32 replies to this topic

[Roadbeer]

Wouldn't this be better next to Helmers "Dev Tracker" in the "In The News" sub-forum.

Or, you can both have your own Forum for it.

MOAR SUB-FORUMS, NOT LESS

[A Man In A Can]

Thanks for finally posting an official twitter tracking thread on the official forums! Please keep it updated often!

[Heffay]

Is this automated?

Also, maybe user comments should be consolidated in another thread, only having official posts in here? Keeps the signal to noise ratio down. We can call that the "Roadbeer Rule".

Edited by Nikolai Lubkiewicz, 08 April 2014 - 01:44 PM.
Not at the Moment. But this is a great idea. Please hold...

[Heffay]

Hellen Wheels, on 08 April 2014 - 01:54 PM, said:

More twits?

How unprofessional.

No thanks.

Not more. Just consolidating the existing information.

Twitter is used by all corporations these days. It's not *just* for posting nekkid pictures of yourself. That's just an added bonus.

I should get on Twitter some day. Seems like all the cool kids are doing it. Oh, and snapchat! I hear you get all kinds of interesting stuff that way!

[Sug]

Heffay, on 08 April 2014 - 02:07 PM, said:

Oh, and snapchat! I hear you get all kinds of interesting stuff that way!

Mainly dongs.

[Roadbeer]

Hellen Wheels, on 08 April 2014 - 01:54 PM, said:

More twits?

How unprofessional.

No thanks.

It's actually quite entertaining. The "Big 3" can generate just as much rage in 140 characters as they can in a whole Command Chair post.

It's amazing really.

[Heffay]

Sug, on 08 April 2014 - 02:10 PM, said:

Mainly dongs.

Awesome! I'm in!

Nikolai Lubkiewicz, on 08 April 2014 - 02:10 PM, said:

Hi Hellen!

The tracker is perfect for you then. You can keep up with info from the tweets without ever having to sign up. While we appreciate your concern that Twitter may be viewed as unprofessional, you can rest assured that many industry leaders in video games, software, technology and entertainment have their own Twitter accounts and use them on a regular basis for personal, professional and marketing purposes. We hope you don't mind if we continue to evolve and utilize the various forms of Social Media at our disposal to help us reach a wider audience and interact with players who might otherwise not regard forums as a preferable system of Community interaction. Thanks for your understanding.

That's a very pretty way of saying "Dude, times have changed, quit being such a Luddite."

[Davers]

Nikolai Lubkiewicz, on 08 April 2014 - 02:10 PM, said:

Hi Hellen!

The tracker is perfect for you then. You can keep up with info from the tweets without ever having to sign up. While we appreciate your concern that Twitter may be viewed as unprofessional, you can rest assured that many industry leaders in video games, software, technology and entertainment have their own Twitter accounts and use them on a regular basis for personal, professional and marketing purposes. We hope you don't mind if we continue to evolve and utilize the various forms of Social Media at our disposal to help us reach a wider audience and interact with players who might otherwise not regard forums as a preferable system of Community interaction. Thanks for your understanding.

It's cool that PGI is keeping up to date on the newest communication trends. There is a cutting edge technology, often referred to as VOIP. I hear all the kids use it when they play AAA video games. Maybe MW:O might want to check it out?

[Anders]

I think that this is a really great idea. Because complicated ideas, thoughts, and game play mechanics should be, in the interest of berevit

Edited by Anders, 08 April 2014 - 06:30 PM.

[Devlin Stone]

Whoa Niko, slow down. That is just way to much text for my fragile attention span. Here, let me re-tweet that for you.

Nikolai Lubkiewicz, on 08 April 2014 - 02:10 PM, said:

Hi Hellen! The tracker is perfect for you then. You can keep up with info from the tweets without ever having to sign up. While we appreciat

Oh. . . That's right, twitter is bad for expressing ideas more complicated or involved than "I'm hungry for tacos".
If only there was some sort of "forum" where Devs could go to discuss their plans or ideas in detail.

I do appreciate what you're trying to do Niko, but like most things that deal with those guys it's essentially a band-aid fix for an underlying problem.

