314 replies to this topic

[Yokaiko]

Bishop Steiner, on 27 April 2013 - 01:02 PM, said:

two sides to every coin. We, the population need to voice our objection maturely (not the forum rage nonsense, nor the "PGI ATE MY BABY" garbage certain self appointed community police are so fond of pandering), and IGP/PGI and their "minions" need to learn how to handle constructive criticism while they still HAVE a customer base.

For prosperity

[Jacob Dieffenbach]

I don't know many people who are saying that there aren't two sides to the coin.

Everyone knows that this community is filled with barely contained boiling rage.

And anyone who's interacted with the tech support staff, or read one of the 'this thread is locked' messages from the moderators, knows that the website staff is extremely snide and sarcastic.

I think both* stem from the same problem, however: concern over getting voices heard.

When I post a thread on this forum, if it's quiet and polite, it gets washed away by the boiling rage. Meanwhile, the developers themselves have made it clear that they only listen to the boiling rage. Like, they listen to trends of threads popping up, not individual threads. Individual well-written voices are ignored in favor of what the masses think. I'm not saying that's what's true, just what they've made clear is true.

Meanwhile, the moderation staff has received a different message: that everything must be condensed and organized, that the hate must be cleaned up and the quiet, polite voices given room to shine in order for the proper messages to get to the developers. That there must not be huge waves (trends) of threads, that they must be organized.

So, everyone is doing their best to have their voices heard. The community is told one message about how to best make their voices heard (yelling and spamming), the moderators are given another message about how to best make player voices heard (organizing into subforums and deleting threads that are duplicates/add nothing new). But, in a great irony, these two objectives clash against each other, intensifying the amount of anger on both sides, and each side redoubles their efforts.

So in the end, I think two things are needed: first, PGI needs to come up with a better system for organizing ideas, and make it clear that this is the way to get ideas to them. There needs to be words from on high that say "Sorry, the 'trends' remark was a little unfocused. We listen to ideas that are presented to us by our moderators, and our moderators present well-worded, polite things to us that are placed in the proper forum." This should also be accompanied by the moderators redoubling their efforts to provide feedback to the community that their ideas are being heard. As in, if there's a 40 page forum thread on ways to improve ECM, the moderators should say "I'm actively compiling these ideas (the ones that are well-worded and polite) into a document to present to the development team right now". Or maybe it's not the mods job to do that, and someone at PGI should say that.

The point is, that tiny little forum post would stop people from posting page after page of ECM threads, it would calm us down because we would know our voices are being heard, and it would send the message that organized, controlled ideas are the best way to talk to PGI.

The second idea?

Return the General Discussion forum.

*except the tech support staff, they're just jerks as far as I can tell.

[Delas Ting Usee]

To whomever is in charge of making decisions at PGI,

First there was the modules.
Then you have all these little patch mishaps i.e. missing hud, FPS issues etc. that seem to occur with every patch.
But hey, it's 'Beta' we get that.
Still, with the past three patches, confidence is at an all time low.
And then you did the forum change.
Talk about blunders.
There's facebook, twitter and blogs we can air our unhappiness on if there's no 'General Discussion'.
I've done so on facebook already.
I understand if you wanna reorg the forums to get proper feedback, but 'GD' was for us, the community.
Talk to a collegue/friend with some PR experience, PLEASE! They'll advise you to bring the GD back as it was. You'll get so much goodwill with such a small act - it's win win in the long run.
Don't screwed the pooch on this one, PGI.

Edited by Delas Ting Usee, 27 April 2013 - 07:55 PM.

[Xoxim SC]

I personally can't stand this new forum setup, there are far too many subsections.

[Mechwarrior Buddah]

superbob, on 27 April 2013 - 12:11 AM, said:

I liked the GD forum for how random and general it was, so I could visit there and roughly see the state of the community at the time... Or rather the state of the QQ.

Kind of think thats exactly what they DONT want new players to be able to see easily

superbob, on 27 April 2013 - 12:37 AM, said:

To re-iterate, GD was fun because of all the drama and hot topics, but these pretty much drowned out all the less popular discussion threads. The problem is some folks still tried posting genuine feedback in GD, which got instantly buried, and the sad and angry mods still had to dig through the stuff despite it not being discussed much.

As sad as it sounds, many forum users are too dumb to read past the front page, so mods are trying to split the forums so there can be more "front pages" where less popular threads can hang out. (honestly I don't think it will work that well)

SOOOOOO.... make a "general" discussion subforum, and keep all the other subforums. That way we HAVE a place to go chat AND all these neat little subforums as well.

