Official forums - Yea or Nay?

[Nybling]

I'm interested in seeing some opinions regarding fansites.

Should companies go the SOE/Blizzard route and host their own forums with their own Community teams, or should companies trod down the path that Sigil originally took and that Mythic is taking with WAR, which is to let fansites do all the forum work and moderation?

While I can understand and appreciate the option Mythic is taking and that Sigil attempted to take, I think the SOE/Blizzard route is much, much better. Some may argue that the cost of hiring some community staff to placate the masses on a forum are unnecessary, but I think that these official forums serve several purposes:

- These forums provide a place consolidated discussion. Instead of people having to check 5 or 6 fansites (which was the case for Vanguard it seemed), people can check one place for news, information and also for varying discussions.

- It helps tone down the marketing of goldfarmers. Yeah, I would question this point, but how many fansites have you been too with stupid AdSense ads that spam some goldselling websites? Yep, I've been to a few. Frankly, there are numerous smaller sites that have ads strewn about along with donation programs, and then later down the line they get bought out by some goldfarming company (Wowhead, Allakhazam, etc...).

Like I said, I'd rather see a company-hosted site than focus squarely on fansites and this being said I have a small one a few friends and I are working on for Warhammer Online since the other major ones are all ran by sellouts, it seems. :/ I guess it's just a travesty to see that the fan in fansite really just provides a way for entreprenuers to craft a pump & dump business. Pump up a community, sell it off to another one (Warhammer Alliance being sold to Curse.com for example).

[oneplusone]

I personally liked the route Sigil took in that they didn't have their own forums, but they failed at giving people an alternative. There should have been links on the front page to the forums they support so people have a place to go to. They also need to summarize the latest news on their front page so people don't have to check community sites.

Now, I can see official forums working if they made some severe restrictions on it. Something to the extent that only max level players can post in the raiding forums, to post on server specific forum you mush have a character over level 50% of max on that server, only 2 posts per day in the general discussion forum, total of 5 posts across all forums per day, people who posts rants with no constructive criticism gets muted for 30 days, etc. Pretty much the moderation has to be very harsh.

[Chad SExington]

It depends on the scale of the game. One game recently that has gone without forums is Tabula Rasa, and while I initially thought it was a terrible idea, their community team has done a pretty good job at highlighting the goings-on in their fansite communities. In this way they're sort of a central hub for the greater community without actually having to host anything themselves. Then again, Tabula Rasa also doesn't have the largest community I've ever seen in the world.

I think WAR going without official forums is definitely a mistake. For a supposed WoW-killer to go without some sort of centralized community to concentrate player feedback seems like a folly to me. If it's seen as a cost-cutting measure, this would make me particularly displeased, considering they've openly talked about charging more than $15/mo for their service. They must be pretty confident in their product if they think they can offer less services than the industry leader and still charge a higher price for it.

[Teljair]

I think they should let the community build the forums, they can worry about the game.

[Blackguard]

My current opinion, which is ever-shifting, is "yes." Companies should have relatively limited official forums, while fansites should have all the rest. That is to say, companies should basically just have forums for things like:

- Test Server: Test server players only.
- Developer Roundtable: Devs can post topics, players can respond.
- New Players: Only players who are in their first 30 days or are Trial users can post topics, others can answer.
- Major Game Components: One forum for each major game component, like Combat, Crafting, etc.
- Links: Prominent links to approved fansite forums.

Essentially, official forums should be for new players and communicating the major "stuff" related to the game. It can help set the foundation for a great community, but the community should be developed more by fansites than the company itself (though the company needs to facilitate these fansites and the community in any way possible).

Fansites should run...

- Server Communities: A forum for each server has to be out there, so provide some incentive for fansites to run one. I'd probably endorse one site per class (more if there's more than one good site) with a link, posting there, etc.).
- Class Communities: Remeber EQ Diva, EQ Bards, Forest Stalker, etc? They are becoming more and more rare. Same thing as server communities. Give those fansites some incentive to exist, and endorse one site per class (more if there's more than one good site) with a link, posting there, etc.).
- Off-Topic Discussion: Let players bond off-topic on fansites.
- Fan Art, Stories, Etc.: All of this stuff rocks for the community, so you better promote the hell out of it by featuring great stories/art/etc. in your news, but you don't need it on official forums.

For international forums, I'm still unsure. Places like Jeux Online are wonderful for French forums and such, but you should probably have at least one forum per language (probably more like 3: New Players, Developer Roundtable, Gameplay).

[Nybling]

Blackguard, you made some really good points, and I'd like to respond to your post before responding to a few points from the other responders.

- Test Server: Test server players only.
- Developer Roundtable: Devs can post topics, players can respond.
- New Players: Only players who are in their first 30 days or are Trial users can post topics, others can answer.
- Major Game Components: One forum for each major game component, like Combat, Crafting, etc.

I agree. Things like the Test Server are important enough to warrant a special forum. I was disappointed at Sigil for doling out their Test Server forum to a fansite. I feel this is irresponsible as something like the Test Server should be focused on feedback, and on an official forum, people are going to feel like their comments are being listened to and not like "Gee, I hope they are reading this site today!"

Yeah, New players should feel welcome into a community and be able to ask questions. I like the newbie forums EQ2 has up.