Edited by Devlin Stone, 08 April 2014 - 06:47 PM.

[Anders]

y, be subject to a one hundred and forty character limit. I mean, how could one possibly be mis-understood, if they had a restrictive numbe

r of characters in which to get their point across?

Edited by Anders, 08 April 2014 - 06:31 PM.

[Roland]

Anders, let's get real. How many characters do you honestly think it takes to ignore complaints about gameplay, balance, and the lack of progress, and tell us about new mech sales?

GOLD MECHS is only 10 characters. You can say that 14 times dude.

[Heffay]

Roland, on 08 April 2014 - 07:55 PM, said:

Anders, let's get real. How many characters do you honestly think it takes to ignore complaints about gameplay, balance, and the lack of progress, and tell us about new mech sales?

Multiple channels are good. Taking advantage of a communication method that is used by far more people than the forums is good for the community.

You still have the dev tracker, vlogs, Facebook, command chair, and a community manager to help convey info that can't be effectively done by twitter.

[Joseph Mallan]

Nikolai Lubkiewicz, on 08 April 2014 - 01:46 PM, said:

Thank you for standing by.

This information is manually compiled by myself. It has been moved and pinned beside Helmer's Tracker.

This thread may now be regarded as a feedback thread for the Official Twitter Tracker, which remains locked to the public. May it live long and remain constructive.

Wouldn't it be easier if you just posted the news here first... in your official forum?

[TehSBGX]

Roadbeer, on 08 April 2014 - 02:13 PM, said:

It's actually quite entertaining. The "Big 3" can generate just as much rage in 140 characters as they can in a whole Command Chair post.

It's amazing really.

They're some kind of magical Sorcerors I tells ya!

[Heffay]

Joseph Mallan, on 09 April 2014 - 06:48 AM, said:

Wouldn't it be easier if you just posted the news here first... in your official forum?

Some news is posted here first. It depends on the context and where it can be most effectively released.

Unless you think they should announce each Twitter post prior to actually making the Tweet? That seems ineffective...

Only about 5% of the people who play the game ever even bother going to the forum. Using social tools that people use for multiple activities already pretty much guarantees you'll hit a larger portion of the population, in addition to finding new people to bring into the game.

[Roland]

Heffay, on 09 April 2014 - 09:07 AM, said:

Some news is posted here first. It depends on the context and where it can be most effectively released.

Unless you think they should announce each Twitter post prior to actually making the Tweet? That seems ineffective...

Neither Bryan nor Russ have posted anything, ANYTHING, on these forums since December of last year.

You'd think that they'd have some desire to communicate with their forum community at some point over a period of five months.

Heffay, on 09 April 2014 - 09:07 AM, said:

Only about 5% of the people who play the game ever even bother going to the forum. Using social tools that people use for multiple activities already pretty much guarantees you'll hit a larger portion of the population, in addition to finding new people to bring into the game.

1) I would love to know where you came up with the 5% number, since the I certainly seem to have more than 5% of the folks I've seen in game folks I recognize from the forum. But, since I'm sure you have a source for this data, I'm interested in knowing what it is.

2) You believe that only 5% of the playerbase participates in the forum, but that MORE people are following Russ and Bryan on twitter? That seems somewhat unlikely, doesn't it? Given that both bryan and russ only have around 2500 followers, and presumably those followers are likely the same 2500 people.

[Heffay]

Roland, on 09 April 2014 - 10:22 AM, said:

Neither Bryan nor Russ have posted anything, ANYTHING, on these forums since December of last year.

You'd think that they'd have some desire to communicate with their forum community at some point over a period of five months.


1) I would love to know where you came up with the 5% number, since the I certainly seem to have more than 5% of the folks I've seen in game folks I recognize from the forum. But, since I'm sure you have a source for this data, I'm interested in knowing what it is.

2) You believe that only 5% of the playerbase participates in the forum, but that MORE people are following Russ and Bryan on twitter? That seems somewhat unlikely, doesn't it? Given that both bryan and russ only have around 2500 followers, and presumably those followers are likely the same 2500 people.