[Mechwarrior Buddah]

RedDragon, on 27 April 2013 - 01:04 AM, said:

I agree to some degree with this, but I wouldn't blame it on the moderators. I guess it's the policy under which they act that made GD so a messed up place. Apart from some bannings because people really stepped out of line, there were absolutely no consequences for acting like a douche on GD. There were so many people who posted one idiotic topic after the other and in the best case they only got deleted or moved to offtopic. Or people only posting memes or other unqualified bullsh*t as responses. No one had to fear any consequences for polluting GD (or any other forum for that matter).
We even had an announcement from one of the staff-members that they now would be more rigid in enforcing the rules, but nothing ever happened. After all it's nearly always the same guys who spam all the threads and create useless topics.

Which to be honest is THEIR fault for not following up on their own posted rules

Inertiamon, on 27 April 2013 - 01:09 AM, said:

IF we are to remain in Over-Nested Unusuable Forum Hell could someone at least turn on some more usefull forum tools, subbed threads view, new threads view etc

*cough*search*cough*

Purplefluffybunny, on 27 April 2013 - 01:44 AM, said:

I praise the fact that a poll has appeared on this issue. It is beyond me why you guys do not ask our opinions before making changes. This is not the first time. For example just consider the unilateral changes to the TS3 servers, made without consultation. I hope this lesson has been learnt and that you consult us first before making changes like this.

I would like to state now that it is disingenuous to title a set of sub-forums as 'general discussion' because what follows under that category is anything but 'general'. We still don't have a general discussion area?

Because the forum population is so small compared to the silent majority, we're not worth listening to. Like they said in the 3rd person thread

[Mechwarrior Buddah]

Bishop Steiner, on 27 April 2013 - 04:02 AM, said:

It may be "bad" from the traditional "customer service" standpoint (aka, no matter what, one is not supposed to stoop to the customer's level),

Yeah we never saw mods trolling back lol

[Mechwarrior Buddah]

Bishop Steiner, on 27 April 2013 - 01:02 PM, said:

two sides to every coin. We, the population need to voice our objection maturely (not the forum rage nonsense, nor the "PGI ATE MY BABY" garbage certain self appointed community police are so fond of pandering), and IGP/PGI and their "minions" need to learn how to handle constructive criticism while they still HAVE a customer base.

This

[jozkhan]

As someone pointed out yesterday:

If the MWO admin has a sig claiming to be 'Luddite Liaison' then that shows a level of contempt for the forum users that I have never seen anywhere else (contempt can also be seen literally dripping from various posts and communicationsand this admin will have fostered this toxic attitude among the volunteer mods and other staff. There can be NO CONFIDENCE in the admin resolving this issue and someone from higher up in the executive management structure needs to come to the forums and make a statement about this.

Cleaning the forums before launch? Clean house first

[Mechwarrior Buddah]

jozkhan, on 28 April 2013 - 03:30 AM, said:

As someone pointed out yesterday:

If the MWO admin has a sig claiming to be 'Luddite Liaison' then that shows a level of contempt for the forum users that I have never seen anywhere else (contempt can also be seen literally dripping from various posts and communicationsand this admin will have fostered this toxic attitude among the volunteer mods and other staff. There can be NO CONFIDENCE in the admin resolving this issue and someone from higher up in the executive management structure needs to come to the forums and make a statement about this.

Cleaning the forums before launch? Clean house first

Yeah, when they show us contempt, it CANT be that huge a surprise when that attitude is then reflected back at them

[Bishop Steiner]

Mechwarrior Buddah, on 28 April 2013 - 04:12 AM, said:

Yeah, when they show us contempt, it CANT be that huge a surprise when that attitude is then reflected back at them

Power Corrupts. And Absolute Power is actually kind of neat.

Seems to sum up the view of some of the Mods.

[Inkarnus]

dude i like the way atleast its going, general discuss was becoming a spam fest
you couldnt hold your thread up if it wasnt we hate pgi thread or what u made sux
the first thing i care is that devs get input
but what i didnt like is there 2 server concept and closed forum stuff
i see rarly posting devs in open part and if it is its mostly something
trivial already said
the problem is the open forum part feels it gets alot of
ignorance and treatment as if it we are thin air and just an annoyiance
and sure ppl will be angry about it by leaving a more angry
comment about something else in the open forum
and the fact an elite has access to closed parts of forum and servers
is actually the downfall of many games in the past and present

[Kaijin]

Bishop Steiner, on 27 April 2013 - 01:02 PM, said:

We, the population need to voice our objection maturely (not the forum rage nonsense, nor the "PGI ATE MY BABY" garbage certain self appointed community police are so fond of pandering), and IGP/PGI and their "minions" need to learn how to handle constructive criticism while they still HAVE a customer base.

