feel the warmth of free speech. The whole issue here is that SOE just really doesnt care about any of their subscribers, they never have now will they change. Maybe a boycott is in order. Everyone can cancel their account for a month and let the executives feel the heat of lost revenue.
Now I wonder how long it will take them to delete this post 
exc wrote:
Perhaps an ingame suggestion tool (like bug report) would help if working like tickets (1 max each time every 24h per account). The categories would help to catalogue ideas and focalize efficiency.
Do you really want to limit creativity to once every 24 hours?
-Indene-
Having experienced a similarattempt in a few other gaming communities, I will say it's been universally negative. The key to a successful forums is community building, and while the idea of cutting out the most negative areas seems to be a good idea, it's final effect is dilution.
You cannot track the galaxies. Player input is being effectively stifled for anything other than the individual professions. General Star Wars stuff is shot out the window. Overall, it negatively affects the community by scattering the only common gathering place that is actually about the game in general.
Another point is thatGeneral Discussions forums are critical to free conversation and community cohesion. People like to bitch, toss out crazy ideas, etc.GAT isn't it nor are the galaxies. Cutting off that conversation in favor of Developer controlled ones sounds like a good idea on the surface but it misses out because as soon as the Devs lose touch with the player base (which is soooo easy to do) and the critical stuff will never be brought up.
"they will not see for themselves the majority of negative feelings that is the mood of most players."
The thing is a lot of the negative stuff that gets posted is not productive at all.
I know that I've gotten a more negative feeling about the game from reading the forum.
But I'm usually pretty happy when I'm playing.
My friends who never read the forums are happier than I am.
They have things that irritate them, but on the whole they are enjoying it.
There are issues with the game that bother me, and I'd like them addressed.
I try to be constuctive.
I did post some flames against the devs on the day of the vehicle publish and feel pretty bad about it and wish I could take them back (probably the reason for no edit button, since people would post whatever mean stuff they wanted for a few minutes and then edit it out themselves after the damage was done).
The really negative stuff that does nothing but slam the devs and other players personally has got to go.
But there should be a place where we can say what we want changed that's in the game already and a place where we can say what we want added to the game later.
As I've said, we should be able to create our own threads there.
I would like to have another forum, somewhat similar to the discussion forum, for SWG related general stuff. This would be a place to hobnob and chitchat. But this should not be the forum where the real serious good posts end up. Maybe people can propose ideas there and hash them out among themselves, but the better ideas should be moved from there to particular idea forums. The devs should not have to read the general forum, which would just be for us. However, it would be moderated to remove the worst insults, etc.
'Nother thanks to R2DA for helping out here.
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Thunderheart wrote:
4. The SWG Discussion Forum will be removed to help focus game development discussions and make sure that community suggestions, comments and contributions are catalogued in forums that will be read and tracked by the development team. Please use your Galaxy forums for general SWG discussions.
We want to keep the best parts of the SWG discussion forum, so we encourage comments about what other types of forums would be a benefit to the community with the knowledge that they will not get developer attention.
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This seems like very narrow thinking to me (and also rather dangerous).
Understand that not everything is peachy-keen in SWG. Also understand that by using blatant censorship to hush the people who are vocal about the many problems is not going to make said problems just go away.
Furthermore, although I have a great deal of respect for Thunderheart and his efforts, I find it hard to believe that he is going to sift through 20 some-odd Galaxy forums to find the same "good threads" to pass along to others (Koster for example). By that same token, I also have my doubts that he will be able to find those threads that are pointing out the many, MANY bugs both new and old that are the most irritating or gamebreaking at any given point in time.
I just think that, as negative as you may see the SWG Discussion forum, there is a reason for some (not all) of the negativity. It means things need fixing. I would like to know how you plan to streamline the process of getting major issues resolved if you are not spotting them in the huge threads that arise on the SWG Discussion forum.
It just seems like a step backward to me. I've tried, but cannot see it any other way.
I understand this is to help the Devs focus on the issues and avoid the 'chatter'. It's a full time job just trying to keep up with the forums postings!
However, issues such as combat balance, combat exploits etc... where are they best addressed?
For example:
BH want to hunt Jedi. Sure, in concept this is a good thing for the game, however, one warcry 2 blocks all Jedi powers (and without terrain negotiation they are doomed to be kited...) and a single KD/Dizzy can end a Jedi's life easy. So the BH ---> Jedi hunt is not a lot a challenge for the BH, nor a lot of 'fun' for the Jedi player.
Lack of critter loot- a general problem that affects everyone, on all servers including test. Kill a 350k HAM Dark Jedi Master with 90% resists and heavy armor, and the damage inflicted/resources consumed is fairly high. And the last 6 the team managed after a big battle to take down- one loot item. A newbie wookie bowcaster 
Low XP, no loot... that really was not fun. Where would I post such a problem now?
As someone mentioned, the professions forum gets a lot of support from said profession. No bounty hunter in their right mind would say 'my light lightning cannon is doing too much damage'. No Pistoleer would ever claim their Dodge mods stack with other professions and should be nerfed/tweaked. Each profession will constantly be looking for improvements to their class. It's a political bidding war. The most broken professions will have the least presence, due to lack of players playing them, and posting about it. A catch 22 situation.
So, I'm sort of sad to see this forum go. I understand the reasons why, and cannot think of a real alternative yet, but there might be a 'player suggestions' forum in the future that can be monitored fairly heavily, or a place for the profession correspondents to hash out ideas, taken from their combine population?
Best of luck in 2004,
Renairdor Dartain
Naritus Godfather
One of the major issues with SWG froma player point of view is that there is no way of commenting on the game, except through rigidly controlled channels. The rigidity serves not to focus comment, but rather to filter comment.
