Does Reddit really have more dev attention than PS2 forums?

Relaying every change the development team is discussing making to the game is not the job of a community manager. There is of course some subjectiveness into what this role does throughout the industry, but it's not how things are done with most companies I'm familiar with. It's also not the best use of resources given the limited and unmeasurable ROI on catering to concerns of a smaller portion of the community. Those efforts can be used to reach more people with significantly lower cost.

You used the Vulcan example so let's run with that. Your mood was "hey we just found out the Vulcan is getting some changes and it's on PTS." I can't think of any initial questions that are valid beyond "What did you think of the Vulcan on PTS?" Are you asking me to ask the devs what they thought about what you thought about this?

What you are asking for is old school community management where we don't allow the developers to speak directly with the community and conduit everything through me. That's not the route we have chosen to go as a company and being blunt it's really outdated and ineffective given the rise of social media. I'm personally glad we've evolved instead of stagnated and clung to old methodologies.

Once again this does not negate the engagement which does happen on the forums and the importance of the deeper conversations here. It's not however the center of all communication anymore.

SOE customer service insists that the DEVs read the forums, but from everything that that I have seen in the forums and the replies like those that are in the thread, it simply is not the case.
One would think that if SOE customer service really thinks that the DEVs are supposed to operate in their own OFFICAL forums that someone form SOE management would step in and tell the DEVs that they needed to use the OFFICAL forums instead of some third-party websites.
It appears that SOE management is out of the loop. There is a disconnect. The DEVs run-amok.

These are the OFFICAL forums. They simply aren't used by the DEVs for much more than limited interaction to post some of what they post on third-party websites.
Yeah, and that goes for the bug reports forums as well. Apparently, the DEVs use some other third-party website for bug-tracking.

BTW, a forum moderator edited my signature because it was too big pixel-wise. They how ever did not change or discuss the actual text.
So note what I said in my signature and that a moderator read it and didn't bother commenting. That should clear things up a bit in regards tot the DEVs interaction with the OFFICAL Planetside 2 forums.

TBH most players just want to the forums to be " part " of the communication in regards to the development of the game ..

For all the good yourself and for example Muldoon do on these forums it mostly has little to do with the actual questions / answers / conversations the players are asking for ..

People think that it might just be nice once in a while to have a meaningful conversation with a Dev about the game , it's systems , it's goals, it's future etc etc etc ... On the games own forum ..

No one is asking the Dev's to ignore Reddit, or for Higby to stop posting dog pictures on Twitter they are just asking for a tad of equality.

What happened to the thread you used to do ? Dev question of the week or w/e it was ? That quickly died a death for the good idea it was in bringing idea's and conversation to the table ..

I think you bring up an important point that highlights what I'm talking about with perception. Why do you believe other formats are getting more answers than you are? I'd challenge you to dig through a few pages of this and see what they are getting that you aren't.

What really grinds my gears about the whole Forum vs Reddit thing is you guys are so similar it's crazy (although yes you do communicate a little differently). I can only say this because I put in a considerable amount of time monitoring traffic, sifting through posts, and providing analysis.

The developer threads fell off my radar (no pun intended) when things got a little slower last month. Having those threads is important when there is something to discuss and yeah it's about time we had another so thank you for reminding me.

You get a lot of crap (deserved or not), but nobody can say you lack stamina and patience

About 7-10% of the players at one time or another spend money on this game. Without their contributions, in any form, the game would not exist. I obviously don't have any numbers, but subscriptions will make up a significant part of that.

How could you possibly argue against this obvious fact? The reddit guy has the right idea.

You're right, because the game would be taken offline. Wouldn't be anything then.

Except it's the truth. If we didn't voluntarily pay for things, the game would be P2P or not exist. A select few shoulder the costs for everyone who doesn't.

Planetside 2 is an incredible game regardless of whether SOE has made good on what they originally intended.

I don't have a membership, I buy some SC from time to time.

Because they have poisonous fans

Sen, don't make **** up if you can't back it up. Look up "bell curve" on google and get back to me.

Sony isn't the best company, but I'm sure their marketing division is capable of twelfth-grade math.

Good thing Planetside 2 is a fantastic game.

I never intended to imply they are getting more info .. My point is about what the players want in regards to this forum and that the forums shouldn't be an after thought, or require a player to copy and paste any info that is brought forward.


And TBH if the lack of " answers " are as bad on Reddit and Twitter as they are here then it's a pretty poor show across the board regardless of the media being used.

Note: I'm ignoring Dev post's in Account and Billing because that's not the communication this topic is about ..

Dev's willing and it doesn't need to be the same one weekly , but even when things get slow you can always take one of the hot topics and ask a Dev to comment and answer questions about it ..

Or hell even weekly scroll down the front page > make a list of the more pertinent topics > Make a list of questions based off those topics > Ask a Dev to answer them > Copy paste the answers ... They don't even need to get their hands dirty then



^ That's not about what other media's get or don't get .. That's about what this forum could do with and would be better place for it .

When Devs state pretty much just that in official videos, such as the Planetside 2 Anniversary broadcast. If you haven't seen the part where it was admitted that not much time is spent on the forums and they are viewed as largely redundant in any real sense, then maybe you might want to ask the Devs why they are viewing a toxic space such as Reddit as being, in their own words, the place to communicate rather than the official forums.

The current problem is not the devs not being allowed to post on the forum. It is the devs intentionally avoiding the forum that they're supposed to be looking at. You, the community manager, is currently the only red-name with a notable presence on these forums other than the forum mods.

