44 replies to this topic

[Revorn]

Great Move Russ,

i realy like your Idea. It may be usefully, to do some organizing for the Forum, to give the Players and the Programmers in Charge for this Topic, some exclusive Room to disucuss this Topic.

Btw, iam sure you could find plenty of intrested Comunitymembers, for doing some Help, to get some Lore Pages up as well. That Way, your Companys Customers dont need to go to 3rd Party Websites to get Informations about the Lore.

A Section for Modeldesigners and maybe one for Mapcreators could be usefully as well. Iam sure the Comunity is more then exited about the Idea, to help at the Creation of some Parts of the Game.


Section for ECM
Section for Lore
Section for Map
Section for Mechdesign
Section for Forumstructure
Section for Weaponmodulbalancing
Section for Unitbasecreation
Section for Unitdecals
Section for Spacetravel,

ect, ect. PPL are surly like to help with all this Stuff and much more. Have Fun and well done.

Edited by Revorn, 12 September 2014 - 07:24 PM.

[Tombstoner]

Now no one can say you dont. EVE was very sucessfull reaching out to the player base and forming a player councle. throught there efforts i beleave the super carriers where redesigned. This is exactyl what the player base has been asking for a very long time.

I would like to point out that the x-prizes projects are now being copied by DARPA with great sucess. It will be interesting to see what bunch of extreamly diverse and equaly pationet players come up with.

[Wolfways]

King of the Woad, on 12 September 2014 - 05:56 PM, said:

I like ECM. I like limitations. The heat limitation took TT from being "just another tt game" to something worthwhile and enjoyable. If ECM is removed, there will be no point to playing anything but LRM and may the most tubes win.

Proving my point.

[Mudhutwarrior]

No offense but this is an exercise in futility Russ. You want the community to dance around and raise a totem just so you will look at the issue. I don't buy it.

If its an issue and the community has posted on it a lot it should be looked at.

I wrote support asking for clarification of the synch drop rule and they asked me to post it here. I did that and it went forty pages with admissions from players and groups that it was being done in solo. Multiple times many asked for clarification.

Not a peep.

Sorry, Don't trust you anymore after everything and certainly not going to dance for you. Will just keep my wallet shut instead until I actually see some involvement from your side.

[Sjorpha]

Wonderful initiative.

However, be aware that the responsibility to stay continually updated, involved and responsive, and deliver the requested product to your customer base rests soundly on PGI whether the community can meet your request or not. Now hopefully it can to some degree, and that's awesome!

As a professional producing a product, you should never ever officially try to shift blame or responsibility for any problems whatsoever away from yourself. Even IF, and this is important, even if it actually IS someone elses fault. The only exception is actual threats, lawsuits etc, but even those should be limited strictly to the involved parties. I see far too many business representatives failing on this basic PR principle.

I don't think you're trying to do that, your initiative is great. I'm just saying this as a warning that a failure to meet your request should/can not be used as an excuse to not adress problems or listen less to feedback.

[Sarlic]

Russ Bullock, on 12 September 2014 - 11:03 AM, said:

Read this thread for the answer.

http://mwomercs.com/...ue/page__st__20

Let's see if both PGI and the community can deliver on something like this.

Your doing it much better. Communication is getting better, and let the idea's flow. Your getting closer regaining my trust, Bullock. It's rough, but keep it up.

Only need a better dev tracker.

[Asmudius Heng]

To those that say this is a smokescreen.

I think that if the right people are in this players council and this is pretty transparent Russ is going to shoot himself in the foot if good recommendations are not implemented.

The people being mentioned over and over are not PGI yes men but critical thinkers with long lists of great posts and many years of experience in mechwarrior games.

If it is a 'trick' it would be pretty silly of him to pull because if they try and use it against us it will backfire spectacularly ... I just cannot see PGI being that poor at PR and community management despite the many slips ups they have already made.

PGI is well aware they are in redemption mode, for me the worry is more can they keep this level of engagement up long term.

[kapusta11]

When PGI were asking about what's better to desync Gauss and PPC via projectile speed or procedurally most where saying that both options kinda suck and do not address the issue itself yet from two they would choose the latter one, guess what PGI did? Right, picked the former one. I don't believe this "PGI listens" crap anymore, sorry. There is nothing to "fix" with ECM, and once community fails to fix something that isn't broken PGI will say "Hey, you're not capable of solving things".

[Kiiyor]

Russ Bullock, on 12 September 2014 - 11:03 AM, said:

Read this thread for the answer.

http://mwomercs.com/...ue/page__st__20

Let's see if both PGI and the community can deliver on something like this.

If this sort of thing is going to become the norm, then I propose this:


I understand this will likely be more work for an already overworked team, but if you are serious about player feedback in the future, this could be a useful tool for measuring majority opinion, and strengthening the impression that you value player opinion.

[Napoleon_Blownapart]

i watched a recent devlog cast talking about maps and changing current maps to make them different and they mentioned a player suggested 'flooded canyon' which i believe was my idea so someone has to be reading the boards.

