Interesting article by a game dev about why they can't be more open to players

[Defecter]

The reason they dont mention but is probably a part of it as well, is that a lot of people on gaming forums are extremely negative or demanding.

 

There have been threads saying this game is dead if not dying from 2011 on...none of them have been right. People are being ridiculously critical, with devs/support never being allowed to make a mistake without making a huge deal out of it. There are sooo many people who are just spouting 'facts' while not knowing even a quarter of the information needed to make such assumptions. BW CAN NEVER GET IT RIGHT. It is impossible. There will always be unhappy people because the game is simply not for everyone and does not cater to everyones desires.

 

Yes, feedback is important, but self-enititled, demanding and/or doom and gloom threads are pointless and only ruin that which could have been a decent discussion.

 

Look at the Nico Okar thread for instance. Yes he could have easily looked up that he would not get the companion yet but come one....half a dozen pages of flaming is not really helping the situation. Anonymity makes people behave a lot worse.

Granted, gaming communities are not known for their cool-headed thinking. But that's where good community management comes in. A good community management means filtering out the nonsense and relaying any potentially helpful feedback to those who can use it.

 

Hell, even a simple 'Thank you. This sounds interesting. I'll pass it on.' in bright yellow letters would do so much to improve how the overall image of the development and community team. It shows they are actually reading and taking their customers seriously. It might even be the case right now that someone is reading our posts across the forum. It might be that they actually do take input seriously. But without them showing their customers that they are listening, the prevalent feeling people will have is 'They don't give a flying bantha excrement about what we think.'

 

And yes, there will always be a part of the community who will still feel like they've been ignored if they say that a suggestion will be passed on and nothing is actually done with it. But what do you think is happening now? Nearly the entire community feels that way instead of only the hard-headed ones that can't separate their own entitlement from reality.

 

So yes, what you say with 'BW CAN NEVER GET IT RIGHT' is partly true. But the same goes for every single business ever in the history of mankind who has had more then a few customers. The trick is minimizing those who are unsatisfied and ignoring that small, but sadly often very vocal, minority who can't ever be pleased.

 

Tl;DR: Pleasing everyone is impossible, making an effort to please the sensible and largest part of your customer base, isn't.

Edited August 19, 2015 by Defecter

[ChazDoit]

It wasn't just ME3 devs that have been victims of cyber harassment. One of the members of SWTOR's combat team received threats on his and his family's personal accounts over class changes recently, because he came out and explained why they made the changes they did. One of the Dragon Age 2 writers received death threats on her children over that game, ala this: "And it included graphic threats to kill my children on their way out of school to show them that they should have been aborted at birth rather than have to have me as a mother."

 

I find the lack of information and interaction on the forums disheartening, always have. But I can't place all of the blame on them after seeing how crummy of a place the internet can be. When Bioware alone has so many instances of personal threats and harassment, death threats over the writing in a video game or class changes in an MMO, I can't say I'd be eager to come post on the forums if I was on the Bioware team. I don't think anybody would want to put themselves on that firing line. I'll still hope that we get more information and interaction, of course, but if we don't get it I can recognize that they have valid reasons for it even if it sucks for the rest of us that haven't resorted to the classless behavior that's caused it.

 

I agree but this is not a Bioware issue, it's an internet issue, I see devs from other companies being the victims of cyber-harassment too John Smedly, formerly from SOE, latrr Daybreak Studios, had people send him pictures of his father's grave, other SOE dev had received pictures of the front door of his house.

 

I know people that are very small time youtubers and have maybe a few thousands subscribers or twitter followers and they get death threats, I know journalist that as soon as they publish an article they get threats too, also large youtubers, John Bain aka Totalbiscuit, has a big gaming channel and said he's been on therapy for the past year because he keeps getting harassed or sent hateful messages, not necessarily by his viewers, hate has come from game developers, journalists, or random people that have nothing to do with video games.

 

But even things being as bad as they are, if you're running a business around an online game with a community you should communicate with them as much as possible, a few cases of cyber-harassment are no excuse to shut down communication unless you want to cast blame over all the people that play the game.

Edited August 19, 2015 by ChazDoit

[CDRWirbelwind]

Hmm... maybe next time, they should announce the expansion two weeks before it launches. Nah, people will still complain that they've been left in the dark.

