PjPablo Posted January 14, 2012 Share Posted January 14, 2012 Very nice changes!!! Glad to see you guys are listening. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Boxcar Posted January 14, 2012 Share Posted January 14, 2012 Not to mention it serves as an automatic filter for the threads that actually matter to me. Right now the fix is apparantly "Oh instead of 1 out of every 120 threads being geared towards your server we are making it so that it's 1 out of every 40. GG us!" You've completely missed the point. How about we do away from subcategories all together and put everything in one forum. But wait! Here me out. People who want to talk about PvP can put a [PvP] tag in front of their posts and people who wants to talk about Guild Recruitment can put a [Guild Recruitment][server Name][Faction][Guild Type] tag in front of their posts. Problem solved! I lol'd Also disappointed with this news. Perhaps one day BW will understand? Man, that is a really bad idea. I know saying that it is a bad idea means my feedback isn't constructive. Here's my constructive feedback: Look at WoW's server forums, which are very lightly moderated. Ask each server if they would rather have a group forum by alphabet with other, unrelated servers, but which are better moderated. Hopefully you can guess the preference of 90%+ of all posters. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Boxcar Posted January 14, 2012 Share Posted January 14, 2012 In previous posts, devs made comments that seem to boil down to not granting server forums because they tend to carry forum trolling over into the game, server griefing back into the forums and generally heating up server drama. It appears they prefer to keep the forum side of server communication less direct to keep things more cooled down. In other words, they'd like to keep community fun to a minimum. PvP troll threads are a big part of what makes server forums awesome. If people don't like that, I don't see why they can't just avoid it? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Daemonjax Posted January 14, 2012 Share Posted January 14, 2012 Thanks for the forum search feature! I'm looking forward to the suggestion box, also. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lonkley Posted January 14, 2012 Share Posted January 14, 2012 (edited) 1) People will never do something like tagging their server in the title consitently. 2) You still have to page through dozens of pages to find stuff related to them. Forums are already a game of bump the most active threads to the top, and bury everything else. It's like you guys work to make poor interfaces. The UI, GTN, the Forum. Edited January 14, 2012 by Lonkley Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vandrel-Blitz Posted January 14, 2012 Share Posted January 14, 2012 (edited) Next week, we’re going to implement some changes to the Forums based on feedback we’ve received from the community. These changes are meant to help address some of the concerns the community has and to make Forums organization a little easier to use overall. In the layout we have now, things like Guild Recruitment and Server Events are spread out and can be difficult to locate. We’ve also seen some requests for places on the forums where players can go to discuss things more closely with others on their particular server, and for a place for suggestions for the game. To start addressing some of these concerns, we will introduce a new forum section: Server Group Forums, and will place the Suggestion Box back in its rightful place under General Discussion. The Server Group Forums will be divided by server type (PvE, PvP, RP, and RP-PvP), and then alphabetically by the server listing. We have grouped several servers of the same types together to provide areas where players can more easily talk with others on their server (and other players on the same types of servers) – about crafting items, grouping up, hosting events, and more. Each Server Group Forum hosts several servers. If your server’s name falls in the alphabetical range in the forum title, that’s where you’ll post! Each Server Group Forum has a Guild Recruitment subforum, where players can recruit others into their guilds and look for a guild. There are many more subforums for recruitment in this organization than previously, so it will be much easier to find a guild on your server! We ask that you please use a [server Name] tag in front of your threads in these forums when they open to make it easy to see when you make a thread that is specifically intended for other members of your server, and to make sure everyone can see relevant threads easily. As a side effect of opening these new forums, we will close the Guild Hall and Server Events sections of the forum, as the content for those forums now belongs under our Server Group Forums. We’ll leave those forums visible for a time (but not open for posts) so that you can grab the text of your recruitment posts (or any other posts you’d like to keep from those forums) and post in the new Server Group Forums. We will also add the Suggestion Box forum to create a place for constructive suggestion threads to live. We encourage you to share your ideas! We understand that some players would still prefer individual server forums. If volume in the Server Group Forums dictates and it is still too difficult to locate information important to you that relates to your server, we will continue to consider additional changes. We believe this