[xThrottle Geek]

Russ (and PGI)

However, in order to facilitate this PLAYER COUNCIL there needs to be a dedicated area in the forums for the community to get organized. I propose that it get its own FORUM area in the Developer's Corner Forum or perhaps even its own entire section. This way ALL DISCUSSION can take place in an organized and easily found area. We need ORGANIZATION for this to succeed not just a crazy assortment of posts spread all over the place.

What say you?

Edited by xThrottle Geek, 13 September 2014 - 06:26 AM.

[Lucky Noob]

@ Paul,

Thats the Way, Lead your Company, and dont do all the work for yourself, just imagine how much Manpower the comunity has, With you at lead and the Power of the comunity, MWO can be the best game ever, and damm it coud make more Money than you can imagine, never forget all the Founders who are still lurking , no Matter what happend, you have the most lojal Fanbase iof all Games.

And they not Kinddies, they all grown Persons with lotta Money willing to spend
And many of them are for sure very professional Computer something,

If SOE can let the Comunity Build the World of EQ next by Landmark, i am sure you find something for your Comunity , like you have now shown.

Lets do this, Keep the lead, and we do some of your Homework.

[Elyam]

Oh good grief, so this is what it's come to. I understand what you're trying to do PGI, but this isn't the way to lead. And you know it. This is just about attempted spin control at a time when things are rotating pretty hard post-Trans|verse reveal. What you've proposed openly is not in any real way different from how you've dealt with player opinion all along. You're just making it perhaps a bit more transparent. Players may not believe it, but it's always been there. Now you're in a nose dive in addition to a wild roll.

Edited by Elyam, 13 September 2014 - 06:50 AM.

[Mawai]

Russ Bullock, on 12 September 2014 - 11:48 AM, said:

thanks for noticing

Unfortunately, the only folks who notice are those who actively follow twitter rather than the PGI forums (or in addition to the forums) ... though if they are on twitter should they follow Russ, Bryan, Paul, MWO, MechwarriorOnline, NGNG or some other twitter hashtag where some 140 character piece of useful information might come out?.

Twitter is limited to 140 characters (1120 bits of data) at a time. It is an easy medium for fast, short communications often with limited content to a potentially limited audience.

On the other hand, the PGI forums are structured, searchable, and will contain the content posted by any member of PGI for as long a time as you want it to. Posts can be as long or short as desired and can be organized as discussions on specific topics with participation by a large number of individuals.

There was an initiative by Niko to post all the tweets by PGI folks into a forum topic ... the effort eventually fell by the wayside and wasn't updated so I stopped looking there.

Some folks have had great success engaging folks at PGI on twitter or other social media.

If you want your primary channel of communications to your players to be facebook, twitter or some other outlet ... then shut your forums down and use the primary channel exclusively. On the other hand, if your forums are worthwhile ... you should be the first using them and making sure that the response to feedback and interactions with your player base are posted here.

By the way ... what are the numbers? How many folks read the forums and post here? How many read twitter or the other social media you use to disseminate information?

Anyway, the bottom line is that if you want the players to notice communications ... you need to put it where they will see it and not have to go looking for it all over the internet to find it.

[darkkterror]

The real question here is: Is the community actually capable of coming up with something they can all (or at least 80% of them) agree on?

[Mawai]

One more point to consider ...

The folks on the forum are one part of the player base and I generally trust them to come up with a fun to play alternative design. However, only you know what fraction of the player base this represents.

When you suggest a poll ... will it be based only on the forums or are you planning on implementing an feature to survery active players ... or using something like survey monkey to access all registered users?

I consider the idea of a suggested redesign and a poll to be an excellent idea ... but it doesn't seem to have been fully thought out.

[kapusta11]

darkkterror, on 13 September 2014 - 06:56 AM, said:

The real question here is: Is the community actually capable of coming up with something they can all (or at least 80% of them) agree on?

Of couse not, 80% don't know what they want.

[F4T 4L]

Great move Russ.. I hereby rescind my angry promise not to invest further in the game

Come on tho.. time to do the right thing and reverse some of those bans. Right?

[Gimpbytr]

Russ
Definition of forum:
a meeting at which a subject can be discussed:
a place or opportunity for discussing a subject:
a public meeting or lecture involving audience discussion:

Examples of a Forum:
Forums were held to determine how to handle the situation.

Related to Forum/synonyms:
colloquy, conference, council, panel, panel discussion, parley, powwow, round-robin, roundtable, seminar, symposium

What I am pointing out is the Forums were/are your council. They would go without responses until a huge blowup would occur.

When I beta tested this game, there was never any emails sent with a survey- as other beta games I tested have sent numerous surveys to see what works, bugs encountered, and features that would like to be seen.

This really has the feeling of damage control more than true concern for the community.

I do hope that this franchise can succeed,for I have seen many of my sentiments posted by others over the years warning of the iceberg heading towards Mechwarrior Online, but the captain going full steam ahead.

Thank you and wishing PGI success in developing MWO.

[M0rpHeu5]

Better late than never, I hope this continues.