plaguelands.comConfederacy of Forum Asshats
I read far too many forums, well I don’t technically always read them, the drudgery, which most official mmorpg forums seem to be brimming with page after page. I’ve honed my skill in skimming threads and blaze through most of this drudgery before my eyes start burning out of my skull. On occasion I do admire the camaraderie between the inept mongrels as if I were watching retarded monkeys eat each others poop and then rub it in each other’s faces.
Not all forums are completely horrible, but I do believe official mmorpg forums as medium for player to developer communication is frustrating for the developers trying to convey a message. Even some of the informative developer posts will go unnoticed and or ignored if the thread isn’t stickified and quickly starts tumbling towards the next page, there’s always the dev trackers, but the best place to put the important news for the masses is of course the patch launcher. I think developers free time is better spent on nerfing, I mean fixing the game, expanding their knowledge as a scholar, playing their own game as well as others and most importantly baking pop tarts. That’s not too say I think game developers should ignore their forums all together, I’m a huge proponent of developers posting on outside forums and their own, but not too much.
Most forum software has had the same basic functionality for years, web concepts have been advancing, but the only noticeable advancement I’ve noticed in forum software is under-the-hood optimization and very little customization on the non-officiator’s end… Since we can’t change the confederacy of forum asshats, nor should we eliminate their power of expression, if I were a developer I would rather have them bitching on the forums than in the game and most importantly what we know as forums need to evolve.
Jeff Freeman:
“So you’re better off not having official forums, relying instead on a blog-type news site with heavily moderated comments.
The “heavily moderated comments” part is important. You don’t want players to dilute the news feed with comments that aren’t useful for other players to read. Of course, you read all the comments, but only green-light the ones that would be good for players to read as well.
That wouldn’t be many green-lit comments; but that’s fine. Players are reading that for information, not for the opinions of their fellow players. For example if you post “We’re aware of problems with such-n-such drivers and we’re working on it” then you might want to green-light a “Here’s a work-around”-sort of comment. And not a “Why are you guys so stupid?”-comment.
To get the “pulse of the community” you send your community-dudes out to find the players own personal sites: the online communities that form when there are no official forums. They police themselves, moderate their own members, and generally remain a lot more positive than official forums ever do. Generally.
‘Reward and encourage the good ones with link-recognition from the official site.”
I essentially agree, another solution needs to be presented, but my proposal would focus around derivatives of social networking concepts used on spaces like digg rather than a strict dictation by a specific persona or a community management team, although I wouldn’t oust the community management team either.
About this entry
You’re currently reading “Confederacy of Forum Asshats,” an entry on Plaguelands
- Published:
- 03.30.06 / 11pm
- Category:
- Game Developer, Jeff Freeman, MMOG Forums
Ah HA! Blizzard forums are the worst. If only Blizzard would delete all the “first” and “second1!1!” posts. Heck, even give these foozles a one to three day ban for being “asshats”. Overkill? Maybe. Worth getting the forum clear of trollers? Most defiantly.
KK
Translation:
“gods forbid there would be actually be people telling me exactly what they think about quality of my design. Please, provide me only with opinions of these who like my game enough to create and maintain 3rd party forums for it, _and_ pre-trimmed from the negatives on top of that, to boot.
No, we don’t want _feedback_ on our product. We want carefully selected praises to confirm that our design abilites are unmatched, to be delivered to service door of our ivory tower. We will offer warm words of encouragement to those who we find excel at this task, and maybe even some occasional pearls of our wisdom in private blog. (that you better not comment upon, and if you will we are going to screen these comments) Other than that you can worship us. From afar.”
Not at all, feedback is great. This is a signal-to-noise ratio problem: official forums drowned-out useful commentary with useless trolling. As a medium of dialog, they don’t work well.
And yeah. Why would you as the owner of a company - *any* company - want to host *negative* commentary on your own official site? Certainly seek it out, consider it, welcome it, but then what value do you get from *broadcasting* it?
As for only hearing the opinions of people who like the game enough to create 3rd party forums for it, that’s not the motive here either. As I wrote in the orginal update:
“Additionally, third-party communities tend to include more than just the fans of one particular game. So you get a broader point of view from a more diverse group of players and a higher level of discourse.”
