Open letter to PS2 producer, Sites

Dear Sites,
thank you for posting on the "Official Website" of Planetside2.

First, my sympathy. I understand the pressure of new owners, new investors and an unrelenting onslaught of demands from customers. It's not easy. If it were, anyone could do it.

In over a year on the forum I must say that I have seen one constant point of friction: the lack of communication. As a director of communications I can not understand the difficulty that the previous PS2 team has displayed in this matter, and I wanted to provide a small opportunity at positive change.

In our company, if any employee causes our clients to go to a different website, other than our own, that employee creates traffic for someone else. That traffic should belong to us. Traffic drives revenue and thus, any employee violating this modus operandi, has caused revenue to leave our firm. In my office we call that 'economic sabotage', as a joke, but it is a serious issue.

Twitter, Facebook, Reddit or any other social sites should be utilized to drive traffic to YOUR site, not any other site. If you could, please, post on twitter, but only to say that you have news on PS2, on the Forum of Planteside2.com. Update Facebook, say that you have news on the Forum of Planetside2.com. Use Reddit to tell the world, that they can all read the latest news, on the Forum of Planetside2.com...

There once was a post on this forum with over 200,000 views. The Producer's letter now has over 39,000 views. Unique hits. Most everything else barely goes over 5,000. What happened to all those registered users and interested future players and customers? The were all tweeted away and had no need to keep coming back, after all, Reddit gave them everything they wanted to know.

Please change that. It's easy to do and will be much appreciated.

Thank you for reading this.

(also posted as an IM to Sites)

Make it so number one. You're on to something here and I appreciate the effort. I despise Reddit and always took exception to Higby and all the other SOE staff that bypassed the forums and used Reddit as their "Official" voice instead of using their own forums to share information or communicate to the player base. They always seemed more willing to keep us at arms length than embracing us for who we are..........the driving force behind their product and all of us gamers to the core.

Would not this fall under the common sense clause?.

I can understand your frustration with how we jump from social media platform to social media platform when communicating game-related info. Our goal is to cast the communication/feedback net as wide as possible, so we’re getting a broad range of opinions. That said, some team members are more comfortable communicating via certain platforms than others. I will say that while we will continue to post on the various outlets, we do need to improve our official forums presence.

FBVanu....hey I can't say I agree with most of your posts here. But thank you...not to many people understand my frustration with the lack of official forum use by their own staff. But that pretty much explains it all. Well put sir.

It's not a huge deal if reddit or twitter are used by the devs, but there shouldn't be any announcements made on a 3rd party site before they have been made on the official site. That isn't really asking for too much, is it?

I really hope this is something that changes with the new ownership. In the last survey I stated that I got most of my information (or lack there of) from the forums though I felt there was next to no interaction or overall dev presence on here. Maybe replies just get buried quickly but I frequent this site enough to feel that's not the case. Usually info is passed along here via links to other sites which is unfortunate but I'm at least hopeful at seeing a prompt reply so maybe things will change.

I'm not interested in registering with reddit or twitter so I'm left feeling out of the loop even though I've been playing since launch and I feel I've always been a constructive member of the community.

I went to Reddit to find out all the goings on with the layoffs/departures (which is understandable in that instance, them being former employees) but I didn't see any less toxicity in posts there versus on forumside. I guess I just don't understand. I've followed other games to lesser degrees and I've never seen such a disconnect between developers and their own forums.

I don't speak for any outfits, just my personal 2 cents.

Honesty is the best policy, and what better way to be honest than to share great, albeit sometimes slightly immature yet comedic, discussions on Forumside? There are two things that keeps me magnetized to this part of the Internet:
1. The warm feeling of seeing an alert in the alert box.
2. The feeling of mass fear when the inbox has a number next to it.

Well, that, and the awe-inspiring threads made by the devs. Seeing a single word colored red keeps me here. On the rare times when I'm not playing the game, this place is where I socialize (or try to, at that) on weekends, when school is out, and everybody is frantically preparing for a marvelous thing called university. In summary, communication is one of humanity's greatest virtues; just communicate when you can

Honesty is the best policy, and what better way to be honest than to share great, albeit sometimes slightly immature yet comedic, discussions on Forumside? There are two things that keeps me magnetized to this part of the Internet:
1. The warm feeling of seeing an alert in the alert box.
2. The feeling of mass fear when the inbox has a number next to it.

