Mar 24
This is Why I Like Jeff Freeman
From his post on why Forums are Bad:
Only MMO developers provide their customers with forums. These forums enable the customers to talk to each other. As a medium of dialog between the developer and the customer, forums are terrible. When they are provided and moderated by the developer, they’re even pretty terrible at facilitating communication among players. Typically, players don’t talk about the game on official forums, they talk about the game company.
1 Comment so far
Leave a comment
Well I agree forums are bad, but I find them fun :) Not every forum can operate on the level of Grimwell Online or many of the LtM sites.
The problem I have with Jeff is that he seems to believe a company shouldn’t be at fault… specifically a certain company he may just be working for. He tends to blame nobody… nothing… that games fail just because. He most of all should understand that someone is at fault… or at least something is at fault at the companies behind failed games. Ignorance is bliss. Someone needs to stand up and accept responsibility.
Jeff is like Raph in my eyes… a lot of talk about good things. Good discussion on good topics, but then you look at the games they work on and it’s easy to see they can talk the talk, but not walk the walk. I have always pointed right at SOE… there is something there that blocks these guys ideas from making it into games. I realise I don’t work for SOE… don’t develop games… don’t understand the system… but its evident something isn’t right with SOE.
Once a company accepts responsibility for their fuck ups then I wager the community may come around to discuss the game instead of the company. If you don’t believe it then I suggest you look at some Guild Wars forums.
But yes forums are bad. Darniaq posted a while ago about feedback systems for MMORPG betas in response to my Vanguard Beta write up that you put up on /. Darniaq hit it on the head… the feedback systems that developers use with their community just plain suck. There is no accountability in the system.
But if an MMORPG doesn’t have forums does it mean people won’t bitch? (kinda like a tree falls in the woods does it make a sound… I amuse myself) You’re damn right people would still bitch, but there would be a lot less cross polination of discussion because there would be the same discusion on 100 different websites. At least a central forum provides the ability for progress on topics. The problem lies in how that power is harnessed and how a feedback system is utilized.