organization will allow us to have a thriving area for per-server discussion, and we’ll remain flexible and receptive to feedback from these changes. As always, if you have any other suggestions for the forums (new forums you’d like to see, changes that would be helpful), we’re glad to hear them. Thank you for providing your constructive feedback! No per: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=3500 What's funny is it's not what the customers asked for It's like asking a company for a red door and they turn around and say, well...here's a yellow door. Updated the main post here with the official statement from Bioware. Here is one thing I would like to point out to everyone, they are grouping servers into forums. Obviously we know there's a lot of servers, infact there's too many. There's so many servers that that's a handful that are nearly empty shells. To me, it seems as if Bioware is attempting to save face and cover their mistakes already. They know they screwed up the server organization and divided the overall population in a very unbalanced way. They don't want it to be easily noticed that there are empty servers, so to combat this they are grouping servers. Great idea here, right? Take say, 4-5 servers and roll them into 1 group forum...2 of those servers could be ghost towns....but no one will really ever notice because there's 2-3 high traffic servers rolled in that section. Now let's all take a step back and analyse the situation we're about to get forced upon us (which we did not ask for). We currently have a forum disaster, it's embarrassing. Nothing can be found easily, it's a mess. Bioware is saying they want to make things EASIER for us and ORGANIZE things, yet they are still refusing to give us SERVER FORUMS. Instead we get GROUP FORUMS?! This is not a used car lot, we are not shopping for used cars. We are not paying a monthly fee to talk to used car salesmen. Do not try and sell me a double decker bus when I ask for a 4 door sedan. While I am happy to see Bioware taking steps to correct their mistakes, I am insulted by their motion to disregard the REQUEST.....rather, DEMAND, for server forums and turn around to give us something we did not ask for. We do not want SERVER GROUPS (containing 4 to 5 to 10 servers) we want INDIVIDUAL SERVER FORUMS......so we can COMMUNICATE with OUR SERVER! period Allison, I understand the difficulties and challenges of your position, however I urge you to refrain from ignoring demands from your customers. No one mentioned, asked, or even recommended SERVER GROUP FORUMS. The demand was simple as per ( http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=3500 ), give your customers SERVER SPECIFIC FORUMS. Meaning, individual forums for servers, NOT group forums. This is quite simply insulting and I am more then embarrassed for Bioware as a whole this early on in the MMO game. Bioware had a shot at ranking #1 and cornering the market. That shot is slowly fading. EVERYONE came to this game with hopes an dreams after being spood fed (life is great on this side of the fence). The path you are headed down right now is the same path previous companies such as SOE chose to take which ultimately lead to the demise of the product (death of the game). Do not continue this rampant disregard for your customers best interest. You have more then proven that you are more worried about the product then the consumers. Cease and deisist now before it's too late to mitigate and reverse the damage. It would behoove you to gather your employees together, hold a meeting and let each and every one of them read the contents within ( http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=3500 ). Whoever is making use of the company whiteboard and "el-marko's", tell them to stop, sit down and pay attention. This is not the time, nor place, to be debating what each employee thinks is better for the customers. The customers have spoken. Pay very close attention to the demands outlined in ( http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=3500 ). It really is quite simple. Infact, if you read through several of the pages you'll find my post where I even did the leg work for you and told you the simple steps of creating a vBulletin forum section (just how easy it is to give US what we want). I would like to thank you for your time in this matter and value your input. I do, once again, highly recommend you refrain from any further disregard of customer requests. Regards, - Van Why isn't every server getting their own forum again? It seems stupid that you are making people preface their topics with the server name when you could completely bypass that just by categorizing all threads of a particular server into its own forum! It's not like I care what events are happening on Hedarr Soongh when all my characters are on Helm of Graush just because it is also a PVP server that begins with the letter 'H'. Needlessly complicated. Thank you Mechintel, You are absolutely correct. Needlessly complicated. There is no reason for players on Giradda the Hutt to even so much as VIEW a thread from Veela or Juyo (for example). This has nothing to do with PVE, PVP, RP, etc. It's the simple fact of organization, nothing more, nothing less. Giradda the Hutt players don't care and don't want to be bothered with "spam" from another server. It's again, needless complication. Edited January 14, 2012 by Vandrel-Blitz Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vandrel-Blitz Posted January 