314 replies to this topic

[Kyle Polulak]

Greetings MechWarriors!

We would like to take a moment to address a few concerns that have been raised following our forum structure changes, as well as to address the changes we have now made in accordance with the comments we have received.

As with any change, we expected that some people would have reservations with the restructuring, and we have been closely monitoring feedback on this issue. For context, we have received a plethora of varied responses, including many who see the changes as positive and support our effort to make the forums a place where discussion can be focused and productive.

There has been mention that we are trying to ‘divide’ the forum into smaller sections, so as to diffuse the negativity and make it more difficult for users providing criticism to have a platform to voice their concerns.
On the contrary, critical feedback is very important to us, and we are always reviewing the ‘negative’ threads that point out key issues with our game; this is one of the many reasons we have official forums in the first place.

Ultimately, we think that specificity and a proper categorization of information will better serve both our users and developers. That said, we wholeheartedly recognize that the initial changes had both under and over-reached in many different categories, and these have been largely identified by members of the Community and acted upon as follows:

• Forum-wide
  
  • Several Sub-Forums have been renamed to clarify their intent.
• Guides
  
  • A Mech Lab Guides sub-forum has been created.
    
  • A Joysticks & Peripherals Guides sub-forum has been created.
    
  • Maps & Environment Guides has been dropped.
• Announcements
  
  • Announcements and Service Status have been re-consolidated.
• General Discussion
  
  • News has been opened to the public and moved.
    
  • Polling has been reactivated in all General/Gameplay Discussion sub-forums
    
  • Gameplay Balance has been reactivated from the Archive
    
  • Mechs & Loadouts GD have been merged.
    
  • Maps & Game Modes GD have been merged.
    
  • Metagame GD has been created.
    
  • Tournaments GD has been created.
• Off-Topic
  
  • Off-Topic Discussion has been separated from the Community HPG

There have been a number of other requests in which the Community appears to be divided on first glance: In order to be clear of the Communities wishes, we have established a series of questions here in the form of a poll. We hope you will take part, as we are eager to have your feedback on how we can continue to evolve the forums with you in mind!


Surprisingly to some: Since these initial changes, we have seen an increase in new unique and returning visitors, an increase in visitors to specific sub-forums, and an increase in approved and constructive posts and threads generated in those sub-forums. There has been an immediate decrease in duplicate threads (with exception to those threads duplicated to discuss the loss of General Discussion and how it would spin the forums into a Dark Age.) Despite a slight increase in reports in the immediate aftershock of the changes; Overall, there was a decrease in the number of unique reported players and high threat reports. We will be hopeful to see if this pattern continues.

Update: http://mwomercs.com/...ost__p__2308968

[Tennex]

we need a section to discuss the news in. also for people to go to for one stop shop news. since information about this game is almost never given directly on this website.

update: ah i see it now. thanks for listening!

Edited by Tennex, 26 April 2013 - 02:00 PM.

[Jabilo]

Looks good.

Meta game and game balance forums will broadly give us the functionality of GD.

Some of the merges are also sensible.

I would turn polls of again personally, but that is probably just me.

Overall nice work.

[Gregory Owen]

hi again niko,

after spending a few days with this new design, i still don't care for it. the most populated sub-forum is now the polls, which to be honest i'm completely sick of. it sounded like a good idea at first but now with everybody posting one i have no interest in filling them out.

as much as you guys are trying to reinvent the forums, it just doesn't feel welcoming, too many sub forums hidden within eachother. when i click on "general discussion" like with any other games forums i want to see posts from people with a variety of discussions going on whether good or bad. seeing 8 more choices is confusing, especially since the first 2 are not meant for general discussion at all.

also this seems to have pushed the goons over to reddit which we really don't appreciate.

i'm looking at todays changes, i notice you've moved "suggestions" to the bottom to discourage being the default, and it looks like "game balance" is about to replace it.

