Discord but not forums? Tells you something...

I am rather new to EQ2 and didn't know anything about the EQ2Wire forums but I must thank Feldon. He does a lot of work for the community.

The access to the devs via Discord is very helpful when there are game-breaking bugs, and I really do appreciate their responsiveness. We really need someone to collect the relevant things that the devs share on Discord and summarize them to the official forums...a player liaison who can make sure things like "We know that <blah> is happening, it's a bug and will be fixed with the next hotfix" get communicated to the playerbase.

Discord can be a great tool if it is harnessed well. Right now, it's a bit chaotic...there is some very good, vital information being shared there, but it is only being seen by the few who are online at the time. Having a player advocate compiling and sharing the dev posts on the official forums would go a long way towards making sure important information gets collected and passed on with consistency.

the devs haven't paid much attention to the forums in years, at least with discord you know there are there listening evewn if they aren't responding and if there is a major problem you can let them know on discord quickly.

as for looking at how a discussion came about, you can do that in discord, find the post referencing whatever it is and then backtrack through the history.

Feldon was trying to be that "player liaison" and they pretty much trolled him right out of there. Last I heard, Feldon stopped helping with the Discord stuff just a little bit ago. I don't hate the idea of the discord, I actually really like the idea, I just think it needs to be moderated a whole lot better.

ok so..

devs still reply here.

forums are moderated by RadarX, which he is inactive in discord. RadarX deals with forums. devs answer questions as they always have. i dont see a problem.

Feldon is no longer involved with Discord because he opposes the way in which the devs boot anybody with criticisms to make, even when they're constructive. That wasn't the intent of Discord. That's an authoritarian communication style, and it further weakens their connection to the playerbase, which admittedly was never great to begin with. It encourages game development in a vacuum, one where the only other voices are those of cheerleaders and investment fund managers shouting, "Add another paywall! Add another paywall! Add another paywall!"

I hope this is an attempt at sarcasm.

https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq2/index.php?threads/how-do-we-effect-change.577619/

So, how are we supposed to find out about this Discord thing unless we happen to see it mentioned here?

The EGII webpage has a link to the Forum promenently displayed at the top and FB and Twitter linked at the bottom but a quick look through the menus shows no sign of discord.
How do we find it anyway? Discord.com doesn't look like the right place, nor does discord.org.

https://discord.gg/Q5VJeXb

You're right though - there really haven't been many recent "official posts" recently regarding their use of Discord. I think there was something a while back in the Norrathian Herald... or something.

You mean other than it literally being the very first stickied thread in this Gameplay Discussion forum with a link to the EQ2 discord in the OP of that thread? I'm really not trying to be facetious about it but it is the case.

When they first started the Discord thing I felt very much the same way as the OP of this thread. I didn't like it, at all. However, I have since concluded that there is interaction in that chat directly with the Dev team like has never happened before in this game. That said, I don't follow discord daily while I do at least browse here every single day. I would like it if the Dev team was a little bit more active here on the main forums to be sure. But, the instant conversations that spring up on any given topic are something we have never had until that discord channel.

HEY. Don't cloud the issue with facts..

As a regular forum browser... I usually start off with Staff Posts.. then What's New. Rarely do I select a topic such as Gameplay / etc thread... so that's prob why I didn't really see it.

It definitely is a mixed bag of nuts. I do like though, on Discord, how you're able to search a "channel" by a particular Dev's name, to see what their input was on any given subject. I'm still kinda new - but it does give me a glimpse of what might be coming down the pipe... <cough> tithe fix <cough>

I think it's one of the smartest things they have done, useing a 3rd part scource of information for us. When DDOS attacks happen, we can't get to the forums or any other DBG website. Feldon usualy does an awesome job keeping us informed on what is going on via EQ2wire, but it's nice to be able to ask questions on a site that is still up and has a direct connection to the devs.

That being said, there are to many 3rd party sites. XD And they seem to migrate from one to another. This seems like the best one so far though. Facebook didn't really get replies (and a lot of people refuse to use Facebook due to it's lack of ethics and privacy), twitter was too spread out trying to talk to multiple devs, the DBG issue tracker seems too impersonal and didn't allow for direct conversation (although that is another of their ideas I really like, even though it is not utilized as much as it could be by players). A regular old chat room like Discord seems like a pretty good idea to me.

