“It All Comes Together: Our Players Post In Cretan Linear B!”

I guess so. But I don’t think there needs to be a lot of goodbye posts and Furor-like ultimatums for players to get their issues raised. I think enough gaming history has passed by for people to know how to treat and run forums by now. There’s good information in the worst complaints. But it shouldn’t be the worst complaints that get all the attention.

oh, and “FiRST”

Tide, except in a lot of games, there does. Take Eve-Online as an example.

Ask any long time player about the UI. About the degrading server performance. About the weeks waiting times for petition answers. For the arbitrary behavior of GM’s and forum moderators.

And nobody seems, in the so-caled journalistic press, to CARE.

People are too bitter and jaded these days. To willing to accept the status quo. (Including well, yes, me.)

WoW has puleld its success off by being polished to a degree which no other MMO I’ve played (a lot) even BEGINS to approach, more than any other factor.

THAT should say a lot about the industry of today.

Blizzard also gives a crap about their community team. They haven’t had very good people in charge, granted, but at least the brass cares.

To care, however, there needs to be more of a consensus about what “community” means and what “community managers” (or whatever they’re called) are for. SOE is not as proactive about communicating with players as they ought to be, and there’s an unhealthy culture “they just fuck us up” culture in that regard. They’re not the only ones at fault.

Players have a role, too. Most players express their feelings about games by playing them, or, following a divorce, not playing them. Most players are inarticulate, and that’s OK.

Should MMO companies ever decide to turn over a new leaf and have their community be something other than what grows when their back is turned, they can start by building a code of conduct for communication and enforce it as strictly as they do in-game behavior. Make it a privilege to talk to community managers. The best community managers already have such a relationship with players.

Then, beat the Christ out of the rest of the dev team until they learn to SHUT THE HELL UP and let the CMs do the job of controlling the flow of information.

Ungh. Lithium is perhaps the worst message board out there. Even PHPBB works better. SOE nearly dropped Lithium in favor of an internally coded app for the EQLive boards earlier this year but suddenly backed off and we’ve not heard why or if/when they’re gonna migrate. Most people know BB code and Lithium doesn’t support it for some odd reason. Plus Lithium has several features that frustrate users (chief among them is there’s no built-in quoting system which is the lifeblood of any MB) and even if there were, Lithium only shows you the post you’re replying to, not the whole thread in an iframe. For a non-free MB the fact that PHPBB has less frustration does not bode well. Emulate the ease of vBulletin (the gold standard of MBs for me) or don’t bother.

Make it a privilege to talk to community managers. The best community managers already have such a relationship with players.

Then, beat the Christ out of the rest of the dev team until they learn to SHUT THE HELL UP and let the CMs do the job of controlling the flow of information.

OR you make private forums and invite the non-ranty people to talk to devs directly. If you let your CM be the middle-man (someone who may be very, very nice but not technical at all) you run the risk of having things get muddled when your knight-tank posts parses compared to that rogue-mage and the CM smiles and has no clue what they’re talking about so they may report “Uhm, knight-tanks are MAD and they have some numbers” which devs may scoff at when there may indeed be a problem. It’s points like that where acerbic people (like Furor) people start nailing theses to your forehead.

You don’t have to be technically inclined at all. Many designers are not so good with the systems and the numbers. You just need to understand the debate and to do that, you have to play the game. If you don’t actually play the game, there is no context and then of course the forums will seem like rubbish =)

As for SOE and Lithium (and I apologize Scott for again using your wonderful blog for my propaganda) We are moving away from Lithium on all games. We slowed down on the transitions due to some back end issues with the DB and if the smaller forums were causing a DB ruckus, we knew the big ones would kill it. =) The new forums will be coming for the others games soon (EQ and EQII are rumored to have post as your character functionality)

So back to the topic at hand . . .
I thought the Terra Nova post was a good piece of insight into the value of forums. Are they the best medium for true communication? Probably not, but it’s what we gots. But they can and should be viewed as a valuable resource and a ton of solid data can be gathered from them, as long as your understand the context of the debate.

The CoH forums are a HUGE expense and effort to maintain, though, in terms of manpower – they’re good, but they ain’t cheap, and that’s often an issue.