IMO this is probably really confusing for you're average player, and too complicated for new players. it would definitely discourage me a little if i didn't think my post was going to be in the right place and get enough exposure to answer my question or problem.

while you guys may be able to sort out information information better, i feel it will probably lead to less posts overall of the good and bad variety.

I think the simple "general discussion" everyone else uses was just fine.

[Fitzbattleaxe]

These changes will definitely help. Especially the news and meta sections.

One point though:

Niko Snow, on 26 April 2013 - 10:53 AM, said:

There has been mention that we are trying to ‘divide’ the forum into smaller sections, so as to diffuse the negativity and make it more difficult for users providing criticism to have a platform to voice their concerns.
On the contrary, critical feedback is very important to us, and we are always reviewing the ‘negative’ threads that point out key issues with our game; this is one of the many reasons we have official forums in the first place.

A perfectly civil thread that merely asked where people should go to generally discuss the game was locked because "why would you possibly want a general discussion section other than to hurl insults at the devs?" You can read my posts. I've never said anything negative about the developers. The person who started that thread may not have either. And yet the moderators of this forum felt free to hurl insults at anyone who was upset at the change. "If you don't like it, then you must be a whining *****, so we're not going to listen to you". I think you have a great game here, even if I don't agree with every design decision. I'm a software engineer myself, and know that things are often a lot more difficult than they appear from the outside. But the manner in which some of your employees interact with this community is disgraceful.

Edited by Fitzbattleaxe, 26 April 2013 - 02:40 PM.

[Roadbeer]

Fitzbattleaxe, on 26 April 2013 - 02:39 PM, said:

But the manner in which some of your employees interact with this community is disgraceful.

The way the community interacts with the employees is worse. Keep smacking a dog and sooner or later it's going to bite you.

[Budor]

He said dog!

[jeffsw6]

I'm glad PGI is listening to player feedback, especially with regards to General Discussion; however there needs to be one "General Discussion" forum that is simply titled that. It's what casuals and regulars both need, when they are not sure where a topic should be posted. You want newbies to have an easy time posting.

Moderators can always move threads from "General Discussion" into different sub-forums when needed. But if casuals can't figure out where to start posting, they are just as likely not to post at all, as they are to dig through a big directory of sub-sections.

Beyond that, your survey is asking numerous questions about how to further sub-divide, or not, many different areas of the forum. The answer to every one of those questions is obvious. Divide them when needed. As the player-base grows, more content will be available in those sections, and perhaps also, more new threads. That is when you should begin dividing them up into more granular categories. Your forum organization must scale with the needs of your player-base. Today, there are fewer than 6000 forum posters in total. That is a very small readership, and making the forum structure unnecessarily complex will only hurt the game and its community by making it less user-friendly.

Let's talk for a moment about why you should, or shouldn't, move threads out of General Discussion. If there are 20 new threads each day about PPCs, clearly that is drowning out other useful topics; and those threads should be moved into Game Balance or Mechs & Loadouts or whatever.

Moving threads in this manner needs to be seen, by players, as something to keep the topics in General Discussion varied and interesting. To date, the moderators have failed spectacularly at this task, by treating "move thread" as a suppression tool, instead of a beneficial way to promote a variety of general discussion while also encouraging posters to limit their discussion of PPCs to one thread (perhaps sticky for a few days at a time) or to direct their efforts into a different section.

The snide "topic locked!" posts from a few moderators are also not helpful. As you've seen, this actually encourages bashing of PGI and its forum moderation practices, and is contributing to many posters' suspicion toward the underlying motives behind what would otherwise be viewed as routine moderation tasks -- closing or moving threads so General Discussion isn't entirely full of PPC talk, and has room for other threads (like how much I like Highlanders, or which ones everybody is buying first.)

If the moderators are going to lock or move topics, they need to use a better boilerplate than "topic locked!" Players will understand if there are 20 threads a day about PPCs and these are being merged together into a sticky, or moved to a different section, if they are told that the idea behind General Discussion is to be a point-of-entry for new topics which might be moved, and meant to contain a broader variety of discussion than it does today. They do not understand "topic locked!"