 

Honestly, reading some posts here, I don't wonder why community managers don't write more on the forums and simply do live streams (I didn't say they do lots of them, mind you). I mean... just imagine you're the SWTOR community manager and you read everything in this thread... do you still want to be reassuring towards those "fans" who only show disdain in every single one of their post history ? I know I wouldn't. But then again, I'm not patient enough to do this.

 

And then people who try to be understanding and defend BioWare are just branded as "sheeps" and "mindless fanboys" so they don't try anymore, why bother ? So all that's left are whiners and a**h*les who know everything better than anyone.

 

Eric Musco would spend his time far more efficiently giving interviews or, really, doing anything other than focusing his attention on the forums. Which, it seems, he is doing. Which is cool because, contrary to what some forum users seem to think, the forums are not -at least I hope so- a good representation of the SWTOR community. And if it is, I REALLY don't think I want to have anything to do with most of them. But from the opinions I've seen in the game and the ones on the forums, I don't think they're the same.

[MSchuyler]

This thread is a case in point. Assuming you actually read the article, all you can manage to do is argue with it. That's EXACTLY what he is talking about. All these picky little pedantic points are examples of the diner's telling the cooks how to run a restaurant. It's a no-win situation for them, and given the physical anger directed at devs for pointing these issues out and actually having an opinion about their own profession, including threats against devs and their families, it's no wonder they don't want to talk to players. I don't blame them a bit.

[The-Kaitou-Kid]

I agree but this is not a Bioware issue, it's an internet issue, I see devs from other companies being the victims of cyber-harassment too John Smedly, formerly from SOE, latrr Daybreak Studios, had people send him pictures of his father's grave, other SOE dev had received pictures of the front door of his house.

 

I know people that are very small time youtubers and have maybe a few thousands subscribers or twitter followers and they get death threats, I know journalist that as soon as they publish an article they get threats too, also large youtubers, John Bain aka Totalbiscuit, has a big gaming channel and said he's been on therapy for the past year because he keeps getting harassed or sent hateful messages, not necessarily by his viewers, hate has come from game developers, journalists, or random people that have nothing to do with video games.

 

But even things being as bad as they are, if you're running a business around an online game with a community you should communicate with them as much as possible, a few cases of cyber-harassment are no excuse to shut down communication unless you want to cast blame over all the people that play the game.

 

I don't disagree with you that this is an internet issue, my point there was Bioware alone has had several extreme cases of it which makes any lack of communication from them understandable in my eyes. Not a great solution or one I'm happy with, but understandable nonetheless.

 

Another thing to keep in mind, they haven't shut down communication. They just posted in a topic yesterday promising info within the next week or so, responded again in that same topic to address somebody's concerns about the livestream (see here), and overall they made 7 posts yesterday not counting the "All servers available!" post from Tait. They've released information too, the operations/flashpoints stuff here on the forums in addition to the Gamescon Q&As (see here for those) just to name a couple. That's in addition to all of the interviews and such they've done throughout the past couple months. So they are releasing things and they are communicating, just not enough for everybody. Which I agree with, I'd like to see more information and more communication from the team. My point was that I can understand why they wouldn't want to do more.

[ChazDoit]

This thread is a case in point. Assuming you actually read the article, all you can manage to do is argue with it. That's EXACTLY what he is talking about. All these picky little pedantic points are examples of the diner's telling the cooks how to run a restaurant. It's a no-win situation for them, and given the physical anger directed at devs for pointing these issues out and actually having an opinion about their own profession, including threats against devs and their families, it's no wonder they don't want to talk to players. I don't blame them a bit.

 

I have no doubt this is how they think, and I don't think this attitued is going to last long without hurting their business. With all this new narrative of video games making people sexist, racist and a revival of the 90s argument that video games breed violent individuals, Im sure many developers see gamers as animals.

 

But at some point, paying customers are going to be fed up with being treated like potential criminals or pariahs, since the millions of Bioware fans had nothing to do with few cases of cyber-harassment that happened and should not be blamed for the actions of a few.

 

This "We're too good to communicate with you" attitude is only going to end up hurting their business.

 

I don't disagree with you that this is an internet issue, my point there was Bioware alone has had several extreme cases of it which makes any lack of communication from them understandable in my eyes. Not a great solution or one I'm happy with, but understandable nonetheless.

 

While cyber-harassment or cyber-threats are bad, I wouldn't say they are extreme since that would be putting them on the same level as being harassed or threatened in real life, on the internet that level of harassment is possible because apparently it's untraceable, I never heard of the people that threatened the life of developers being tracked down and prosecuted.