14, 2012 Share Posted January 14, 2012 (edited) In previous posts, devs made comments that seem to boil down to not granting server forums because they tend to carry forum trolling over into the game, server griefing back into the forums and generally heating up server drama. It appears they prefer to keep the forum side of server communication less direct to keep things more cooled down. I can sort of see the sense of it since it keeps the back and forth more fleeting as your gameside comments appear and then scroll off the screen and are much harder to refer back too with strongly considered responses but, it hinders more legitimate uses of the forum. Seeing as we get search back, I can cope and won't miss the drama. Wrong, http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=3500 They said it's because they don't have the manpower to moderate all the forums. That boils down to piss poor management and business development. We ask that you please use a [server Name] tag in front of your threads in these forums when they open to make it easy to see when you make a thread that is specifically intended for other members of your server, and to make sure everyone can see relevant threads easily. Here is why this will not work You are asking and expecting people to do something for YOU. This is a function that Bioware should do for US. Why should we, the customers, be further burdened with keeping your forums organized? Did you know that vBulletin had this wonderful feature called "THREAD PREFIX"? Guess what that does? It forces users in vBulletin to SELECT a custom defined field which is displayed on the thread title, and it can be toggled so that users cannot complete a thread creation until they have selected a prefix. So, again, you are making it harder on your customers by: a) Lack of provided organization b) Lack of expertise in vBulletin c) Lack of mitigated burdens for customers to deal with Please, for the sake of the community, educate your fellow employees. Put a stop to this nonsense. A Community Manager can make or break a game, I would know Edited January 14, 2012 by Vandrel-Blitz Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kunra Posted January 14, 2012 Share Posted January 14, 2012 Will we see search functionality corrected as well? This, only forum change I want to see is a Search function. I would even settle for being able to, atleast, search for my own posts instead of searching dozens of pages trying to find my posts from the night before. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matte_Black Posted January 14, 2012 Share Posted January 14, 2012 Wrong, http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=3500 They said it's because they don't have the manpower to moderate all the forums. That boils down to piss poor management and business development. What exactly do you think they would be moderating? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vandrel-Blitz Posted January 14, 2012 Share Posted January 14, 2012 (edited) What exactly do you think they would be moderating? Go to the thread I linked, read their responses. It's all clearly laid out and organanized on there. It's not a matter of "what" they'll moderate, it's a matter of them stating they "cannot" provide the service and therefore "do not" want to give it to us. Edited January 14, 2012 by Vandrel-Blitz Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Twixted Posted January 14, 2012 Share Posted January 14, 2012 We ask that you please use a [server Name] tag in front of your threads in these forums when they open to make it easy to see when you make a thread that is specifically intended for other members of your server, and to make sure everyone can see relevant threads easily. is this serious? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vandrel-Blitz Posted January 14, 2012 Share Posted January 14, 2012 I would also like to note from: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=33477 This is where Bioware should refund specific customers any/all associated costs they have taken-on in order to create/provide server forums. http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=173672 Bioware failed at launch to provide server forums, then they expected customers to pay for their own server forums. Now they are turning back and trying to save face on a terrible decision. All of you who have paid out-of-pocket expenses to create server forums should demand a refund (expense reimbursement). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mechintel Posted January 14, 2012 Share Posted January 14, 2012 I still can't wrap my head around the fact that they have the nerve to say that we should just tag all our threads with our server name. It's like they realize that things need to be organized but blatantly refuse to provide the framework for us to keep it that way. Seriously why make people tag every thread in a particular forum. EVERY SINGLE THREAD is expected to have a tag... that is a clear sign that your hierarchy is poorly designed. The whole point of subforums is to keep things organized. To make it easier for people to find threads specific to a certain category. The way they plan to implement things now it's as if we are walking into a hardware store looking to buy a bag of three inch nails, which the hardware store has in a box mixed with nails of every size imaginable. But when you complain that they could have made your job a lot easier by simply organizing the nails into separate boxes based on size they reply back with "Well we put all the screws in a box over there so it should be easy now to sift through the nails to find the ones you need." It's absolute backwards thinking. