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

if SOE spent the same time and energy looking at the "Ideas and Suggestions" board, as they do deleting posts they don't like and writing up nanny topics like this, they would actually be doing something worthwhile. a lot of us have stopped spending money because it's plain for everyone to see the way this game and its players are being treated; can you blame us for being negative complainers?

Actually. I understand now why they're doing this.

Just like with OMFG, it was preparation for the PS4 launch.

They want to make it as cozy here for the console players as possible, because we all know how console players are inclined to log onto the forums?

I feel inclined to write something to corporate about how this game is being managed at times.

I'm sure this is a great idea, and will certainly not lead to this forum becoming a dystopian echo chamber of yes men where every negative comment or legitimate criticism is deleted.
And I'm also sure that the unaccountable moderators you appoint will not let petty personal dislikes weigh into their decisions, like banning people who talk positively about, say, a political party they don't like, or Ponies.
I'm sure this will not happen because I totally haven't seen mods acting corrupt more times than I can count.
I mean, yeah there is the example of literally tens of thousand of websites being ruined by moderators who abuse their power, but surely this one will get lucky.
Surely.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Sorry if you don't see it, I've seen it numerous times now.

The thread I mentioned in my first post? Yeah, that thread I posted was about a post made by Wrel on reddit. It wasn't about anything that had to do with the devs, yet it was derailed because... it came from Reddit? And because reddit was evil. Really, that is it. Some valiant forumsider decided that it was best to attack my post, because it came from a member of the community who posted said post on Reddit. A member of their own gaming community. Do you have any idea how bad that looks for this portion of the community?

You are never going to get information posted here like you want, because people like that thrive here. They will crush any hope you ever have of getting the attention PS2's main forums believe they are entitled to, because it isn't about the devs posting information, it is about having a loose justification to be toxic towards people in their exact same situation who made the arbitrary decision to follow one of the forums rather than the others.

As to posts linking to the main forums: you mean that the PS2 forums never get exclusive information... except for the balance posts... and the code forge posts... and everything test server... that no one ever links to the main PS2 forums, except for all of those things, which are linked back to the main forums every time. PS2 forums get a lot of information, but until you get rid of the people I talked about earlier, you are never going to get dev interaction like people want... and frankly I don't think you'll ever really get what people expect around here, simply because it requires something akin to a response in every single thread, even suggestions. I have yet to encounter a game where a developer commented on every suggestion ever made, or even the majority of threads about suggestions. I don't think I'd want that either because unless the game is tiny, that would require a LOT of time, I'd rather someone spend Making a game.

it makes perfect sense, and if you look at SOE's track record, this sort of crackdown usually occurs as a preview or immediate reaction to a big change. the same thing happened back in SWG when they "revamped" (read: torpedoed) the game.

SOE doesn't understand that console players are even more fickle than we are. they might download PS2, try it out, spend a few dollars, but this game will be forgotten as soon as the next wave of shooters rolls onto PS4. at least we've stuck around for a whole year waiting to see if things improve. a PS4 player gets frustrated by a game? he turns around, deletes it, and moves on to the next.

Guilty as charged. Just because some of the decisions on SOE's part makes me question their sanity, it doesn't mean I should be an horse's behind about it.

(Although I have to question 'as of late', Luperza. This has been going on at least since the playerbase discovered spawncamping via Liberators).

One more thing: I realise that I'm beating a dead horse here, but could someone please explain what this

http://www.reddit.com/r/Planetside/comments/1rxjym/we_are_the_planetside_2_dev_team_ask_us_anything/

is doing there and not here? Kinda flies in the face of what you are trying to do here, in my opinion.

Edit: Please try to not use profanity. Avoiding the filter is like a red flag. - Piestro

I think people such as myself would be happy and have a better peace of mind if they only posted replies to the current big issues .. Even if it's only to say " Our data says it's not an issue "

Kinda off topic :

I'm not sure on the practicality but maybe an idea is to get a volunteer Mod .. Who's only power is the ability to post in a locked thread .. Then they could be charged with gathering any info posted on 3rd party sites into one handy pinned topic ..

This isn't true. I know because I mainly play on consoles and I've been playing this for months.

Woah a forums or customer support person that can actaully contact the devs directly. Up until at least March most of customer only seemed to get any updates on problems through the same public posting players did. Actually that is still my largest problem with this game is a customer support that at least had been if not still is largely ignored by the core development team.

i used to come on here everyday back in january and february because i wanted to hear what the devs were saying, these days i come on here to see if the devs listen anymore or even care, and eveidentally, based against what higby did today with his little AMA question stunt, they still dont give a dam, they tell us to be nice on their forums, when they dont even use the massive resource of brilliant people at their disposal, hell if they played their cards right they could probably get people to actually write code for them for station cash or some other thing like a gun that they get to name or they get to make a selection of things to have the players vote on to see what the devs will do next, alot like the Founders group that helps out warframe

there is so much more that could be done with these forums, i really wish they didnt use reddit or twitter at all, reddit is a pain to use for new people and not everyone wants a twitter


my new motto

THE PLANETSIDE 2 FORUMS

USE THEM OR LOOSE THEM

Just words. There a so many official posts that claim "from now on we do more on the forum" but all this actions fall asleep after a while.
To the players: you can post a lot of critics on the forum without getting deleted.