 

Seems to me you can just tell someone you're going to harm him on twitter and get away with it, that is a sad state of affairs, but shutting down communication or just say the minimum that you can say seems to be the wrong way to go about it.

 

Maybe it's because I've followed many crowdfunded games, they seem to be a thousand times more transparent, making your customers feel valued and keeping them engaged seems like good business to me.

Edited August 19, 2015 by ChazDoit

[The-Kaitou-Kid]

While cyber-harassment or cyber-threats are bad, I wouldn't say they are extreme since that would be putting them on the same level as being harassed or threatened in real life, on the internet that level of harassment is possible because apparently it's untraceable, I never heard of the people that threatened the life of developers being tracked down and prosecuted.

 

Agree to disagree here, while I wouldn't put them right on the same level as real life threats they're still pretty serious. Especially when somebody's family is brought into play such as the DA2 writer or SWTOR combat team dev, both of whom not only had their own lives threatened but the lives of their families threatened. You have to realize we live in a day and age where a little information on somebody (such as name and job) can be used to find personal information such as phone numbers, home addresses, and everything in between. Stuff like Gamergate with Zoe Quinn and the recent incident with Walter Palmer and Cecil the lion show that it doesn't take much for people to find where you live through online documentation. Once you get to that level (the SWTOR combat team dev had his personal accounts and his family's personal accounts, which weren't linked to his account here at all, found and that's where the threats were sent) it's not something you should be looking at like "Oh, it's just the internet." Not when somebody's family is in play in today's age where your address can be found in an instant. Not everybody is going to make good on those threats, absolutely, but the same can be said for real life threats. The fact is, it only takes one person to be the exception to that and things take a big turn for the worse.

 

Seems to me you can just tell someone you're going to harm him on twitter and get away with it, that is a sad state of affairs, but shutting down communication or just say the minimum that you can say seems to be the wrong way to go about it.

 

Maybe it's because I've followed many crowdfunded games, they seem to be a thousand times more transparent, making your customers feel valued and keeping them engaged seems like good business to me.

 

Again, though, they haven't shut down communication. As I said in my previous post, we're still getting communication and information. Not as much as we'd like, true, but it hasn't stopped or even come close to the bare minimum. Hopefully they see the good of the community and increase the communication for their sake but again, if they don't and continue with what we're getting now I won't have to wonder why. It's understandable.

[Andryah]

Agree to disagree here, while I wouldn't put them right on the same level as real life threats they're still pretty serious. Especially when somebody's family is brought into play such as the DA2 writer or SWTOR combat team dev, both of whom not only had their own lives threatened but the lives of their families threatened. You have to realize we live in a day and age where a little information on somebody (such as name and job) can be used to find personal information such as phone numbers, home addresses, and everything in between. Stuff like Gamergate with Zoe Quinn and the recent incident with Walter Palmer and Cecil the lion show that it doesn't take much for people to find where you live through online documentation. Once you get to that level (the SWTOR combat team dev had his personal accounts and his family's personal accounts, which weren't linked to his account here at all, found and that's where the threats were sent) it's not something you should be looking at like "Oh, it's just the internet." Not when somebody's family is in play in today's age where your address can be found in an instant. Not everybody is going to make good on those threats, absolutely, but the same can be said for real life threats. The fact is, it only takes one person to be the exception to that and things take a big turn for the worse.

 

 

 

Again, though, they haven't shut down communication. As I said in my previous post, we're still getting communication and information. Not as much as we'd like, true, but it hasn't stopped or even come close to the bare minimum. Hopefully they see the good of the community and increase the communication for their sake but again, if they don't and continue with what we're getting now I won't have to wonder why. It's understandable.

 

^^ Absolutely agree, on all points.

 

There have been a number of notable cases where internet threats were actually pushed into real life. How on earth is anyone who is threatened on the internet going to know if it ends there or carries forward to real life.. especially when one's family, and even sometimes home address are included as part of the internet threats? The prudent approach is to take them seriously, investigate them, and if needed take action through law enforcement.

Edited August 19, 2015 by Andryah

[ChazDoit]

Stuff like Gamergate with Zoe Quinn and the recent incident with Walter Palmer and Cecil the lion show that it doesn't take much for people to find where you live through online documentation. Once you get to that level (the SWTOR combat team dev had his personal accounts and his family's personal accounts, which weren't linked to his account here at all, found and that's where the threats were sent) it's not something you should be looking at like "Oh, it's just the internet." Not when somebody's family is in play in today's age where your address can be found in an instant. Not everybody is going to make good on those threats, absolutely, but the same can be said for real life threats. The fact is, it only takes one person to be the exception to that and things take a big turn for the worse.

