Jedi Archive
Thread: I posted this on the customer service boards, they need to ditch the NDA...
By keeping secrets/not talking straight forward to the player base, you're killing it. The more secrets you keep, the less money you will earn. This isn't the pentagon. This isn't some top secret weapons project. It's an online game, designed to keep subscribers happy. Keeping secrets about upcoming changes is NOT keeping us happy. Got some keen concept/quest idea? Post it. Got an idea when the FRS will be back? Post it. Got some huge issue happening in game that a nerf is going to happen? Post it!
Keeping us in the dark is the wrong answer. We pay your bills. You're suppose to keep us happy. If you lose our subscription, you're losing your stability, and all reasons to keep secrets. What is the point? Why all the secracy. Hinting about content you plan to bring to the game does NOT spoil it. It makes people WANT to stay. Why oh WHY should we stay if all we hear is "expansions might come, monthly content will come." Text book outsourced answers are NOT what we want to hear. We want something to be excited to keep playing for. Silence is the wrong answer. The answers posted in most of these "Dev chats" are complete trash because THEY DO NOT OFFER HOPE. Your eld game community, mostly made up of Jedi who have earned their place in the game, are hanging on by a thread hoping you guys will fix things like Flawless/Premium Pearl/crystal drops, the FRS, smuggler quests, the GCW, high level LOOT and more. So much stuff left up in the air because you guys don't have a direction, or at least you do not have one that you're showing us.
Drop the NDA, TELL us, the customers, the investors, the ones who keep your very livelyhood in check, what is going on. We NEED to know this stuff in order to remain customers. Don't treat us like it's a top secret weapons project. It's not. Honesty and Integrity keeps the bills paid. If you do not have a PUBLIC forward plan, how do you expect the game to have any sort of financial future from your customers.
The NDA is there for a reason, like it or not. Its basically to stop rival companies stealing your good idea's before you put them into practice. Imagine this, SoE finally decide on a FRS and before they actually start to code it etc, they publish all the facts details and the like on the forums. Now someone at Blizzard or whoever reads the forums and takes the idea and modifies it and puts it into WoW and labels it a Blizzard idea and sells 1000's of extra copies of WoW, all thanks too a SoE designer.
The other reason is basic common sense really, not all the idea's and stuff are actually doable in the long run. I mean SoE may have a wonderful idea for FRS on paper, but when it comes down to the actual implementation they find it hard or impossible so have to change it. Imagine the uproar on these forums if they had to keep changing idea's and the like? So what do they do, they do not disclose anything until it is near on finished.
I doubt very much they do it because they are nasty and secretive, its just logical and good business sense to restrict knowledge on upcoming expansions to the game.
Message Edited by MikeHeXt on 10-28-2005 08:25 AM
MikeHeXt wrote:
SWG and WOW are completely different ideas/ideals. Let WoW steal what they want, they won't have Jedi or riflemen. I'm sorry but not giving your subscribers any hope = bad.
Message Edited by MikeHeXt on 10-28-2005 08:25 AM
Not neccessarily. a sci fi Jedi can be a fantasy Paladin easily. I think WoW can still exploit an idea. Seeing SOE's track record of taking eternity and a day to implement something, much less make it work, WoW would be wiping the floor with SOE big time.
DarkPetal wrote:
Actually, WoW already stole an idea from SWG: the battlefields. SWG had a great idea with the battlefields, and only half-assed implimented it. WoW saw them, took them, FIXED them, and they are working. SWG, instead of fixing a great idea, removed them.
This is at the heart of SoE's complete and utter failure to deliver the SWG that was originally promised. The absolute and complete failure to deliver the GCW Meta game is what has led to this fiasco we have now. Love running around seeing the "circus tents" of the grand "battlefields". Monolithic testaments to the failures of SoE and SWG.
MikeHeXt wrote:
I hope others feel the way we do.
If it means getting back a strong community in this game with alot of people again then yes i suport this 100000000000.1%
/agree
Mike...im sure every subscriber, regardless of what profession they are and what they are trying to achieve in game, jedi or otherwise feels the same way mate.