Stop weaseling it away as "emergence of the new media". If the dev team still cares about forum opinion as you have claimed, they would have used it along with Reddit, like they have used Twitter along with it with little conflict with each other. It is evidently not the case. Not even this very thread, attacking the professionalism of the developers, have attracted any dev attention to defend themselves. No, there's just a community manager trying to defuse a bomb that the devs are too uncaring to do anything about.

You're speaking as if there is any dev engagement on the forum to begin with.

Fixed. And it's beyond horrible that I find this to be the real case.

You don't know what the definition of "microtransaction" is then.

A microtransaction is paying a small nominal fee for access to content, with "small" being undefined. I'd guess that it varies from product to product, with iPad apps taking low-end cent payments, and more expensive programs asking for ten or more (like Avast).

You also demonstrate your ignorance of what a bell curve is; towards one extreme of cheapness, more people will buy but you need a very large number of customers to support you. If guns were to cost $1 instead of $7, you'd need 70% of the playerbase to buy instead of the current 10%, which according to analysis from every F2P I've seen is not feasible. Counter to that, more expensive items get fewer buyers but need fewer to start with. Beyond a certain level prices are just too extreme. I'll assume SOE took the five minutes needed to make a bell curve graph of prices and demand, and it would look like this;



If Sony has any competence at all (they do), then $7 will be in the orange zone near the top, with the graph representing income/player. And planetside 2 is one of the best F2P's from an income/capita perspective.

It is though, but you're welcome to be wrong about that like everything else.

Clearly they understand that, and when the anniversary bundle didn't sell well because of it's price, they dropped it since their cost per additional unit is nil. If only they would look to that lesson and give up the whaling, a lot more people would be buying things.

No offense to you guys, I know you're in a heated debate and it is interesting to read, but could you create a new thread for this? Like I said, nothing against you two, it's just this is a discussion totally separate of what we're talking about currently. Both of you have awesome points and it would just be better to weigh in on them if this had it's own thread. And no, I'm not a mod, not trying to a mod, etc. It's just we have this really good thread going on already and I don't want it to get too noisy.

Thank you.

This is pretty much how I feel about it. PromptCritical, RadarX, and Muldoon apparently post on these forums. But Higby, as I posted earlier, hasn't posted on these forums since March 11th (that is, in direct response to a player). What is the reasoning for this?

pretty much the only time we have had any interaction from a dev/mod is from radarx either answering us saying yes we visit the forum or for announcements "we have sent out everyones anniversary boosts" or sorting out peoples account issues and stuff

no juicy information of any kind or "fun" talk like they get in reddit - its all very dry talk in the forums from the devs/mods


things like that are things i think us forumsiders would be happy to see - im not saying to ONLY talk in the forums, go nuts in reddit also but at least give us some useful information every now and again in the forums or even have a bit of fun with us like you do on reddit

pre release during the tech test there was loads and loads of forum communication but after the game released it pretty much stopped - i told my friends in battlefield forums that at least we get communication from devs in the ps2 forums when we had the tech test but then release came and the communication just stopped and my friends were like "wtf f0d devs dont communicate in ps2 forums - u be trollin us?"

so again im not saying ONLY talk to us im saying just throw us a bone every now and again that isnt totally dry or "release" information - just a comment on a discussion of balance or the technical side of ps2 or things you like to use in ps2 ANYTHING

Let's see what happens to the daily SOE Landmark Twitter images barrage by their lead dev once it is finally released. Reminds me a bit of GW2, lots of "communication" as long as nothing is done and when it is released and people ask specifics the one-sided communication is over.

As for PS2 communication, the point of no return has probably been reached already some time ago. Seems that is the preferred state.

SOE is far more active actually chatting on other places, than on the official forum always has been that way.

Here they are busy just trying to keep everyone playing nice.

Since they don't moderate reddit they have to actually attempt real thought out replies occasionally, instead of just deleting posts.

So you still don't understand basic economics, good to know. Putting the costs too low or too high can negatively affect revenue, a fact I learned in grade 9 and figured out how to derive in grade 12.

Almost every F2P game has around 5-20% of people buying, even for cheap things. Planetside 2 has 7-10 % of its players paying for something once or more. If SOE were to drop prices they'd need to make it up with volume, which according to every reference I've ever seen regarding every F2P wouldn't be possible. They'd need to septuple their output to make up for your suggested price, but they'd fail.

I'll ignore for a second PS2's monetization is one of the fairest ever made in F2P gaming. Off the top of my head the only other game that does it better is Team Fortress 2.

So what, this isn't Everquest.

Your complete lack of understanding and failure to grasp basic principles of economics aside, stating facts is not arrogance. You may think that just because you say something it is authoritative, but in reality things are either true or false. When you say "PS2 is not a good game" you are wrong, to be quite blunt. There is no room for interpretation here. It may not suit you, but stating it is bad is just objectively false from virtually every standpoint.

It's because SOE is a business, and like it or not a business is the only entity that could afford to host servers for a game like this. They aren't a charity, and Sony doesn't bail them out.

Because there are smart decisions and poor decisions in business. Lowering prices would not be good for SOE, and what is good for SOE, being the devs of this game, is ultimately good for us (to an extent).

There is a balance to be struck between customer focus and revenue focus, it's not all-in, one or the other. SOE does a good enough job at it, and I get mad when know-nothings get mad at shrewd and fair business practice.

Given they brought back 2x SC sales after 20 months you may well be assuming incorrectly, in at least that they may have miscalculated they price to sales sweet point.