A belated congratulations on your new post Rox. It's always good to hear of companies making interns employees. Enjoy the ride!
I've been busy with work and such, so haven't been on in a while, but welcome! Nice to see a post from a member of the Community team again-and the updates look amazing Can't wait to see what else is in store!
That's pretty much how RadarX and the devs viewed it. Because the forums have shrunk over the years to such a small percentage of the playerbase (maybe 0.1%?), they can be safely ignored. In nine years, I've seen the forums go from being a cornerstone of developer-player interaction to an afterthought. And as long as people repeat this "conventional wisdom" that forums are populated by "whiners" and "complainers" and that people who are happy with the game are busy playing the game, developer-player interaction will continue to diminish. My biggest regret as an EverQuest II player and fansite operator for the last 9 years is having helped create the Discord chat.
Makes it really easy to dismiss things outright as well. Problem gets brought up on the forums, forums are a 'vocal minority' so it must not really be a problem, doesn't get fixed. And now they are stuck struggling to figure out how to get more money out of less players without causing a riot.
If not you, it would have been some other person. I had high hopes when I learned about the Discord channel... and high hopes for summer ethereals.. and PG's.. etc et al. Ian: Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should. - Jurassic Park
This has been a rocky year - however recently the tide seems to be turning against the grind="fun" mindset which has been driving subs away (I'm ignoring the recent PG rune prices as they must be a typo!) Yes, things aren't perfect. But they do seem to be getting quite a bit better recently, and I can live with that. Little bit more listening and interaction on the forums from a proper CS rep, along with a little bit more well developed stuff in current expac (like days of summer is), and I might even resub before mine runs out in October
Feldon discord is great , i really enjoy it ) Just cause eq2 chat has turned into a "complain and we kick you" doesnt mean the program itself aint great
I'm sure there wasn't a choice. Give them a significant level of control or don't expect them to participate. What is the point of a method of conversation and feedback if you aren't allowed to actually have an honest conversation and give feedback? I'm sorry, but if I'm going to get down and service anyone's account it'll be my spouse, not some thin skinned person on the internet that doesn't actually want to hear what I have to say. I believe I said a variation of this at the time, but the entire discord thing was never a good idea. Maybe not from Feldon's perspective, but from the company's all I ever saw it as was a thinly veiled attempt to give the customers the perception CN and DBG actually care while further reducing the level of communication and accountability to the people they should be working to please.
The H1Z1 and DCUO teams have very successful Discord chats which are a companion to their forums. It's a quick way for people to bring up issues and ask questions. I was a moderator of the EQ2 Discord and gave initial input, but I never had admin rights.
It doesn't matter what channel feedback comes in, when you are working as a developer, you are somewhat constrained by the project manager (by whatever title) and the number of man-hours for which you are committed to ongoing development. In general, if a bug is not causing crashes or losing data, then it's not important enough to bump aside other development. Bugfixes get scheduled in when the project manager decides, or whenever devs are stuck waiting for someone else's deliverable. Also, what is a critical existential threat type bug to one player is another player's "meh", never mind the official inhouse bug triage team. Cosmetic fixes are the absolute bottom of the barrel, if/when we ever get time. I don't think the devs are ignoring the forums. It's just that it's easier to see them via Discord.
This is an oddly long post about bugs when I was talking about feedback. There are recent instances where the devs have openly stated they will not take feedback for certain aspects of the game. Implementing features and gameplay that was unsolicited while outright ignoring that which is requested. Sticking with this philosophy with little to no deviation only has one possible outcome and that outcome is not maintaining or growing the playerbase.
Frankly this is why eq2flames was such a success, those who were "whiners" and "complainers" were flamed into not posting, and real solid feedback was posted that developers responded to and adjusted accordingly. As it currently stands any constructive feedback regardless of who its is from is viewed as complaints in the eyes of a few loud members of the community, which cripples the game. I would love to see some responses to anything, as it currently stands I have to send messages to developers on a discord where they are quick to ban members for posting anything that puts them in a position of looking bad.
Does feldon have a discord? I would love for it to get popular enough to where the developers have to be in it either to lurk it as non-named accounts or post with their developer names.
Forums are like like a needle in a haystack, only instead of hay we have much worse substance. Any grain of truth or any grain of usefulness in covered with tons and tons of complains, whining, slander, allegations, abuse, etc. No wonder that the value of forum is low. No one wants to go through tons of mud to find that grain of truth. The game itself is doing good. The player base is stable and DBG has some nice plans for players coming months. So I'm sure Norrath stays active and alive coming months and years.
I mean they had a really solid forum section with the raid council and the community round-table of specific members who always provided solid feeback, but eventually even those sections saw specific members of the raiding community (Equilibrium, fatality, etc.) removed due to feedback that was deemed "non-constructive" or feedback that actually properly reflected the issues at hand instead of sugar coating them. Surprisingly all of those players no longer raid/play the game (with the exception of myself)
I like the forum for the test server , we get responses often from devs and other team members of DB there are almost no complainers , so stuff gets done and we are listened to.
Next expansions info is out: Plane of Proving Grounds. The xpac includes 4 brand new proving ground zones, 1 solo, 2 group and 1 for a raid! Just kidding, however, now I really jinxed it, didn't I?