 

At the end of the day other companies keep a much more open communication with their customers, even with all the cyber-harassment that is going on, that is the bar that customers should be using to measure how well Bioware community and marketing team works.

 

I've seen a lot of online harassment in the past year, I mentioned John Bain aka Totalbiscuit denouncing harassment against himself and his family, most likely because he was involved in the gamergate controversy, or Milo Yiannopoulos, a journalist that according to some articles reacived more than 10 death threats after writing an article about it too.

 

The worst thing is that I never heard of any of these people sending online threats to be tracked down and made an example, which is pretty depressing how easy they get away with it.

[Quraswren]

Well, clearly you're one of the stated people in the article who don't know the difference between a promise and a plan, and rage when plans fall short. For those of us who can handle it it's good to know what to look forward to. Or not.

 

I very well know the difference. I also know what implied means as well.

 

Problem is, their plan is to hype their product. Overall thats not to bad but they don't also get to put the blame on players for being negative when that plan falls through. They created the hype train, created the momentum and everything that goes with it all so they could drive marketing and eventually sales. Once thats going and the thing fall apart, it is not the gamers to blame at that point but the ones that designed and engineered the situation.

 

Also, their betas last for months and don't have an NDA. If you're buying based on the inclusion of some feature the information is perfectly available to you if you're smart enough to look for it.

 

Most gamers are but like blizzard in my example , don't start taking pre-order money then cut features later with some statement of, "well you can just get your money back if you jump through a few hurdles." Thats kinda seen as a Di2K move and will generate some negativity.

 

At some point, the developers have to take the blame (along with many aspects of the company I'm sure) and it's not all the gamers fault when the entire situation is generated by them. They want control of things and that just isn't going to work out for the type of control they want. You cannot create the hype, have all the so called plans but not produce on the hype you generate.

 

I'd rather they just shut up about things they are no confident about. When they are looking at things, don't announce it if you're not damn sure it's close to a 100% chance of making launch.

 

Save everyone a lot of headache.

Edited August 19, 2015 by Quraswren

[XDOUBLEX]

@warrgames. I've stayed out of this whole drama fest but I wanted to pop in and say you are dead on correct. MH does an amazing job with communication, customer service and information. I've seen very inflammatory threads diffused there just by a community manager jumping in and speaking honestly. Often times they bring in a dev for a quick response then continue to manage the issues back into calm discussion.

 

I remember reading somewhere from somebody (amazing detail I know) that it is the developers job to set the tone, the narrative for how people communicate and what they communicate on their forums. Silence is always followed by flame wars because of speculation and wild imagination by all sides (super fans and cynics alike). Just admitting a mistake can diffuse days of hostility and communicating reason and intent often calms the outraged gamer.

Edited August 19, 2015 by XDOUBLEX
Autocorrect

[Cuspin]

I must Say, that I would not be surprised if games in the future have no official forums. I was hoping swtor would get rid of them after beta. I believe they are much better served having fan sites run forums and just have one way communication after beta.

 

Us gamers are mean selfish and demanding to a fault.

[MeNaCe-NZ]

Hmm... maybe next time, they should announce the expansion two weeks before it launches. Nah, people will still complain that they've been left in the dark.

 

Honestly, reading some posts here, I don't wonder why community managers don't write more on the forums and simply do live streams (I didn't say they do lots of them, mind you). I mean... just imagine you're the SWTOR community manager and you read everything in this thread... do you still want to be reassuring towards those "fans" who only show disdain in every single one of their post history ? I know I wouldn't. But then again, I'm not patient enough to do this.

 

And then people who try to be understanding and defend BioWare are just branded as "sheeps" and "mindless fanboys" so they don't try anymore, why bother ? So all that's left are whiners and a**h*les who know everything better than anyone.

 

Eric Musco would spend his time far more efficiently giving interviews or, really, doing anything other than focusing his attention on the forums. Which, it seems, he is doing. Which is cool because, contrary to what some forum users seem to think, the forums are not -at least I hope so- a good representation of the SWTOR community. And if it is, I REALLY don't think I want to have anything to do with most of them. But from the opinions I've seen in the game and the ones on the forums, I don't think they're the same.

 

I think Eric has cultivated this negative community through in his inability to properly communicate.