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vandrel-Blitz Posted January 14, 2012 Share Posted January 14, 2012 It's absolute backwards thinking. Your analogy made me laugh out loud, thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kunra Posted January 14, 2012 Share Posted January 14, 2012 I still can't wrap my head around the fact that they have the nerve to say that we should just tag all our threads with our server name. It's like they realize that things need to be organized but blatantly refuse to provide the framework for us to keep it that way. Seriously why make people tag every thread in a particular forum. EVERY SINGLE THREAD is expected to have a tag... that is a clear sign that your hierarchy is poorly designed. The whole point of subforums is to keep things organized. To make it easier for people to find threads specific to a certain category. The way they plan to implement things now it's as if we are walking into a hardware store looking to buy a bag of three inch nails, which the hardware store has in a box mixed with nails of every size imaginable. But when you complain that they could have made your job a lot easier by simply organizing the nails into separate boxes based on size they reply back with "Well we put all the screws in a box over there so it should be easy now to sift through the nails to find the ones you need." It's absolute backwards thinking. I like you!!...folks at Bioware probably dont after this post. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Twixted Posted January 14, 2012 Share Posted January 14, 2012 The way they plan to implement things now it's as if we are walking into a hardware store looking to buy a bag of three inch nails, which the hardware store has in a box mixed with nails of every size imaginable. But when you complain that they could have made your job a lot easier by simply organizing the nails into separate boxes based on size they reply back with "Well we put all the screws in a box over there so it should be easy now to sift through the nails to find the ones you need." are those metric threads or standard? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mechintel Posted January 14, 2012 Share Posted January 14, 2012 are those metric threads or standard? Oh we had a guy tag them with little pieces of paper that tell you the answer to that... for your convenience. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
avimeso Posted January 14, 2012 Share Posted January 14, 2012 hopefully it will be easier to find a guild on here after changes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SelinaK Posted January 14, 2012 Share Posted January 14, 2012 (edited) One thing that would be good would be in the Roleplaying section to have a link inside that to the Events section, as I think a lot of RPers mainly read the RP forums and not the events... I think basically you need a way for a forum to be a subforum of multiple forums for that to work. That way you could also have a link within the RP forum to fanfiction as well - it seems the best to duplicate links like that in a few places (another example, a link to the guild recruitment forum from within the RP forum) to make it easier to browse for people that don't think like a search crawler e.g. make sections easy to see from the main list, not buried down within other links Click-through rate on such things is very small, you need to grab peoples' attention so they can find what they want without getting lost Edited January 14, 2012 by SelinaK Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Voyle Posted January 14, 2012 Share Posted January 14, 2012 Wait, so instead of server forums, you're asking us to share multiple servers with the same starting name letter? Half effort ditch or what? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zombull Posted January 14, 2012 Share Posted January 14, 2012 (edited) you can already do that, under "my account" -> "basic information" -> "time zone" It doesn't seem to apply to the forums, though. Edit: I posted this at 1:29AM EST and it shows 06:29AM EST. Edited January 14, 2012 by JCinDE Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darvus Posted January 14, 2012 Share Posted January 14, 2012 It doesn't seem to apply to the forums, though. Edit: I posted this at 1:29AM EST and it shows 06:29AM EST. On mine, it shows 1:29AM EST, so keep playing with your settings. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zombull Posted January 14, 2012 Share Posted January 14, 2012 On mine, it shows 1:29AM EST, so keep playing with your settings. Weird. I went and changed the setting to GMT, saved, changed it back to GMT-5, saved and now it works correctly. Anyway, thanks for the help. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bearaids Posted January 14, 2012 Share Posted January 14, 2012 I dont agree with this. Our server has its own server forums, not constantly patrolled by bioware and gives you a warning when you call someone a Stupid. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bearaids Posted January 14, 2012 Share Posted January 14, 2012 (edited) Edit Double post. Edited January 14, 2012 by Bearaids Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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