Attention All Forum Users: Bringing Order to the PlanetSide 2 Forums

As a dev team lead that at a previous post had a very active customer base, it's a waste of time and effort to have Developers trawl the forums when they can be writing code.

It's much better for a couple of professional community admins to filter the stuff that might have an answer and then ask the Developers. This is because in most cases the community doesn't want the developer's answer. The developer's answer will be technical and even if you've got 30 years of code behind you, you're not going to understand the core of the PS2 platform. Much better for the Dev to explain something to the community admin and for them to translate it into English.

On the subject of DDOS, no firm that can have its services DDOS'd should ever say it's being DDOS'd. By doing so, you give credibility to the idiots that are doing it. It's security 101 to call it a network fault. And technically, it's not lying either. It is a network fault - packets cannot be routed fast enough. If there is a security breach and clients/users information is removed then you have to announce that. Security breaches are not a DDOS, although they can be connected.

I won't stick up for SOE on the membership debacle (which is very disappointing) but I think it's important that the community hears from a non-SOE person what is reasonable to expect.

I just wanted to hop in and say "thanks" for actively taking the first reddit posts into the forums. This is the kind of engagement a lot of us wanted.

Aww! It's always nice to hear kind words. Thanks!

I dont even look at reddit.

Good to know, I as well thought you didn't pay attention to your forums. Ok, so here are a few things I would like to see improves for the forums.

1. (At least for the ideas and suggestion section of the forums) Make the original post editable at all times. This way you can create (for example a vehicle idea) a thread which best suits everyone's needs. For example: the original poster posts an idea and someone else says; Well hey this might be good and the original poster agrees. He can then incorperate the idea into the original post. Like this the devs can easily see in the original post what/how the people like the idea the most. (For example: I made some vehicle suggestions on the forums. Some people like the idea of the driver and gunner both having guns the most, while other people rather see the driver not having any guns). If you give the original poster the opportunity to change it, so that both idea are on there and that he can count votes and such for them, you have a good overview of what the majority would like to see.

2. Assign one or more devs to give the community feedback on their ideas (if you don't, people will think the forums are deserted and by providing feedback, you create a better relationship between the devs and the community/players). It doesn't have to take to long, they can just watch and give feedback for all the threads on the first page of the title (ideas and suggestion for example).

3. If a post is unconstructive/inappropriate/doesn't belong in the section, the dev should close the thread. A thread should probably also be closed when it has been implemented or when it is clear/obvious to the dev that the idea will not be used.

4. Filter the posts on likes and views. So the order would be to: First look at the amount of likes and then at the amount of views.
In the order top to bottom: 100 likes + 100 views -> 99 likes + 110 views -> 99 likes + 100 views. <- like that.

Let me know what you think . I for one think it would make the forums better.

Here is a post in the "Idea and suggestions" that is empire specific, full of great idea's, is 6 months old and still part of active discussion. It has over 16k views, over 425 repllies, and the first 2 posts have over 150+ likes, yet no response from anyone from SoE.
https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2...bishing-tr-as-a-faction-part-2.129411/page-22

What is the criteria to getting a meaningful official post, or atleast an acknowledgement that it has been read? What can the community do to help bring popular subjects like this to your attention? I understand that spamming dev's is counter productive, and that everything can not be read, but their are many examples of very popular threads that are important to the majority of the player base, or at forum-base. I think most of us would love a way to help filter these from threads that either few care about or are simply answering questions?

Definitely some great feedback in this thread and I've gone back and read through this quite a few times as new comments continue to get added to it.

The major thing I want to give as a suggestion is instead of having really broad topics like "The Ultimate Thread Dedicated to Refurbishing TR as a faction," breaking this up into sub threads that go over various aspects in detail are much better for our development team. This allows the person who works on X weapon, Y vehicle, Z helmet to go back and make changes or comment within the thread.

It's a bit more difficult for a developer who works on a specific aspect of the game to sift through a thread discussing a ton of topics with 22 pages worth of comments in order to find the comments that are specifically about what they are working on. Hopefully that makes a bit more sense.

You mean, threads like this?

because, from what I've seen, despite the majority reacting positively, few if any of these single-topic threads that are actually done with effort and sincerity get any sort of acknowledgement by relevant dev memebers

Most of us, including me, just want to know: is this in line with the dev team's thinking? might there be reasons that we have not seen, that this would definitely not work?

Knowing all that will help us in helping you - especially because we will then be better equipped to supply relevant suggestions, ideas, and feedback.