If it really is your opinion that official forums work well - and not only ‘well’, but better than anything else we could be doing - for this sort of thing, then I respectfully disagree.
Blizzard needs to get those digg concepts implemented on the World of Warcraft forums as soon as possible. My main concern is their confederacy of asshats winning the polls and all those retarded first and second posts receiving approval instead of non, which is plausible, if that’s the case, well, the forums would be better off nuked, or at least separated from another type of forum where developers post.
Hey Jeff, nice crime fighting. I wanted to include some design docs of my idea for an evolved mmorpg forum, but I got lazy and linked digg instead, pretty slick huh, although I’m sure you have seen digg before. /. has been utilizing a similar concept for comment moderation for what seems like forever. What do you think of web 2.0 concepts versus a blog structure with strict moderation?
Well, i think if the signal-to-noise ratio is the problem, then it’s caused by lack of (or not good enough) moderation. The catch is, this isn’t something limited to just official forum — “90% of everything is garbage” rule applies to everything. Also to private forums and in developers blogs. So, someone _has_ to shuffle through the content and weed the garbage out. And if they fail, you get the very same inane stuff you can get on the official forum.
The difference might be, due to these alternatives being quite a bit harder to find and reach, the volume of feedback posted can be considerably lower. Which makes weeding the garbage out easier… _but_ the drawback is, with lower volume of feedback you’re also losing part of _useful_ info that would be posted otherwise (10% of total volume if we keep the optimistic “90% is crap” estimation)
The other point. Why would you want as owner of any company to host negative comments about your product. Perhaps because –by both displaying these concerns and addressing them in the very same place they’re raised– it also offers opportunity to show potential customer the company does listen to customers’ complaints, and strives to fix pointed out problems in timely fashion. Instead of sticking head in sand and pretending they don’t exist, in hope information about them won’t be found on 3rd party forum. This is about creating certain image of your company, and there’s admittedly no saying really which option in the end is better than the other. Although people does seem to have certain appreciation for being treated in honest and straighforward fashion.
And the final point of 3rd party forums including more than fans of just one game… i don’t think it’s really true. Unless you are picturing the people who play your game and post on your forum as some kind of _extremely_ specialized drones who never ever play anything else or do anything else but play your game, hence have no experience with anything outside your product… which is quite obviously highly unlikely.
In the end… i’d say my opinion is, while the official game forums aren’t by any means perfect, they are also by no means worse than suggested alternatives. And in comparison to these alternatives offer enough advantage (extra amount of useful feedback even if some of this feedback is negative) to offset potential drawback (increased amount of noise the forum operators need to sort out) … that in the end actually makes them preferable way of communication. At least as far as alternatives suggested so far go.
But of course, we can simply disagree on this =)
Sorry tmp, I’m gonna have to disagree too. There may be a useful idea in that neverending sea of posts on WoW’s boards, good luck finding it! By the time you sorted through each and every “nerf class X” post, you could have leveled all classes to 60 and found out for yourself!
The only thing WoW’s forum will teach you are:
1.) The location of the YTMND site.
2.) Chuck Norris is god.
BTW, I do believe that Devs would be better Devs if they did level their own classes to 60, and then raided! Then the things that sucked about a game would get changed REAL quick
Heh, while i’ll agree on the overall quality (or lack thereof) of WoW boards, i think this isn’t really a good example of “omg official boards suck” … simply because due to sheer amount of subscribers, the volume of crap content produced (90% etc) grows to the point where the moderators plain fail to keep up. Not that the way they do run these forums actually help in curbing the shitty content.
But WoW, if anything is /exception/ in my eyes than the rule. Because how many MMO games have the playerbase of this size? Exactly.
For any more “typical” game with significantly lower volume of posts generated daily… official forums can be imo well managed, and useful.
I personally enjoyed the way EQ was back in it’s heyday, where there were independent boards for classes and servers. Yes, they had the official boards for a time before they closed them off. Who could forget the crazy antics of Absor and Abashi? My main server, Vazaelle, had a wonderful community board that I found was pleasing to read and never found something like it after playing other games following my departure from EQ. The class boards were an alright experience as well, eventhough I never went to my own class board, since the for clerics was incredibly dull.