I remember a game where the devs nominated player reps. for a particular topic (topic would translate to "Skythe", "NC LA", "Prowler" etc. in terms of PS2) that underwent prior screening for quality posting and "acceptance within the community" of course. These people would then extract the feedback from the myriads of threads and present them to the devs and anyone else in a readable fashion. These people also functioned as contact person for players on their specific topic.

Look at the General Technical Support section on these forums located here:

https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?forums/general-technical-support.29/

The first 10 pages of threads has had only 1 post by an SOE representative.

That's a total of 300 threads about Technical problems customers are having and only only 1 thread out of 300 was worth the time of SOE to address.

Look at the bugs section. More locked threads than SOE responses!

So one could say that SOE isn't even using this forum for its intended purpose. So that leads me to ask the question what is out of control?

You know what the crowning jewel of that forum is?

The post about the game breaking in ability to spawn a HIGHLY certed vehicle persisted for 2 weeks, until somebody in the thread posted it on reddit and Higby posted a hotfix less than a day later.

Behold:

https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/cant-spawn-the-mosquito-aircraft.157769/

From my experience on the forums the lack of dev "presence" is what seems to be causing all the turmoil. For those of us that post on the forums regularly, it doesn't seem like you guys are there--even though you could be reading the posts you're really nothing more than a ghost passing through until you post. We want to have a conversation with you guys as the devs but we can't have that unless you post something of value that can add to the conversation. Something like data (that is poorly documented) like the effects of suppressors or high velocity/soft point ammo on things like projectile velocity and damage dropoff rates could be plenty for us to make and revise ideas or even going so far as to throw out one of your own ideas or take a stand on an issue (I understand that with the current state of the forums you might have to becareful about how your opinions are presented and all but that) could give us more than enough to work with--and it would at least tell us you're actively listening.

With a game this big you will never please every player, that's impossible but I do think SOE should post a little more in some threads ( not whine threads, leave that for the tumble weed ) of importance. Although we know your looking, we would like to know your actually reading the threads and if you post then we see what direction and what your thinking, that is the most important part for some members. Most threads are repetitive and that's because there is no feed back from SOE, so the same thread gets started all over again and who wants that?

I follow you on twit and I think your great with it, but some times that interaction could be used also on the main forums.

( PS I hate reddit and wont use it )

I'm going to be discussing moderation, and I deem it's not against forum guidelines because I'm not referring to a specific action taken by a single member of the moderation staff, just in general.
(forum guidelines include: "If you disagree with a moderator or employee's actions, do not discuss or challenge the matter in forum posts")

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Great post, I'll quote some bits..

It's very disheartening when a thread that had civil&constructive criticism/discussion going on inside gets locked/moved to offtopic/whatever just because a few bad apples were also involved. I'd rather see those bad apples purged from the thread instead. Multiple constructive threads on the same subject should be merged (which isn't ideal to keeping the discussion clear, but far better than locking one or the other).

The moderation team is probably far too small. I imagine at the start there were far more important things to concentrate on and in any case the forums weren't in such a bad state back then... then the player population went down and there were layoffs in SOE and it may be hard to justify more moderators.

I haven't played properly since the start of July or so, mostly logging in for the passive certs. Recently I stopped doing that as well and cancelled my yearly sub in advance, knowing full well that I lost on the remaining 500 SC per month (which is not a cool way to treat customers btw... if subscription gives you SC monthly and you pay for a year in advance, you should get 12x 500 SC instead of forfeiting all the remaining SC if you cancel.. Feels like they're attempting to make players forget about their sub and accidentally pay for more)

Not giving us free (or paid) transfers (yet?) is one of the better decisions SOE has made, in my opinion. Considering the examples you gave of population imbalance and a bit of knowledge of human nature, any sort of transfer system would be used to stack populations even worse. There would be a few who go help underdog, but far more would move away from the underdog.

So true. I can't read the minds of SOE devs, but this is what it has looked like to me here on forums.

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For dev activity, a while ago (October 17th) I went through a couple of pages (roughly 30% of the threads, 100 pages..) of the Ideas & Suggestions forum, looking for SOE tag on the thread (which indicates a dev or customer relations response, not a moderator response).

In the first 3000 threads, there were 8 SOE tags.
Some of those threads I remember earning their SOE tag while they were still in Gameplay Discussion forum though. There's a lot of threads being made, but I still think a 0.2% response rate is, well, crap. Everyone seems to ignore that section of the forums in favor of gameplay discussion, even the devs (as unlikely as that sounds!) and moderators (you won't find many "there's already a thread for this, locking" comments over there).

Hey just few things to add, i think a lot of people before me have made some very valid points.

Dev Blogs: Your chance to tell the community what your'e up to, anyone from Art , Q&A, Programming, game design, EVE use's the dev blog to address balance issues, gameplay changes, new art, new vehicles.- get a proper blogging system in place.

Community feedback: recent Double XP event, the EU servers where unplayable during primetime during this event, it took far to long for the Devs to officially came on the forums regarding issue to address it. This is important game breaking stuff and no one had the time to make a statement to the community in a timely fashion.

Suggestion: Shutdown the Prosabien PS2 forums, get there PS forum mods to work on the forums during EU time (if they had any in the first place)

Thankyou! I'm fed up of having my threads lead astray by insults and trolls!