The fact that you guys need to do a survey to figure these things out is disconcerting. Every word I've written above is incredibly obvious. If Garth and the other PGI staffers are not up to the job of running your forums, then you need to think about hiring staff with more smarts about this. What you are doing with these surveys is continuing to embarrass yourselves. Okay, it's beta, and that's largely okay; but if you don't get a community team in place that can act with professionalism, and understand how to scale the organizational structure and moderation practices of your forum appropriately for its readership and the MW:O player-base, then you can expect further problems.

That's my 5 MC worth ($0.02!)

[jakucha]

I like it more focused like this. We need less meme-esque threads and more focusing on fixing and balancing in-game stuff.

[Gregory Owen]

jakucha, on 26 April 2013 - 03:16 PM, said:

I like it more focused like this. We need less meme-esque threads and more focusing on fixing and balancing in-game stuff.

unfortunately we only have a few more minutes of this till the goons realize this threads exists it happened on reddit this morning with a discussion on negativity.

[NRP]

I certainly hope these changes were made to quell the negativity. I for one would like to read some intelligent discussion once in a while. Unfortunately, that almost never happens around here.

[Fitzbattleaxe]

Roadbeer, on 26 April 2013 - 02:54 PM, said:

The way the community interacts with the employees is worse. Keep smacking a dog and sooner or later it's going to bite you.

Then those individuals can be banned, and the moderators fired. People who act generally civil can stay.

[Koniving]

I generally agree with the forum structure thus far.

My curiousity is... why do we have an off-topic hub at all? If you're on the MWO forum, but not talking about mechwarrior, battletech, or something along those lines.. why are you here?

Somehow I'm picturing topics of "pass me a beer," and "zomg I love ponies!" However that's just personal opinion.

[Jaguar Prime]

Honestly I preferred GD in its original form. I very rarely visited the other forums. I got more of the info that I wanted from GD than any of the many sub forums. That simple.

[Roadbeer]

Koniving, on 26 April 2013 - 03:35 PM, said:

I generally agree with the forum structure thus far.

My curiousity is... why do we have an off-topic hub at all? If you're on the MWO forum, but not talking about mechwarrior, battletech, or something along those lines.. why are you here?

Somehow I'm picturing topics of "pass me a beer," and "zomg I love ponies!" However that's just personal opinion.

Quiet you!
The OT is the realm of the Post Lerian Jihad and the Cult of the MODs. You don't want us to post as often in the regular forums as we post there.

[ferranis]

Mwo style:

+ reinventing things that work fine for the whole internet.
+ **** of your loyal and small base
+ totally discard new players

At least the game and the forum are now an equal experience.

[Greyfyl]

Roadbeer, on 26 April 2013 - 02:54 PM, said:

The way the community interacts with the employees is worse. Keep smacking a dog and sooner or later it's going to bite you.

Didn't take you long to come to PGI's defense did it?

This latest change is just smoke and mirrors, there still is no GD forum, they just renamed one of the upper level categories General Discussion. Seriously? The forum nazis attitude is their right - it's their forum, but it certainly puts off most people with an IQ above 20, except for people like roadbeer that don't really ever have an opinion, they are just here to troll anyone that says something negative about PGI.

I'm no rocket scientist, but I called this ages ago. F2P companies are almost never the friend of the gaming community. There are still hangers on that insist PGI are 'a great bunch of guys that care about the IP'. Yea, didn't buy that 6 months ago, certainly not buying it now.

Go ahead roadbeer...I'm sure you are just waiting to tell me how wrong I am.

[Koniving]

Greyfyl, on 26 April 2013 - 03:48 PM, said:

I'm no rocket scientist, but I called this ages ago. F2P companies are almost never the friend of the gaming community. There are still hangers on that insist PGI are 'a great bunch of guys that care about the IP'. Yea, didn't buy that 6 months ago, certainly not buying it now.

Go ahead roadbeer...I'm sure you are just waiting to tell me how wrong I am.