The second part has to happen before the first will, and the second part isn't going to happen. I made an attempt, back around the start of the year. Citing my past years of experience as MPBT OWL, a volunteer Community Manager and GM for Kesmai's MPBT: Solaris, I pointed out several problems and possible solutions with the MWO Forums and their management in an e-mail I sent to 'Support'. It got kicked upstairs to the PIG Community Manager bossman, who eventually responded 2 weeks later. Forum rules prohibit me from even paraphrasing the content of his reply. My signature line speaks volumes.

Edited by Kaijin, 28 April 2013 - 07:49 AM.

[Mechwarrior Buddah]

Inkarnus, on 28 April 2013 - 04:34 AM, said:

is actually the downfall of many games in the past and present

Really? Which ones failed MAINLY because they had a general Discussion forum?

[Inkarnus]

iam speakin

Mechwarrior Buddah, on 28 April 2013 - 08:59 AM, said:

Really? Which ones failed MAINLY because they had a general Discussion forum?

wrong u dont see what i meant.
like relic and there balancing in the first versions of DOW2 it was hillarious
how ppl defended there glaring imbalanced stuff were they put devs
and some so called elite players or somehow attached players to the game
on 1 table to discuss balance

[Mechwarrior Buddah]

Inkarnus, on 28 April 2013 - 09:04 AM, said:

wrong u dont see what i meant.

No, I do; you suppositioned that there are many games out there that mainly failed because they had open conversation allowed on their forums. Dont backtrack, back up your position.
Unless you were pulling it out of your ***

Edited by Mechwarrior Buddah, 28 April 2013 - 09:09 AM.

[Vassago Rain]

Mechwarrior Buddah, on 28 April 2013 - 09:09 AM, said:

No, I do; you suppositioned that there are many games out there that mainly failed because they had open conversation allowed on their forums. Dont backtrack, back up your position.
Unless you were pulling it out of your ***

Even War Z kept one. The maker of BIG RIGS is a more reasonable person than PGI.

[Zerberus]

Mechwarrior Buddah, on 26 April 2013 - 11:17 PM, said:

Even this guy sees the problem lol
Guess there should be a rotational mod system then. You stay in for so long, but when you start getting worn down and start acting unprofessional, theyre replaced with fresh guys who arent apt to act that way.

In essence not a bad idea.

In reality, I find it hard to believe they already have so many people that actually volunteered for the positions. I believe they were either mislead by a community that feigned peacefulness, or they are just ******* insane (in which case I love them).

I wouldn`t mod this forum for any amout PGI could pay, hell even just being marked as a Translator would probable get nothing but unwarranted flameage, so what motivation is there to do anything for this community? regardless of what you post you`re always "biased", "walking the company line", "shilling", or "oppressively squashing dissent". A mod could probably post a photo of his dog in OT and get flamed for it.

As such, I`m surprised that the mods even make the effort to show themselves and offer this group of neanderthals the target area. Sitting in the shadows moving, deleting and banning without explanation (which they`re regularly accused of doing even when they explain themselves) is EXACTLY the type of treatment this respectless horde has earned IMO. If you`re going to take flak regardless of what you do and when you do it, explanations are irrelevant and really just a waste of the mods time.

Edited by Zerberus, 28 April 2013 - 10:11 AM.

[Purplefluffybunny]

Zerberus, on 28 April 2013 - 10:05 AM, said:

[...]
In reality, I find it hard to believe they already have so many people that actually volunteered for the positions. I believe they were either mislead by a community that feigned peacefulness, or they are just ******* insane (in which case I love them).
[...]

I volunteered.

[Chavette]

I'd like to see the hard numbers in changes of posts and views since this super smart forum change, although alexa does help a bit imagining what its like... time people spend on the site seems to be taking a small hit.




Still, reasoning by logic/statistics with these guys is like teaching an ox to tango...

And then its still the god-sent attitude at best, "the problem isn't what you think it is" I'm pretty sure the problems are the same ones as 6months ago, same bugs, same 1/3 weapons in game are pea shooters, same...

Edited by Chavette, 28 April 2013 - 10:30 AM.