Although yes there are 1001 threads, and it can be hard, but didn't you say that more or less every thread gets a quick glance? Perhaps, as part of that SOP, you include another step: expressing opinion?

e.g.
"yes, this sounds about OK, but the dev team doesn't have the man hours to implement this any time soon"
or
"no, this would be impractical. please consider the balance implications of your suggestion. for example see: x" (balance is a fragile graph network, affecting one edge/node can affect all others significantly e.g. shortest paths)
or
""

I understand the problem, however breaking them up into many smaller threads tends to allow a lot of these idea's to just get lost in unpopular idea's like "lets add a christmas tree gun". The threads are no longer noticeable when you have a small fracture of isolated idea's which constantly lose the top 5 pages and often the entire front page of a forum simply because they would be competeing with so many more fractures of the same topic.

I think the big worry here is that if we split up all of those topics up, many more, including some in those threads, would just get lost on the second page of "idea's and suggestions". Is there a way we can help show what the community as a whole feels is the most important/relavent? Perhaps adding a vote system for threads, or a thread like button? Perhaps a "thread subscribe" or any thing to indicate that one things is liked more then another?

This is terrible 12 hours late bringing up servers and they are still not online, and now maintenance, wasn't 12 hours enough for all and maintenance .this is rediculas. Ive been playing multi player games for years and never seen anything like this!

We've been very vocal about this.

The 12 hour downtime for the EU Network Maintenance was announced prior. This is something that has to happen.

The issue involving the gateway servers was unexpected. Unfortunately, things don't always happen as expected. We were very vocal about the issue, communicating everything along the way and responding to everyone as quickly as possible regarding the issue.

The question for you then is...Would you rather have your topics be viewed by the Developers or your fellow gamers?

Sure your giant thread encompassing all things TR or VS or NC gets tons of comments and views from players, but the specific devs who work on bits and pieces of that thread won't be able to sift through those comments and posts to find what is relevant to them. They don't have the time to do that.

Although, when I do my Weekly Reports and specific reports requested by the Developers, I do try to get your voices heard. Sometimes it's hard to incorporate responses in threads that are so broad when we are looking for very specific feedback on very specific topics.

Very similar to what I said before, so hopefully that continues to make sense.

Are the forum guidelines enforced automatically, or are there actual humans reading forum posts and decided which posts get removed / which users get banned?

Human process here. You can help too! There's a report button on every post. If you find someone is violating the Forum Guidelines, report them and we'll look into it!

Thanks Luperza. Maybe you could talk to them for me? My honeybaddggger account got banned for basically no reason and then when I logged on with my secondary account to ask that question here, I got banned for attempting to evade the ban?! I think they're getting a little overzealous about it. I don't even know why I got banned in the first place, because the inbox and alerts won't load because I'm banned. I've already emailed forum-admin@soe.sony.com but so far haven't heard anything. I've been contributing to the forums for almost a year now and I've spent a few hundred dollars on this game already. It seems as if someone is having a bad day and is just taking it out on a random person in the forums.

Thanks,

Ben

Perhaps SOE could include a Forum Que... Every forum post entered will be given a Que number that continually updates so the one who created the Post can view regularly when they can expect their Post will be read. Any posts that violate the Forum Rules however and are flagged will get an automatic notice to adjust their post to fit the forum rules within a time limit and if any further flags occur a moderator will review it and decide whether or not to remove the post or send it to the bottom of the que. This moderator however does not comment on the post for the message in the post... only for maintaining the Forum Rules...(this is to prevent greifing in the forums by individuals or teams who wish to flag competitive posts with intent on getting them dropped to the end of the que) However, if devs feel a post is worth reading but dont have the time or the placement of the post is way down in the que but current with an active project ... perhaps releasing a weekly list of forum titles to the community saying which posts are in the running for active dev involvement would be prudent so that members dont feel left out of a discussion... this would vastly improve forum morale and encourage members to present their posts with greater quality and thought sense they know they have a chance at being in the limelight.

Also member comments to a post, either member submitted or official, should receive a community rating that alerts devs and moderators to view those comments... this way comments on posts can be rated and awarded or removed as necessary... Leaving flaming comments or posts on the forums for months can adversely effect the community, lowering community morale and intern lowering the community's ethical standards for new posts resulting in a lot of nonconstructive posts and comments like we have right now.