While I would like PGI to not be so slow in getting something done, I've played enough F2P games to know that no other developer actually does what PGI does. It listens.

In some other games, I've shown game breaking bugs to them... and years after the fact those bugs are still there.

Here. I list game breaking bugs, send an email directly to support listing it, and they disappear within 2 weeks to 3 months.

Yes, there's map bugs and hud bugs, but it's only been 3 weeks. They've had more game-breaking issues such as people with packet loss never leaving home base, and thus 'inexplicably killed by invisible weapons fire' when they are actually 1,300+ meters away from where they think they are since the server no longer accepted updates from their client.

While some of those hud bugs are repeat bugs, they have new causes associated with the new features.

Weapon balancing? I'll tell you PGI does that deliberately. When Artemis first came online, there were bugs to have them do insane damage and a hotfix the same night, but overall it became LRM online as they collected data and then tweaked them. When the discovery came of excessive damage, the nerf was within 2 weeks, and we won't see a fix until missile HSR is reimplemented.

Currently we have ballistics HSR. Just like when laser HSR first came out, everyone's grabbing weapons associated with it. When missile HSR comes, we'll see missile online again, and eventually it'll phase into some sort of balance with some final tweaks.

In the meantime... Here's some bugs that are mostly fixed that you probably didn't know about. Most fixed within 2 weeks of posting them.

Spoiler

Used to be fixed, newly re-happens with new bug.


Day one of the April 2nd patch. Notice the game is a lot more stable now.




Fixed two days after reported in the patch that followed.


Fixed within two weeks of posting it. Even had developer acknowledgement on the video's comments section.


Closed beta, flamers generated no heat until trigger released, heat disappears when trigger pressed. STD engine/STD heatsink Jenner takes out two Atlases with just 4 flamers.

Meanwhile here's a perfect example of a company that doesn't care.

Spoiler

This is a bug report made by JimmyJane (of Combat Arms and of no relation or affiliation to the company of the same name). I made this report several times in the past, especially during 'bug fix month'. Nexon, you have done nothing. My tickets were answered with automatic responses. I have posted this a few times in a few different private videos. Still you've done nothing. All it takes is a simple texture. 1 texture that would make this pallet solid, preventing people from exploiting this. You could fix it in 50 seconds or less. Why is it so hard? Why do you instead insist on automatic pre-written excuses? Maybe if it's a publically known bug, maybe someone will do something.

Update! Unfortunately Nexon has still done nothing to fix this bug, even with Project Fusion's stage 3 "Restore", which was meant to address bugs.

(From the description. Went on that map today. That is still there. It is untouched. Zero cares were given.)

[jay35]

The General Discussions section looks nice. If "News" was not limited to "Journalistic articles" it might better serve its purpose of allowing fans a place to aggregate and discuss all the little bits and pieces of info that PGI employees like to spread far and wide on social and other media. Other than that, it's promising.

Edited by jay35, 26 April 2013 - 04:18 PM.

[jeffsw6]

CYBRN4CR, on 26 April 2013 - 04:50 PM, said:

But absolutely do NOT open up the floodgates again with a resurgence of a true grab-bag GD forum.

An open, General Discussion forum is needed. The fault with it is with the moderators, not posters. The reason there were 20 PPC QQ threads every day, and 20 LRM ones before that, and so on, is because the moderators are not effective. They don't merge threads or move them into a more appropriate sub-forum except when they've grown frustrated with particular posters or subjects, and then, they do it en-masse and create anger among posters.

That is stupid. It's why PGI probably needs more effective community staffers than the ones they've got. Moving or merging threads should be routine, and not seen as "suppressing discussion" by players; but the moderators' actions have created the current, negative atmosphere. It's upon them to use the tools at their disposal -- simple moving/merging threads -- to have a wider variety of discussion topics in General, and to encourage actual use of the sub-forums, instead of treating them as a dumping ground for unwanted opinions.

TL;DR: The fault lies with unprofessional moderators, not posters.