And the filters in place are deliberately designed to filter out all negativities.
The removal of the SWG Discussion forum - which has become, among other things the default place to make comment about issues within the game - points to a loss of active subscribers to SWG, and an attempt to control the information flow about the game from inside (subscribers) to outside (potential subscribers) by removing the facility for subscribers to interact amongst themselves, except in rigidly filtered areas.
The best example I can give of the filtering is the in-game Customer Support (and the /bug) system. Almost eveyr time I make a request for customer support because something has gone wrong, it occurs in an area that cannot be accurately described using the pre-defined filtering system.
And as it doesn't fit, it gets misread (my last ticket was answered no less than 6 times with the same resonse before I managed to get a CSR to actually read the ticket contents and not the category it had been filed under), ignored or deleted.
The same goes for customer support. There are four types of customer support in SWG, and none of them communicate. I really think Raph has made a huge error in both judgment and opinion in enforcing a "no CSR in-game" rule, as this leads to massively increased frustration and anger directed towards CS providers in any way possible, including the use of forums.
Closing any general discussion forum is a retrograde step for any community, and the "general" forum is often to lifeblood of the community. By closing the discussion forum, SOE are clearly showing they have no real interest in what their subscribers have to say, and are falling into the "daddy knows best" trap that so many game developers nad publishers fall in to.
As a regular player (albeit with a two month gap in the middle), and a regular forum lurker (every day while subscribed - subscriber-only forums are the first sign of a mis-managed community and "back-and-fill" spin control), I only ever read the SWG Discussion forum and the Game Guides forum.
I don't read my server forum, I don't read my profession(s) forum, and I rarely read the GCW forum. The primary reason is my interest lies in the experience of other players, their thoughts on the game - and their criticisms - and not in the results of artificial filtering.
By pushing all discussion onto server-specific forums, SOE are managing to filter out and hide in the noise all dissent and criticisms of the game and the game design, as well as setting up for the excuse of "there are too many boards for us to cover everything" when issues are not addressed.
There are few enough answers provided to questions on the SWG Discussion forum as it is - a centralised place where everyone comes when they have a problem or want to make comment - can you imagine what it will be like when these comments are lost in the streams of posts made on server boards? Perhaps this is the intent - after all, if the issues are effectively swept under the rug, the people complaining about them can be safely ignored (ooo - I'm starting to see some of the tactics espoused in one of Raph's lectures to the GDC about running MMO games starting to appear...)
I know that a lot of people express respect for the work Thuderheart is doing - but as a professional community manager - and perhaps more importantly as an *employer* of community managers for communities of 100,000 and more - Thunderheart seems to be doing little if anything to bring the community together, choosing instead to make announcements of planned changes without seeming to follow them through.
Any half-decent community of the size that SWG claims to be has more than one visible person - and I don't mean forum moderators, I mean actual community participants. From the past six months of this board and this game, I have seen little if any community involvement on the part of the community staff, the board moderators and the CSR staff.
And supporting an MMO from a community perspective is far easier than dealing with some other online gaming communities - at least with an MMO all the subscribers are playing the same game on the same servers. I've never understood most of the decisions made by SOE when it comees to providing customer support and community management for SWG, as they seem to be breaking the most basic tenets of both customer service and community management, and sometimes I think that SWG has a community *despite* SOE and the community team.
There is obviously no real communication between the subscriber base (read: paying customers) and the developers of the game. There pretends to be communication, but the reality is far from the ideal, and the decision to close the SWG Discussion board is the final nail in the coffin - the SWG community team aren;t interested in the subscribers or their views - this is being made crystal clear.
I've got to agree with all the people who believe that closing the discussion board is a bad idea. Where else are we going to be able to bring OUR issues and concerns to the devs attention?? Was it a dev who brought up the privicy issue earlier in the week? No it wasn't. Sometimes our imput is even critical in getting bugs addressed. I distinctly remember a harvester bug that the devs claimed didn't exist, but after a few days of us showing the results of tests and observations the bug was acknowledged and fixed.
Channeling the information is great and the proposed changes are mostly a good idea. But there needs to be a forum where WE can bring issues and requests TO YOU the devs. In order for there to be any meaningful communitation it must be both ways.
Re-posting (sort of) what I said on the poofed thread.
I only read the old SWG discussion forum from Dev Tracker links, but it seemed an important source for SOE to learn about non-profession specific bugs and problems. Many bugs got a Dev reply after scores of postings about the problem, and eventually got fixed. It was worth following the links there to be able to avoid the bug in the time between the "need more information" post and the fix.
Replace it with a bugs forum at least!
Where do we post issues that effect multiple professions?
I'm afraid that the profession forums each have a one-sided view of things, and that the accompanying dev is likewise focused. The professions are supposed to work together. None can, or should,stand on its own. Posts from this thread that remain constructive and attract enough attention should be forwarded.
Where do we post issues that effect general gameplay?
What about housing, vendors, the bazaar, content, user interface, targeting (please do something about this, it's been clumsy since day 1) Likewise, popular and constructive posts here should be forwarded, and the CSR needs to post when forwarding the thread.
I agree that we can't get around the need for a general "cantina." Removing this would be a major blow to the forums. Let people blow as much steam in here as they want.
Server boards should not be cluttered with things that do not pertain to a specific server.
Well I can't say this is the best strategy I've seen come out of SOE.
I feel a great disturbance in the force, the economic force.
Some how I get the feeling SOE is grasping at straws again.
Customer service has never been their strong point, and I don't think this will be step in the right direction.
Not that the Dev's realy worked the boards to their most effective use since 2-3 years back.
I give it 6 months and they will chnage to something else.
Don't get too frustrated TH.