Perhaps a reward system could be included as well, such as a well written and thought out post or comment that is constructive and noninflammatory could be rewarded with "in game" and "forum" Titles and Ribbons... players can wear their titles and ribbons with pride in game and on thier profile in the forums alerting other community members of their quality... the titles could be something like Forum Chief ... for generating 100 posts and receiving high praise for their posts by the community... or Special Commendation... for Dev Approval of the Quality of a single post or comment that is viewed as helpful to an issue. (the Special Commendation Title would have to include a custom certificate that shows up on the members in game profile and forum profile with a direct link or note to the actual part of the post or comment that got them the award that is visible to the community provided the player profile has opted to share that particular info.) For members that receive multiple Special Commendation awards, even though they can only receive the award once, they can collect the certificates and have them all visible on their forum and in game profile pages for community viewing. im sure a process would have to be created to filter out such awards so that only the best gain the highest rated awards such as the Special Commendation Ribbon and Title... which should be reserved for specific involvement in an issue or long standing constructive involvement in the community.

On the note of ribbons... a possible option would be to include a page on the player profiles that actually awards graphical ribbons for awards earned in Forums that are visual objects that the player can wear on any of their characters attached to the game account... the player can then import these into the game and wear them on their uniform or on their in game profile page in a manner similar to how ribbons are worn on decorated military service members in the real world... the player would be able to drag and place his preferred ribbons onto an object he or she wears on their uniform in game so other players can notice they are deserving of distinction...

Perhaps these options may take time to implement or be too complicated for the current state of the game, but i feel they could improve the community in game and in forums as a whole, resulting in a boost in the quality of experience and level of morale and customer loyalty to the level most Pay 2 Play games experience. However Unlike Pay 2 Play games where the quality of the player is based on his commitment monetarily, this new commitment to Planetside 2 and perhaps other SOE titles would be based entirely on merit and be open to anyone regardless of age, payment status (premium or f2p), or social standing in the real world such as being male or female or a professional critic or fan-boy. This will mean those titles that adopt this practice would be on a level of quality beyond others, which i feel PS2 is certainly one of those titles.

I could provide some constructive criticism. How about using mirrored servers and some F5's to redirect traffic so you don't have to take the game down to do updates until you've tested them on a "live" server? I don't know if the game was architected to work on multiple servers, but if you're serious about hosting large scale games like this, you should look into making them resilient. You could probably design a core architecture for communicating and storing game state to separate state from server. Do it once, and save yourself having to rewrite code that continues to fail.

Forum Admin takes a while. It's me and RadarX answering it. Our standard policy is to aim for 24 hours, with the understanding that we both work week days.

Umm, I'll be blunt. Any major news about a Sony game should be posted on Sony forums. If you want to post it elsewhere, by all means do so. But post it here.

Why? Some of us Amish players don't use Facebook, Twitter or Reddit. Because computers are evil.

Oh, and btw <looks around> if you tell my elders I was here posting, you'll wake up under a pile of hay. It'll take you weeks to get it all out of you bed.

Hey Luperza, why didn't you respond to the ideas I posted wednesday, I would like to get some feedback ? Mainly since I wrote down some things in the ideas/suggestion section of the forums, which I think could be really cool for PS2 to have and such (and many people with me). If you want I could post links to these threads here, but I don't really think that is the right way to go about this. Below I have copy pasted the post I made wednesday .

Good to know, I as well thought you didn't pay attention to your forums. Ok, so here are a few things I would like to see changed/improved for the forums.

1. (At least for the ideas and suggestion section of the forums) Make the original post editable at all times. This way you can create (for example a vehicle idea) a thread which best suits everyone's needs. For example: the original poster posts an idea and someone else says; Well hey this might be good and the original poster agrees. He can then incorperate the idea into the original post. Like this the devs can easily see in the original post what/how the people like the idea the most. (For example: I made some vehicle suggestions on the forums. Some people like the idea of the driver and gunner both having guns the most, while other people rather see the driver not having any guns). If you give the original poster the opportunity to change it, so that both idea are on there and that he can count votes and such for them, you have a good overview of what the majority would like to see.

2. Assign one or more devs to give the community feedback on their ideas (if you don't, people will think the forums are deserted and by providing feedback, you create a better relationship between the devs and the community/players). It doesn't have to take to long, they can just watch and give feedback for all the threads on the first page of the title (ideas and suggestion for example).

3. If a post is unconstructive/inappropriate/doesn't belong in the section, the dev should close the thread. A thread should probably also be closed when it has been implemented or when it is clear/obvious to the dev that the idea will not be used.

4. Filter the posts on likes and views. So the order would be to: First look at the amount of likes and then at the amount of views.
In the order top to bottom: 100 likes + 100 views -> 99 likes + 110 views -> 99 likes + 100 views. <- like that.

Let me know what you think . I for one think it would make the forums better.

Sounds like communism and suppression of freedom of speech to me.