Mark Jacobs Spills All About Official Forums

[Aelryn]

Wow. Let the tl;dr crowd start cracking.

Mark Jacobs stopped by some Warhammer community forums to explain, at great length, what the deal is with official forums and why they don't want them (and to clarify some earlier, shorter comments that he made).

From the Warhammer Alliance forums:

Folks,

The age we are living in is definitely a different one. I've gone from moderating forums with hundreds of people to seeing forums that are supposed to support games with millions of people. I wish it was as simple as set a few rules, apply them fairly, be honest with the players and then everything will be all right. It just isn't that way, no matter how much we would like it to be. Heck, even on our own beta forums we have people who refuse the follow the rules, break NDAs, ignore stickies, etc. and we do all the right things. No matter how well-intentioned the mods, unless a company is ready, willing and able to devote a ton of staff to the forums (24x7 mods, ruthless enforcement, limited topic creation ability, large staff), there are simply too many people to handle unless you have either an incredibly thick skin or so few available posting venues (as opposed to reading venues) to make it less than worthwhile. Scale is a wonderful and terrible thing and I'm sorry but you can't compare a game(s) that are small to games like WoW or even what we hope WAR will be in terms of number of subscribers. Also, the type of game has a direct effect on the style of the community. Let's face it, in a game like WAR or DAoC in which conflict between the races, sides, etc. is a main selling point, the forums for these games will be rather, hmm, enthusiastic. Lots of screaming and yelling, lots of false reports and tons of exaggeration. Whether it is WAR, WoW, DAoC or any other game in which RvR or PvP plays a major role, all these games share a very similar community. And I've seen more than enough from DAoC and WoW alone, to tell me that I am indeed right in my assessment. And I am happy to make a prediction here, when AoC launches, if they have official forums (I don't know their stance on it), they will have the same kind of behavior that the aforementioned games have had, count on it. If I'm wrong, I'll be also happy to admit it.

From my perspective, I'm not as concerned with the cost in terms of dollars (but the players should be) but rather what I will have to put my people through to run those forums. If WAR is as successful as we hope, we will have more users than any other MMORPG other than WoW. If that is true, we will be flooded by good users and bad. When things turn ugly, and they always do, my people will be insulted, yelled at, cursed at, threatened and told the vilest things possible. When we launched DAoC, one of my rules for our Customer Service Reps was that they didn't have to sit still and be abused by customers. I believe it is every customers' right to complain about the service but I also do not believe it is every customers' right to treat other human beings as people that they can dump on and treat in a manner that I know they wouldn't want to be treated themselves. I've said this before but unless you have worked the backend for one of these games, you do not really understand how ugly players can get when dealing with CMs/CSRs. I've seen more than my fair share of this ugliness directly and no amount of wishful thinking will make it otherwise. I care greatly about providing my customers with a great game but I also care deeply about my people, whether developer or CSR, and I don't want them to have to go through what I've seen happen both in other games as well as our own. While the percentage of people that are truly abusive is small, when you get to the kind of numbers we hope to have with WAR and given the type of game we are, that small percentage can suck up a lot of time and energy if you want to run forums properly. Just so you know, I would never want to have official forums that we ignore just so we could say we have official forums. That is, quite frankly, BS. As I've told our CM people when we talked about this issue, if we are going to do it, we would have to do it right.

Now, this doesn't mean we won't communicate to the community directly. Our Herald system was the best in the industry when we launched it for DAoC and we want to take it to the next level with WAR. We will have internal tester forums and we might have what we had with DAoC in terms of outside, specifically focused forums to help the players as well as to get additional feedback for us. However, even those had their share of false reports, exaggerations, etc. which diminish their usefulness and cost us time and money. We will also continue to post in places like these and make ourselves available to the community where we can. I want to reiterate that both official forums and internal forums, we have misspent a fair amount of time based on what users have sworn said happened, they saw, etc. At least with internal forums (and they can get heated at time), we know that the people there actually want to be there and help and not just post something to waste our time. And we've had our time wasted so often that it is ridiculous (even with QA sometimes you have to pass things on to devs quickly if it is potentially serious enough).

However, if you are looking for Mythic to provide wide-open official forums where people can threaten, curse, vent, etc., we have no intention of doing that now or in the future. There might be a hybrid solution but for now, I'm choosing to err on the side of caution.

Oh, BTW, I've said this before as well, I also post as myself, never an alias. I do this so people know who they are talking to and what I stand for, even if they think/know I'm wrong. I do believe if people posted under their own names the Internet would be a lot more polite. Anonymity is a very good thing at times but when it comes to issues like these, it isn't. It certainly is not true for everybody but it couldn't be much worse than it is and has become over the years. Twenty years of dealing with online communities has taught me many lessons, one of which is that most people (not all) will say things under an alias that they would never do under their real name or in person. I've lost track of the number of people I've met who on the boards/Internet were angry, vicious, unreasonable and nasty but in real-life, the exact opposite. Heck, even some people say that I'm a lot nicer in RL than I might appear to be at times here.

In closing, I do wish I believed that having official forums would be a great move for WAR. Even with the jerks/griefers/flamers/etc., I love online communities, I just cannot be convinced that in 2008, the right way to launch an MMORPG like WAR is with wide-open official forums.

Mark

That's quite a bit of text. I'm having McQuaid flashbacks.

