[Suggestion] I know why Devs do not read/use this forum that much.

Because is full of complaints, dissatisfaction and even rant posts.

8+ out of 10 threads are full of negative feedback, negative questions, negative answers.

No one likes to be in such a negative enviroment.

I think whith shame what a new player/person might feel when reading through the forums and only receive a full infusion of negativity.

Even this own thread is full of negativity. Only difference, is against us, and not PS2 or DEVS.

Please guys, lets try to be constructive and switch our behaviour into a more positive one.

Cheers all.

I think you are not seeing this right. Most people wouldn't care to come here and post anything negative if their game experience was very positive. I've never joined any other gaming forums because there was no reason to: games were working fine, devs were responsive, updates addressed the issues and fixed bugs without introducing new bugs, etc.

Some dev was asked this long ago, either it was on friday night live with Luperza or it was on command center with Higby. The reason they don't post here is because they don't want to be accountable if they say something that turned out not to be true. They didn't use those words but it's what they meant. If it's on reddit/twitter then it's not official, not a promise, can't point to it if something goes wrong.

So basically they are shady businessmen who avoid any and all responsibility at all cost?

Well, it's simply a stupid policy: they talk on Reddit and Twitter, they make statements there, they discuss about the changes, etc.
The fact they aren't official channels is just plain wrong because Reddit and Twitter are the only place where they act in some official way.
The perception from the customer base is what matters.

And @OP: working with customers means hearing a lot of complaints; if you don 't want to then go to do something else.

People don't complain when everything is fine. So I guess everything isn't fine is it! Besides, they don't listen to us anyway. They only listen to the almighty dollar.

There is some accountability...
Smedley essentially deleted (Or had to delete) his reddit and twitter accounts in face of the latest lizard squad outburst.

Still they do not understand that passing by and posting things like "Why acknowledged the problem and we are working on it" has a huge effect on the community's morale. Posting here doesn't make any sense because players feel ignored... that's ridicolous.

And it's still more impressive if you think DBG pays a person called Community Manager to handle the community and relationships with the customer. I've been here since beta and I don't eve know who's the community manager and what the hell is doing. It's much easier to get information about what's going on on Reddit than here.

If I were the boss I would ******* pissed.

In addition to this, they also said they didn't like how restrictive their own company's Forum policies / profanity filter was.

...which also points to Forumside being "more mature" overall than the game's own devs. (Especially more mature than that TRay guy ever was). Another funny thing happened once Reddit started going down hill as well: Their Subbreddit became more toxic than the official ... and Twitter has ALWAYS been more toxic if you saw that "Mean Tweets" edition of a Dev video put out by Higby & his team a year ago where they literally traded "f*** you`s" with their own customers.

So yeh, OP couldn't be more wrong. The reason the devs avoid this Forum is because they're normal human beings who would prefer to avoid most of the problems and Criticisms they can't seem to make up the time to fix. I'm sure we can all sympathize to some degree (all of us who are actually human and fallible / procrastinators that is)

I think you all are missing a big point about DBG and how things work within the business. SOE(DBG) is required by it's parent companies, who bought them from sony, to figure out by themselves how to improve this game, WHILE making a profit with the game during the improvement. The one who ****** this game up was higby, dev resources were squandered and wasted and hes the reason why planetside 2 never reached its full potential because it was rushed from beta into launch too quickly and nothing was seen through to the end.

The people making this game, the art department, people who code, etc, ARE NOT involved with the business side, they do get to decide on on anything thats not development of the game itself. If rennovo(DBG's parent company) decides they want them to release boring crap to get money from players, then they have to oblige.

The timing of this thread is kind of funny, what two days after we got a stickied thread for battle rifle feedback, and about 3 since a sticky about their autokick or whatever policy thing.

And Smedley

they pretty much just dont like the forums and they think because theres more people on twitter and reddit that they should spend all their time there

I don't know how much they read this forum.

But they've never used this forum to post much since Live, however that has nothing really to do with "the state" of the forum, but rather was supposedly a concious choice to use Reddit where they can say (more or less) what they want compared to here.
Even the company President prefers Twitter or Reddit (maybe after being burnt by EQ1 forums, I dunno).



Or to put it another way this forum could be a delight of constructive criticism, bonhomie and dancing Unicorns and they'd still just post stuff on Reddit & Twitter as they always have.

The staff going to reddit and twitter makes no sense to me. You don't see a car dealership or something similar sending their employees and the business owner himself spending the entire day in the park talking and interacting with people there instead of where they are supposed to be.

The parent company might have helped them in some things such as financial backing for projects. I don't know if they actually did but this type of thing does happen in a business structure such as this. Higby worked on a team. They made decisions that worked in conjuction with what the higher ups approved. I'm not saying that every little decision was controlled by the higher ups but I'm sure quite a bit was. Espcially due ot the fact that this was a free-to-play game released earlier then games in the past had been released with the hopes of developing the game after release.

The company also has a habit of hitting targets they set on a project and then refocusing a lot of resources on another project, leaving the previous project dormant until they can free up resources to start working on it again (if ever).

Yes, I imagine the higher ups had deadlines for them, most likely a margin of profit to reach by a certain time which could be why the game was rushed too quickly out of beta. But I highly doubt anyone outside the planetside 2 team was there approving every decision on the design and creative direction of the game, maybe the decision to bring planetside back as a franchise and the financial/business goals they wanted the team to meet. But I really can't see any upper management corporate types being involved in the development of this game, they would rather put a team of coders, designers etc together they think will be effective and delegate the responsibilities to them while the money rakes in lol.

They read/parse through it all...

but yeah, they don't post here beyond what they have to.

With Reddit's up/down vote system its pretty much a fanboy site. Any complaints etc get quickly downvoted never to be seen again. Dev's like sunshine being blown up their ***** I reckon. Also if they can push off the majority of forum responsibilities to a third party they reduce admin costs here.

I think an acknowledgment that they read the forums would be enough to satisfy me, even if they don't reply to stuff. It'd be reassuring to know something as seemingly mundane as that.

Keeping on topic, I do agree that a decent amount of threads are either uninformed, immature, or don't take in other points of view. I bet I've even said something in the past that was pretty stupid in retrospect. It's very rare to see someone respond to these threads in a positive way, as well. Just the other day I was reading this thread complaining about VS; only after around a page or two comments insulting either the kid or the VS did anyone actually post something worth reading.

At the very least, I'd like to see the toxic environment improve a bit, regardless of whether or not the devs are reading this stuff. But I don't know if we could really change peoples' personalities that much...