Developer communication with the message boards of EQ was nonexistant with my server board, which I really don’t see there being much of a need for. I seem to have a vague remembrance of some EQ representatives going to some of the class boards, if my memory is correct. Overall though, devs never really participated in two-way conversation with the members of a community, whether they actually read them is another thing that I wouldn’t know about.
The problem with what EQ produced was that the independent boards were all over the place, requiring logins for each one being a minor annonyance. Also the boards were mostly ezboard, which was came with having to pay for or donate money to keep it pop-up and ad free. Another was that these boards could come and go easily, along with multiple boards that accomplished the same task. All have these problems are solved when a company hosts their own forums.
I don’t find much of a problem with WoW’s current deal, though I do ignore the general forums, except for reading the stickied posts from CMs. Many of the other boards produce much less noise. The worst boards of a game that had official tagged to them were the VN DAoC boards. I lasted a month or so there until I could careless about visiting them again, and received banniation for calling a mod a nazi. Anyway, I seem to remember them being much worse in appearance and just crap subject matter.
I guess for a conclusion both ways serve different purposes. I think official forums serve a better purpose for communicating issues with devs, regardless of the noise that gets generated. Independent boards produce more of a community among the players of the game in my opinion.
Was thinking about it a bit more meanwhile, and eventually occured to me there’s one more potential strong point of official forums: that is, if they’re properly maintained they can carry far less redundant info, that a number of external boards combined.
As example: there’s some 20-30 threads going on WoW general board dealing with single subject, “Wisps as playable race”. Now, quite clerly the moderators dropped the ball in this case (as they repeatedly do) … as about all but one-two of these threads should be locked with standard note to effect of “please continue discussion in already existing thread here: _link_”. This way you have most of the redundant threads fall off the front page _fast_, the thread which does remain there is more visible and more likely to attract future replies… and with more participants in single place they’re likely to quickly cover most aspects of the issue. And when either a developer or guy responsible for keeping developers informed checks the forum, they only have 1-2 threads to skip if wisps happen to be something they aren’t interested in at the moment.
Now replace this model with a number of 3rd party boards. It’s pretty much given there will be one-two threads also dealing with wisps on every single one of them. Even if this means overall it’s “just” 10-20 wisps-related threads across all the boards (due to smaller number of forum posters on the whole) … this still means the person checking out these boards for information has way more redundant threads to skip. And in threads which they do check out, it’s highly likely the information contained will be rather shallow and also repetitive (due to posters on each board having less people to talk with, and consequently less experiences/points of view to exchange)
Same applies to community management. A single troll banned from official forums is gone, period. Unless they buy another game account. On the 3rd party boards, a banned guy simply goes to another board and trolls there, or even stays in the same place, under a new name. Meaning, they still freely generate the drivel someone has to go through when they look for information. In this sense well maintained official boards have potential of carrying higher signal-to-noise ratio than collection of 3rd party places… as long as comparison is done on “official forum vs all external boards combined” basis rather than “official forum vs external boards individually”
What do you think of web 2.0 concepts versus a blog structure with strict moderation?
I think those are very useful in terms of enabling large groups of people to communicate with each other.
But I don’t think that’s the goal, here. Instead you want large groups of people to be able to communicate with a small group of people (essentially “a person”).
You want players to talk to each other, but you want them to do that off in an environment that isn’t disrupted by the presence of devs. Otherwise you want devs to be able to communicate info to large groups, and you want that large group to be able to communicate back to the devs, but individually.
That communication structure isn’t well supported by forums or user-moderation; but it is pretty well supported by rss and blogging in combination with the user’s own ‘fan community’ sites. RSS Feeds mean you don’t have to search the interweb for all the info - all the info you need as a player gets everywhere.
It is more problematic coming the other way - getting info from the players to the devs in a way that the players don’t think is being ignored (emails to nowhere - even if you are reading all of them, no one will believe you are); but forums sure as heck aren’t addressing that issue.
Additionally, I think there’s a very strong sense of entitlement at work here. “I have the RIGHT to tell all your users that you suck, and why, and you have the responsibility to ensure that they hear me.”
But honestly, as a player I have no such ‘right’ and as a developer you have no such ‘responsibility’ and it isn’t even a good idea for you to do that.
So is this the conundrum then? The only way a player feels like the devs are hearing him is if *everyone* is hearing him?