Community Resource Council Launching Soon!

It's explicitly stated that the role of the CRC is to provide feedback on upcoming content, and to provide a player perspective to that, from a variety of angles. This is exactly analogous to various boards I've sat on in my time; they're advisory (to very strongly advisory). The originating entity can disregard that advice entirely if they choose, but, any fallout from disregarding that advice that could have been avoided by taking it lands much harder on individuals disregarding it. It may well be that the advice cannot be taken due to resourcing, and thus the decision needs to be taken as to whether to scrap the flawed proposal or delay it, or proceed at risk (with a known, specified risk, plus the usual unknown unknowns).

I suspect there's a lot of the usual discontent, plus some extra from some unsuccessful changes (which is entirely understandable). Unless you have a huge budget, users of complex commercial software are rarely happy. Even with a huge budget, many still aren't happy, and you'll lose some to attrition, if there are equivalent competing products.
And that's the crux here. There may be many MMOs out there, but precious few (if any) with the dynamic of the EQ line, and as far as communities go, there are thriving communities in the game.
My assessment of the game is that it's viable in the mid-term. The players that stay with the EQ line are because the game caters to a particular style of play (and there's nothing around that's the size of the EQ franchise, plus the other games available in the DB stables).
Bear in mind that the forums are self-selecting, so already have a bias baked in. People rarely come here to post happy things and repeatedly say that they're quite content thank you, so what you have is a set of people who have a dissatisfaction, who come here to post. That's exactly what it's here for. Most players will rarely, if ever, visit these forums. And that's because they're just getting on with the game as a game, and enjoying whichever aspect they feel like and being part of the community. Reading these forums is exactly the wrong place to judge the ambient satisfaction levels across the entire cohort of the player base.

It's fine to think that, but in absence of evidence, there's absolutely no reason to attribute it any validity. I'm entirely agnostic on that as I have no evidence either way, but it makes no business sense whatsoever.
Given that a company has decided the DB IP was worth investing in, there has been money spent. We know that.
Now, to get a return on that investment as is, the games need to be kept running either as long as possible, or until a successor is produced. Not getting a return makes no business sense. So from that we can say the balance of probability lies with keeping a profitable game running and generating revenue.
The CRC is a method of introducing signal into design process (as I've previously said), allowing extra information to be available that wouldn't be available directly from the devs, or a closed commercial set. This can allow for an improved design process, with fewer post release fixes, all saving resource and thus cash (and as a side effect, causing reduced dissatisfaction with the player base). This is exactly why these types of committees exist, as optimisation hints that, when implemented correctly, have repeatedly shown returns. However, they take resource to manage; drop below a certain resource threshold and they cannot be maintained (which I suspect is what happened to the previous incarnation).

Feedback is just that. Feedback. Without knowing the overarching plan and resource base, every single one of us in the player base has absolutely zero idea of just how feasible this feedback is to implement; much of it is wishlist stuff that benefits a particular subgroup, but is not a benefit to the game itself.
For the changes to mechanics of classes. That would be a perfect thing to bounce of a set of players in advance, so that they get a good heads up of exactly what people are going to think, and where the flaws in the thinking are at the design stage. Especially if they garner a set of heads who are used to pushing mechanics to the limit they break and have them in a group along with other heads who would have an idea of how it would impact other areas of the game..
I think you know where I'm going with this, and can see where a well populated CRC would start having advantage (again, not a magic bullet; things can and will go wrong, especially in a poorly understood legacy codebase).

Yeah, we really do. And that's a sunk cost (so a lot of the player base are already well committed to the sunk cost effect). And EQ, out of all the MMOs out there, always has been predicated on "spend the time and effort, and you'll achieve your goal over time", rather than the current fad of "Give people everything as fast as possible to hit the instant gratification dopamine hit", and then lose numbers rapidly once most of the people have everything, and there's no real advancement from there (c.f. New World etc.). When people invest time, they gain attachment. That's one of the big reasons I don't think the majority of the player base will jump ship any time soon. There'll be attrition and some replenishment, but there's life in the game yet. And a lot of it. Because we love the game, and the type of community that plays this type of game.

I've heard this proposed rather a lot, but have no hard evidence that they're not supervised, or accountable. Do you have that on hand? Again, I'm entirely agnostic on this, and have no opinion either way, as I simply don't have enough information and evidence to form one.