But yah, with DDOS attacks always a possibility, not having 3rd party forms of communication with the player base would have been foolish.

They do have a tenancy to be negative in their fixes. :\ I was pretty POed when the old suburbs were locked, only to be opened briefly for a couple quests. I was baffled when they removed all XP from mobs in certain areas. I was pretty vexed when they ignored consignment crafting for the new sig/epic quest-line and forced people to get to lvl 100 crafting (I have 25 lvl 100 craters myself, but I know people that hate crafting. Why make people do things they hate when you want to keep them as a customer? o.0 I want people I know to want to stay here and play!!!) They dropped the cross server project to do a merger instead and lost some people that were annoyed with that... They thought it would be a good idea to sell guild hall skins for $400 or $350 dollars. there is a loooooong list of things they've done that seem like it should have been done differently.
No one is perfect though, and we still enjoy the game for the most part compared to other things we could (or should lol) be doing.

Just gotta politely put in suggestions or objections on the various forms of communications they provide and hope a dev in a receptive mood gets it. XD O'course, keep in mind that company that bought SOE (now re-named DBG) has them in a choke hold for money with as little personnel or resources as possible. Investment firms... /shudder

This X 1000!

Nearly every time I find the thread that has the bug I'm experiencing it's archived from years ago.

I did my due diligence in watching the downfall of Landmark long before and after launch. I noticed these patterns:

- Developers (usually unwillingly) communicate via out-sourced ways, like Twitch, or Discord in this case. It's meant to communicate less and less over time and distance players from the game's decisions, because they will undoubtedly dislike them en masse.

- Holly stops talking/typing almost entirely except to advertise. I've been trying to ask her questions for a while, but it seems she just doesn't care about players anymore. My opinion of her can't really be any lower right now. I see she quietly removed the "Proud Senior Producer of Landmark" from her Twitter page. Her posts are all over in 2015 on these forums, only three in all of 2016 exclusively as producer's letters, and none so far this year. See what I mean?

- RadarX takes over for News and Announcements. I guess it's to widen the gap between players and staff even more.

- Anything newly implemented is likely to be a massive, unpopular grind, or a marketplace purchase. Coupling that with this whole P2W Ascension stuff is exactly the same mindset done to Landmark: squeeze all you can out of who's left playing, ignore (mostly) the complaints and concerns of new and old players. Leave 'em in the dark kind of thinking.

- Topics and posts become more and more negative, with less forum moderation. Instead of the company driving players away, make the players do it. The lesser the blood-flow, the fewer the bloodstains when it gets axed. (Landmark had less than 100 players online at most times, so when it shut down it made almost no splash on the internet. That was intentional.)

I'm not trying to be mister Doom & Gloom but those are my observations. Next things to look out for are staff/developers "quietly" transitioning to other games in the company or quitting. New content having little to no testing or feedback. New bugs/exploits/issues taking a long time to be fixed, if at all. More focus shifting to TLP servers. Etc. Etc.

Also, for a good laugh or sadness, check out the 4th slide on the main page for Daybreak Games.

^^^ THIS ^^^

I usually check the forums during the nights / weekends and make note of any issues that I'm looking into or need to look into, but I utilize Discord during the day to keep an eye on current discussion and reply where I can. They're both useful tools.

Nice to see you in here. Anyway we could get a summary like once a week or something of anything put in discord that is of relevance for those of us that can't monitor discord 24/7 and/or don't want to try and sift through the mountain of banter?

This would help immensely. In Discord, there have been bugs acknowledged, resolution times given, upcoming features/fixes mentioned, with nothing being communicated anywhere else unless the players pass it on (which is less than efficient and subject to misinterpretation). It would be *awesome* if vital game info, especially known bugs/issues and their expected resolution, could be passed on via the forums.

(A good example is the current bug with Vihgoh in Xalgozian Stronghold Solo...there have been at least four separate threads in the forums about it and countless queries in General. A single pinned post on the forums would help a lot, and maybe a notice in the MOTD.)

Isn't there some kind of bot that can post to the forums?

I did some research and found some bots available to post to discord but haven't found any to post from discord - but I did not look at the whole API documentation

To be honest, a player could take it upon themselves to do something like that. As you can see, Jamiss is checking forums nights and weekends when really he should be off work.