- Links: Prominent links to approved fansite forums.

Approved Fansites based on what kind of criteria is the real question. I for one would like to see companies demand that a fansite have zero gold-farming ads on there to be approved for any kind of program like this.

@ Teljair:

I don't quite understand people when they say something like that. It's false logic. Blizzard has developers that focus on the game and has a community staff that focuses on community. Is that taking away from their "focus on the game"? No. Besides, having some level of interaction from the developers to the community helps build the game just as much as anything else. It's part of providing 'good customer service', IMO.

@ Chad:

I somewhat agree with you re: Warhammer Online. It also seems that for a while Mythic concentrated on one fansite and one fansite only (WHA), but the new community guy over there is tossing stuff to WAR-RvR and such now so that should help things a little bit.

Yeah, their comments about price increases worry me. :/

[jason]

Blackguard's list is a good one, except that its missing Tech Support. Every company, at a minimum needs to maintain a tech support forum to answer the "I bought a new Nvidia 9750000 card and your game doesn't work!!!!!111" problems. This forum should be heavily moderated, and discussions should be routinely pruned into FAQs and mirrored in a knowledge base... I would say just to have a knowledge base, but sometimes, quite frankly, the game company doesn't know how to solve a problem, and the community will solve it first.

[Blackguard]

Yeah, I'm in favor of Tech Support and Customer Service forums, but would generally leave those up to the people in charge of those services to decide they are needed. Meaning, on the development side, I wouldn't throw those forums up without discussing it with the Tech/CS leads and making sure they pay close attention to them, because community folks and developers won't (and generally shouldn't) pay attention to them.

[Draegan]

If your game is successful, then a large chunk of your player base is casual. The casual player doesn't read forums and have an active out of game internet life. You need a central location for the players or they begin to feel disconnected. You can also control the quality of information presented to the community.

General Forum
Tech Problem
Gameplay Problem

Everything else is just gravy.

[Nybling]

If your game is successful, then a large chunk of your player base is casual. The casual player doesn't read forums and have an active out of game internet life. You need a central location for the players or they begin to feel disconnected. You can also control the quality of information presented to the community.

General Forum
Tech Problem
Gameplay Problem

Everything else is just gravy.

Draegan's point is a good point, and a huge reason why I think Mythic is kind of shooting themselves in the foot on this. A lot of people are going to want to have a centralized location to get generic information, and best place is your own website.

Not to mention that Customer Service is something I think is overlooked by a lot of MMOG companies. Sadly, I think there are a lot of people that look at players as being whiny and unworthy of their time instead of what they truly are: paying customers.

I am of the mind that a solid CS team really, really helps the perception of your game/company.

[jason]

I also think that at this point, any company that doesn't use some sort of RSS news/blog/etc feed for official announcements, like patch notes, expansions, response to large issues, etc, they are missing out. If you put something up that allows people to subscribe to your news, you make it much easier for your news to get out.

[Nybling]

Well, the front page of your site should provide information on new patches, etc... not having something like that in this day and age would be rather bad... almost unprofessional even.

[Snafzg]

I have to agree with Ryan here...

Official forums should manage only support, testing, and newbie questions.

Fan forums can talk about anything else.

The WoW forums were the most spammy, fast-pased boards I have ever participated in, and as such, I didn't participate for long. Have you ever tried having a genuine discussion on those boards? Any interesting topic would ramp up to 100 comments within minutes of being posted. It was so fast that you couldn't even keep up with conversation. If you wanted to respond to someone in particular, your comment would end up ten pages after it.

If your topic didn't fit the popular criteria defined by the board trolls, it would immediately get pushed two to three pages down (by the 10 thread per minute posting frequency), not even giving you it a chance to reach potential readers.

Granted, these problems mainly occurred because of the number of people playing WoW, which will likely never be reached by another game in the history of MMO gaming, but they still sucked arse. Moderation was a nightmare and so was the actual dev involvement.

I would much rather read multiple fan sites with a slower spam frequency because at least that way, I won't be missing out on interesting conversation.

[Draegan]

Granted, these problems mainly occurred because of the number of people playing WoW, which will likely never be reached by another game in the history of MMO gaming, but they still sucked arse.

Never say never. Because I remember people preaching this a long time ago about other games. How many gamers do you think there are in the EU/NA area? Because right now, WOW only has ~5mil of them.

[Shaz]

I'm with the 'yea' crowd.

Certainly limit the forums if need be, but at the bare minimum as posted above- newbie, support, testing.

Lack of forums has always bothered me about DAoC, even though the Herald was updated regularly. I remember having a tech problem years ago, and I had no place to post, no-one to ask questions of, and no resolution for my problem. It really turned me off of a game I greatly enjoyed, that when I had questions, I had no place to ask them.

I also have to admit I follow the dev posts on game forums not only for games I'm currently playing, but also games I've played but may not be playing at the moment. I realize it's just a mental thing, but seeing devs answering questions or just simply posting and responding quite simply gives me a better feeling about that game, makes me more interested, and often draws me back to games I quit playing for some reason or another.

I realize that game forums can become a royal PITA for those in charge of controlling such a madhouse what with the trolling and ego stroking that can go in, but that's not ALL that goes on in the forums. Not having any official forums at all distances you from and closes you off from your community, and I consider that a bad thing.