Oh boy. Where to start with that one. I think places not having divas crop up, and people play politics to pull agendas to their own ends are the rarity. I used to run my own business which involved me and the guys that worked for me, getting very close in on company structures, processes, information flows and strategies. People from the coal face to senior management in a few of them should never have been considered safe with paperclips, let alone real responsibility and work. Again though, I have no exposure to the internal workings of the DB staff, so I'm agnostic as to exactly what's going on, and I don't have enough evidence or information to form valid opinions (anything I think otherwise, I mentally tag with the "wild conjecture" flag).

I suspect the staff are also tired of being understaffed. It's hideous for morale and staff retention (and failing to retain staff means loss of domain knowledge, and that in turn means it's even harder to keep the lights on for the game).
I can tell you've never worked in software production (or engineering production, ops etc.) from the comment about create an environment. If you have a small, overworked team, that's exactly where errors creep in, and things are run suboptimally. There is literally no environmental change you can make to improve that other than reduce the scope of the work (i.e. shelve the game, and have the team work to support some other product to a higher standard and hope you make the right choice as to which product deserves the axe) or add resource to the team such that it has schedulable work plans that allow the investigation of the legacy code and allow deeper testing and QA pipelines. Those are hard resource constraints. And given that the team is failing due to being short staffed, which of the few do you reward? Those who ahve very little actual work, and improve maybe 1 out of 1000 items on the list, or someone who fixes 200 of the 1000 things, but degrades maybe 20? Is the person who gets things wrong getting them wrong because they're tackling the hard problems that nobody else will touch with a bargepole (because they're hard)? In which case, you're axing your best talent.
To have the answer to that, you need to be very familiar with the team, the codebase, the work plans and the internal working dynamics. Which I'm not. Which is why I don't have an opinion about that particular aspect.

No argument from me there.. But such is the nature of online interaction at the moment; there are a myriad reasons for that, and I usually go straight for the "ignore" options for certain personalities. If an environment is too full of them, I wander elsewhere. Life's too full of real drama to be dealing with the made up ones.
On the not working until there's change, you may be right, or not. I honestly don't know.
What I do know is that the change will not happen in two isolated groups. Psychologically, two entities using diplomacy, etiquette and working to mutual advantage tend to adapt to each other and gain a deeper understanding of the trials of "the other side". That understanding usually leads to a relaxing of the defensive psychological mechanisms which are employed by a distant and confrontational engagement (which feedback forums often are; and sometimes, it's excruciatingly difficult to discern how someone is intending something to be read, which you'd get from intonation, body language, and the regular to and fro of conversation in a non-textual conversation and can lead to a reaction other than that which the originating post actually deserves).
Implementation of the CRC will not fix those problems in the forums, but over time, it tends to lower barriers to constructive criticism in a select group (and to a degree, the wider group as well as adjustments in perception take hold). And it can take a fair amount of time, as it's a huge psychological adjustment to the design group.
It's one of the biggest reason that doing science is so damnably rough on people; it's not just the delving into things for years and going through countless failures to find that band of successes, it's actually putting the work out there for scrutiny (which is an absolute must) and having swathes of people pick apart every mistake, misapprehension, error or weakness. And you sit there and have to accept that maybe years of your life have just been rendered worthless because there was a flaw in the logic somewhere, then you have to pick up, get back to work with good grace, and go about fixing that error and re-proving and demonstrating what you set out to, such that there's nobody around who knows enough to disprove it (provably, not just say "that'll never work"). And when it's all proved and implemented, knowing that it's just a matter of time until someone either works out enough to disprove it, or finds a way of doing it better than you ever could.
Doing things in a more rigorously scientific fashion is a way to drive long term improvements, but it takes time, and an awful lot of practice wearing those flame proof pants. That's essentially what we're asking the design team to engage with.
The biggest chance of failure I see is in a bad selection of CRC candidates who escalate, rather than de-escalate their commentaries. There's really no point in having an absolute guru of game mechanics on the committee from the player side if they're only going to raise hackles all round and set all sides at each other (that'd be entirely counterproductive).
But, from what I've seen over time here, there are a few luminaries around that are well versed in game mechanics AND possess a well developed diplomatic approach, along with being able to communicate clearly and concisely.
So, guaranteed success? Not really. A fighting chance at a mid-long term improvement? I'd say so, so I'm entirely behind the move (not that anyone would have guessed by now). [/quote]

Saying it going to fail before it even starts - seems really silly to me. I prefer to reserve judgement myself.