[lumio]

Originally Posted by Aelryn

That's quite a bit of text. I'm having McQuaid flashbacks.

hahha i was just about to say that. lol


All i got to say is it did not work for Vanguard. Will this work for WAR, I dont know but it has failed once.

im gunna hop up on a soap box for a sec, why do they sound like a 12 year old? "I dont wanna do forums, its just to much work and stuff" uh your a company your customers need support. So suck it and get a large team for the forums.

[Aelryn]

I don't know. Tech support is one thing, and that's fine, but how useful have the official WoW forums been for the average player? If you assume that only 10% of their players even check the official forums ever (and that's probably being pretty generous), I wonder how many of those people get scared away when they try to ask a question or make a thoughtful post and the horde of moronic trolls descend upon them.

I remember a few years ago, before BC, my brother had a theory that they were going to give horde paladins and alliance shamans and that horde pallies would be blood knights. I thought it was brilliant and posted the idea to the forums. What came of it? Like thirty people insulted my intelligence and the post sank like a rock.

I learned my lesson. The only thing I use official forums for is the occasional class guide. The effort of having them probably isn't worth the money for big games.

[RadarX]

I agree with him really. While the no forums situation hasn't always been ideal with TR (they really need a feedback and tech support) all the fluff we see with other forums seem to just create a larger signal to noise ratio. If you take the king of forums like SOE, while it is wonderfully beneficial in some aspects, you are generating overhead that can be very easily absorbed by people like Ten Ton Hammer who willingly provide forums. Our VG forums are a great example of distributing that function and I think the large forums we've known on official sites are a thing of the past.

[Ralsu]

Originally Posted by lumio

All i got to say is it did not work for Vanguard. Will this work for WAR, I dont know but it has failed once.

I say the reason it failed with Vanguard can be traced to 2 reasons:

1. Too many specific forums without enough cooperation
2. Uneven level of support from Sigil

On the first point, I'll give the example of VGRangers (now Forest Stalkers or some such). This was a site dedicated to the Ranger class and nothing else. So, what happened. Many people who played rangers would only go there. The Sigil Class Leads would only post there, which only solidified the site's position as the only stop for rangers. With so many class sites, the information and important posts were scattered.

On the second point, Brad McQuaid kissed ass at Silky Venom and Fires of Heaven, though he got flamed in both places. He came to our forum one day and got flamed once and then cried like a baby because we did not immediately ban the offender. Many subscribers did not like having to wade through hundreds of posts at SV and FoH to find developer comments.

For WAR to succeed without a 1st party forum, they development team needs to evenly support somebody (maybe as many as 3 somebodies) as the official unofficial forum. And, the subscribers need to be willing to visit the places even if they devolve into flamefests.

So overall, I think I agree with Lumio. I'm not sure this can succeed. I'd like to think so, though.

[angryranger]

The real reason he isnt making a forum is that the guy can't handle criticism. He never could on VN and he can't handle it now. It doesn't matter since he always twisted the truth.

[Martuk]

Originally Posted by lumio

hahha i was just about to say that. lol


All i got to say is it did not work for Vanguard. Will this work for WAR, I dont know but it has failed once.

im gunna hop up on a soap box for a sec, why do they sound like a 12 year old? "I dont wanna do forums, its just to much work and stuff" uh your a company your customers need support. So suck it and get a large team for the forums.

Ya know I think he's talking about us. Well the official forums us.

To be honest I think the affiliate program was an excellent idea though there were some issues with its implementation. I think a well balanced and run affiliate style program could actually serve their needs greatly and benefit everyone. The key is implementation and communication.

Personally I would like to see more developers opt for an affiliate program of sorts.

[Miralyn]

I think Aelryn and RadarX hit it on the head....the amount of abuse and overall rudeness on the WoW forums makes reading them painful to say the least. I have really enjoyed this site and recommend it to people because of the friendliness. As Maegwynn and Mikes will attest there must be a half dozen posts each week on the WoW TTH forums with essentially "I was searching for a friendly site because the official WoW forums were so obnoxious"....

If the guys at Warhammer don't want to have the same issues without having a group of people to monitor and clamp down on any kind of rudeness (and in a PVP-flavored game I am sure it will be pretty rough and tumble) then good luck to him. Maybe they can work with you guys to make you guys be their forums.

I agree with his comment about the rudeness to customer service people....I work for a telecommunications company and you get some of the rudest people who feel that because "the customer's always right" they can dump you and you have to take it. It's such a shame.

[Avery]

What Mr Jacobs fails to realise is that he is in a service industry. To many shady companies hide away. As someone already said the guy can't take crititism, its been shown before. He also lacks belief in EA Mythic's employee's or potential moderators to do their job in an official capacity and not some part time posting all over the interweb.

Although customer service and the EA name tag have pretty rarely been mentioned positively in the same sentance, it seems now EA and Mythic were right for each other - in so many ways...

[Miralyn]

Using the WoW forums as an example all they seem to be is people whining about how a) their class is nerfed to hell b) other classes are "OP'ed" c) Blizzard developers are morons who don't play the game and d) everyone who doesn't agree with them is a moron.

I don't think the WoW forums serve any real purpose and whether or not it is lack of control by Blizzard or what but if I were a new person and read some of those posts about topics I might be scared off....just a bunch of mean people who have nothing else to do.

I don't think it is a "he cannot take criticism" it is a "why spend money on something like that that is just going to be used and abused and turn into a cesspit".