They are industry standard numbers. The AoEO post mortem discussed how they had 10% of their player base using the forums, but that was because they had to as they weren't allowed to use player email addresses. And that the average for games was 2-5%, so that is where that number comes from.

And yes, the forum base is probably not as big as the Twitter base. I can't remember how many followers they have on Facebook, but I do recall it's pretty big. And they frequently post the Twitter stuff there too, so you can get the important stuff without following either Twitter or the forums.

This is why the polls people do in the forums are rather useless. You can say "nobody reads the forum" and be accurate within a statistically significant amount (i.e 3%). Everyone else is out there playing the game, and either having fun or moving on. And the player retention metrics that PGI has is the *only* thing that really matters to that. All the polls in the world here is limited to a very self-selected group of people.

Think of all the video games you've ever played. How many of them did you actively participate on their forums? For me its EQ, WoW, MWO and SC. Other than that, I never find myself on the game forums. If I need news on a game, I go to the wikia or reddit or some other source. And that is how it is for most games.

Twitter adds another vector for people to get info about MWO. And it covers not just people who play the game, but people who may just see it in passing, by being friends with someone following it. More vectors is good. If they weren't using Twitter at all, they'd be missing out on both existing players who don't come here, and also new players who happen to run across it.

[Roland]

Quote

They are industry standard numbers. The AoEO post mortem discussed how they had 10% of their player base using the forums, but that was because they had to as they weren't allowed to use player email addresses. And that the average for games was 2-5%, so that is where that number comes from.

I think that others have pointed out the error of thinking that "industry standard" numbers apply to all games. Certainly games in beta-test phase.

Beyond that, if indeed only 5% of the playerbase uses the forum, then MWO is pretty much turbofucked, since most of the game is ONLY explained via the forums. So that would mean that 95% of the playerbase doesn't really have any idea how most of the game works, or even a rudimentary grasp of core game mechanics.

Quote

This is why the polls people do in the forums are rather useless. You can say "nobody reads the forum" and be accurate within a statistically significant amount (i.e 3%). Everyone else is out there playing the game, and either having fun or moving on. And the player retention metrics that PGI has is the *only* thing that really matters to that. All the polls in the world here is limited to a very self-selected group of people.

Yep, you are certainly repeating what PGI apparently believes. Ignoring the forum as being not only a trivial percentage of the user base, but ALSO being somehow totally un-representative of the user base, makes total sense.

Oh wait, no it doesn't. It doesn't really make any sense at all. Because even if you were to believe that most of the players don't use the forums, there's absolutely no reason to believe that those other people believe the OPPOSITE of what the forum-users believe. Indeed, it would tend to make more sense that they had similar beliefs to the forum users, since they are playing the same game.

That's kind of how polls ALWAYS work. They are a small sampling of opinions, with the assumption that the results of that sample can be extrapolated to a wider population.

Quote

Twitter adds another vector for people to get info about MWO. And it covers not just people who play the game, but people who may just see it in passing, by being friends with someone following it. More vectors is good. If they weren't using Twitter at all, they'd be missing out on both existing players who don't come here, and also new players who happen to run across it.

The issue is not that they are using Twitter. Twitter's great.

The issue is that they haven't made a single post on their OWN forums for FOUR MONTHS. But go ahead and explain how that's a good thing. I am supremely confident in your ability to do so.

[Pyrrho]

Having multiple avenues of communication is a wonderful thing. However, if Twitter is an avenue off of the main road that is mwomercs.com, it alone seems to be the only street open to thru traffic. Hearing cynical rhetoric like "you think they should announce their tweets on the forums first?" seems to imply that Twitter is where the information is generated and then it gets disseminated to the forums by a third party moderator who just links back to Twitter. A better use of the tools provided could be to post stuff in detail, then link (via Twitter) to your thread. Not only do you provide news directly to your forum-base, you are also then getting people to visit the website for more information. Perhaps, even, someone who has only been following the development through Twitter will finally get to the site. Once anyone is on the site, maybe they decide to buy MC. Maybe they haven't yet downloaded the client and, now that they are here, the big download button will entice them.

Edited by Pyrrho, 09 April 2014 - 01:04 PM.