Yea, this time will definitely be better. I'm sure they'll listen now...

the cynicism is overwhelming in here

whats the point of being all doom and gloom about this? to alienate the devs more so they dont even want to try?

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Just to frame my commentary, I worked for a Fortune 50 company (not 500 and not a misprint). Which means revenue was multi billions. I understand a corporate environment better than you think. "No evidence to support your conclusions, therefore they lack validity?" You are rather full of yourself, aren't you? I'm not going to point out the flawed logic of that assumption.

Please point to the mountains of evidence to claim this game is still viable mid-term? No evidence to support they're not supervised? Are you actually playing this game at the moment, in Discord or actually reading posts on this forum? While some of them are innocuous or just plain a rant, some of them (backed up by multiple responses) point to a continuing pattern.

Any rate, I had to laugh at your post. My old VP would have brought this back to me between his thumb and forefinger and said "...please condense this epistle." That was his first reaction to a proposal I made which interestingly enough, sounds a lot like what you posted here. We had a laugh about that for years afterwards.

Don't like the game, don't play it. Pretty simple.

Of course, you are using a newly created name on the forums, I guess to hide who you really are in game (if you play at all now). Most here use their toon name in game

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Sorry what's with that wall of text? We get it, you're applying

Aw shucks, I only been playing for 17 years and plan to continue playing until sunset.

But feel free to continue bashing me as you like.

After multiple insulting posts. GG

Yeah, well it gets old after a while reading people bashing a new idea or the game.

Are there things wrong in the game - sure, but it is still better game than many, many others I have tried.

I for one will give this CRC a chance and not discount it out of hand. I also appreciate that some things will be easy fixes and others may require more time, people and money than they have to bring to bear on it. But that has true for any company I have ever been associated with in my career. (Now retired)

"Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Sir Winston Churchill 1948

I'm sitting here waiting for someone to say "I know you are but what am I?"

This seems to be going well lol!

I'd apply, but I have a long history of forum jackassery and my opinions are rather niche anyway.

I understand people who believe that a Community Council won't help anything, but honestly, what does it hurt? Hate the idea, don't volunteer...

Several posts in here perfectly sum up the purpose of the CRC/Community round table/whatever name.

The devs who are receptive to feedback don’t require new forum. Chrol/Ttobey/Gninja/Denmum/Kaitheel already respect feedback and react to it. The others who don’t listen are not going to change for this forum.

But who knows, maybe 7th time lucky this time round?

Assuming good standing will automatically exclude people with a discord ban ? @ascendo ?

I would love to work at Day Break, but after looking at the open jobs, I kind of feel skillless in life. I've never seen the tools that Daybreak uses to make this game. I need a level up book or something. Where is the tradeskiller?

Ideally, I would like to be paid for my ideas. I know everyone has ideas, but I would like to be paid for mine. Yep, any idea that pops into my head, CHA-CHING.

Oh, don't get me wrong. I'd love to be proven wrong. That would be amazing. All of the devs taking feedback and constructive criticism from a diverse background of players from all aspects of gameplay? Absolutely.

Do I believe that's going to happen? About as much as those Nigerian princes that want to give me money.

My perception is that it creates an expectation that feedback will be accepted and acted on in a timely basis rather than used as a placebo to say, "see, we're doing something." How much feedback has been provided on the forums and yet, how many issues/problems are actually acknowledged, much less resolved on a timely basis. I'm not talking about accepting every idea and thinking it will be implemented within two weeks. I'm not an unreasonable person with some pie in the sky hopes.

Example: here we are, a year later, and guild chat is still broken for new members to a guild. Has there been any acknowledgement that a problem exists, much less a "fix it" date? This is an mmog where actual voice interaction is important. Two weeks ago, after a patch, custom voice chat channels are now borked. That's been reported as well. The list could go on.

I don't hate the idea of a council. But having one and not utilizing it as a real resource is problematic at best. My point is that there's plenty of feedback being provided on the forums and how has that worked for us the last two expacs. If that's not working, then what's the council going to do differently as far as providing feedback and see it acted on. I don't intend to volunteer, but I'll support those who want to give it a go.