Well, that, and the awe-inspiring threads made by the devs. Seeing a single word colored red keeps me here. On the rare times when I'm not playing the game, this place is where I socialize (or try to, at that) on weekends, when school is out, and everybody is frantically preparing for a marvelous thing called university. In summary, communication is one of humanity's greatest virtues; just communicate when you can

I agree with you on this. I myself do not care for social media ie: facebook, twitter, etc.

Official news NEEDS to be on the OFFICIAL forums/website. Sure, post it on social media as well, but NOT posting stuff on the OFFICIAL areas and instead posting it on social media makes people miss the information.

Maybe I am the only guy who is against personal social media? I deleted my accounts years ago. I feel so FREE!!!

It's sad that any company needs to be reminded to focus it's communications and to use it's own, official forums instead of cess pits like Reddit. Though things on here, with the likes of the ridiculous - 'this thread is being locked because it's non constructive,' nonsense, need to change and to change soon. Dey Break Games has to start paying attention and wake up. They've just about reached rock bottom and if they don't heed the need of a reality check then things aren't going to get better any time soon. If they do, then at least there is some hope. Well done for posting this.

So much good feedback here.

The take away message if the devs learn nothing else:

Communicate with the official Planetside forums first! And then social media.

On the record, in that order, and in no other order.

If this doesn't change, you can always use the Feed or the Planetside 2 Tracker. They both work well to track all-things communication.

Fear me

On the subject however, I cant believe what I see here, "They are more comfortable communicating on certain platforms than others".

They are writing text and pressing "post", what difference does it make where it is posted? And why are they uncomfortable on their own forums? If it is critique they are afaid of, then why go on the internet at all? If they think people are angry here because they feel abandoned, well duh! But it's nothing a simple "sorry" can't fix. Seriously guys, make bridges.

I think they like reddit due to the upvote/downvote system. The fanboys keep their posts upvoted while the negative criticisms get downvoted. So it appears things are better than they may actually be and makes the devs feel better about themselves.

Way to miss the point.

The OP doesnt really complain about the use alternative social media rather the lack of communication in general.

Here let me me point out what you seemed to have missed

"In over a year on the forum I must say that I have seen one constant point of friction: the lack of communication."

i'd imagine that they all use reddit due to some corporate nonsense,
on reddit they have no consequences for simple chatter, SoE don't own reddit.
but in the company owned forum perhaps they have more limitations on what they can talk about?
like higby mentioning what he is thinking about changing, perhaps the overlords wouldn't want hypothetical balance changes to be on the forum due to backlash that said changes might create.

I could see using more public forms of communication as a bad thing. But, SOE/DBG decided to have an open door policy for communications and management most likely has some sort of rule for their devs to use the more public forms of communication to reach more people. It's the culture in their company and most likely benefits them more. They need to benefit from the communication methods and we should conform to them, not the other way around.

Twitter for quick updates and Reddit for more detailed discussions. They don't want to spread it out to multiple locations because that spreads all the feedback in multiple places which isn't easy to keep up with for them. These forums are for the player-base to discuss amongst themselves. Does some of the discussions on these forums get brought up to the devs? Yes, I believe RadarX keeps up with these forums and relays info to the devs of what is being discussed.

At first, I wasn't in to using Twitter and Reddit but they aren't all that bad...

Same here but the average Planetside player probably never visits forums of any kind but if they do where do you think they come? Then they rarely see anything of note from any of the devs and just think the game is on auto-pilot. If they would occasionally see there was actual developer involvement and interest then they might stick around longer and give the game the benefit of the doubt and put some trust in things are being worked on.

You were around for beta and recall how it was I am sure. I don't think its reasonable to expect that level of interaction now but somewhere between what there is now and then would be nice.

I can understand the Devs wanting to put out as much information through as many outlets as possible to gain maximum exposure. I just don't buy the argument that some Devs feel more comfortable posting on other social sites in lieu of the Official Forums. It almost sounds as if there was some kind of internal bias towards the Forums specifically to avoid addressing player discontent in any official capacity.

I am hopeful the new Regime will begin the process of healing this fractured player base. All we want is to be respected not only as players, who have made a commitment to this game and it's continued success, but also as customers who make transactions on a weekly and monthly basis to supplement the needs of our in game characters. Hell, I even went out and got my PS4 specifically to play Planetside2. Probably stupid but I love this game and care about it's future and it's continued success.

My commitment is unwavering and I'd at least like the same level of commitment shown to me as a player, as a customer, and as a loyal fan. Be honest with me and speak the truth. Good or bad just level with me and I'll figure it out. I may not like it but at least you communicated with me and in the end that's all I or anyone else wants. I'm listening and anxiously awaiting great work and good times. Be well and have a wonderful day.