That is I don't believe he should have to have information pertaining exactly to KoTFE or any game addon etc. but he needs to be more active in the community or hire people that are ( I thought that was what Tait was meant to be doing but *shrug* who knows now ).

 

It's his general lack of communication that causes things to get so negative. He basically let's the community fight one another and then steps in with comments that sometimes incite things even further and steps away again.

 

That's the key thing I've never understood - why does he seem so eager on letting the community fight itself? Doesn't he realise how unproductive it is? Is he justifying in letting people have these multi page, multi thread arguments by thinking it's healthy discussion?

 

If we had a community team that participated in the community instead of sitting back on their asses doing who knows what things wouldn't be half as bad as they are.

 

For example instead of 20 pages of people going back and forward it might be restricted to 5 because you would get regular responses from the community team ( within their ability to respond or at least respond saying why they can't get specifics or when we can expect specifics etc. ) to the point anyone harping on about anything that had already had a response you would get other forum users responding that it had already been answered or it would answered in X time as per the dev response. As it is now we are all guessing.

 

I generally defend Bioware most discussions I partake in on these forums mostly because I see how out of line many of the points against Bioware are but when it comes to their community team I really have big issues with this because I truly feel they are half the problem with the negative attitude on the forums - and no this has nothing to do with the OP Article because that is from devs about dev information which I agree with fully, not with the poor community communication we get from this supposed "community team".

[Fireswraith]

They had me going up until the article said diners don't know how restaurants are run, then I was like wait a minute..... Game devs can be as open or closed to players as they want to be, it's simply a matter of choice. All the devs need to say before they go into anything is post big font size 50 bold underlined words saying something like "these are the/some of the ideas we are currently working with, they are not absolute, they might change, they might all make it, none of them might make it, but they are currently what's on the table". Reason they don't give out info until it's set in stone is because they don't want people erupting on the forums about something. But to be honest that's kind of half the fun of game forums like this.

[Kalfear]

interesting read (if not almost unreadable because of the stupid way the site delivered the article. Those clips were neither entertaining nor creative, just annoying)

 

But its not fully correct

 

Developers now a day like to think and act like they have the only experience

 

There is many very intelligent and experienced gamer in this genre who could not develop or code but do understand the gaming genre as well (and in some cases better) then the developers.

 

Being hired as a dev does not instantly make you a all seeing prophet

 

Many of the mistakes made in this specific title (and among the genre as a whole) could have been avoided from the get go if developers listened to the feedback in closed beta.

 

I will agree that you only have one chance to make a good first impression

SWTOR messed that one up right from the start by not understand the shear arrogance and ego of the team they had originally. That negative feedback hurt them right out of the gate.

 

And I'm not saying they should listen to all feedback

I read these forums and shake my head at some of the nonsense suggested and demanded

 

But that aside, there is still no valid reason devs can come up with for not answering long asked questions (Pazaak, swoop racing, chat boxes (nonononono), and more.

 

There is some 5 year old requests out there that they really should finally and officially address. If for no other reason to let people know why their favorite parts of KotOR are missing still.

[Quraswren]

I must Say, that I would not be surprised if games in the future have no official forums.

 

I don't see that ever happening.

 

Forums are a free think tank for most games and while it's a love/hate relationship. I don't see them going anywhere anytime soon.

 

To many free ideas floating around they can collect for nothing. Change and adjust as needed

[ChazDoit]

I must Say, that I would not be surprised if games in the future have no official forums. I was hoping swtor would get rid of them after beta. I believe they are much better served having fan sites run forums and just have one way communication after beta.

 

Us gamers are mean selfish and demanding to a fault.

 

Self loathing gamers are just curious little things (I guess all those articles saying gamers are horrible terrible people from sites like kotaku and polygon have taken their toll on some) Also they already tried a game without official forum, it was called warhammer online, guess how well that went.

Edited August 20, 2015 by ChazDoit

[TheSeventhJedi]

Here's the problem with BW style communication.

 

Eric: We'll have more information for you about the alliance system in the time leading up to Gamescom.

Us: Hey, hasn't Gamescom come and gone? Where was that info?

 

Now, let's say plans changed. Okay, that happens. You don't have to be a developer to understand that a smart person would come back and say

 

Eric: Hey guys, we had to change something, so we're not quite ready to talk about that yet. We'll talk about this other feature instead in a couple weeks.

 

Instead, we got

 

Eric: Livestream unrelated to anything coming soon!

 

Do you believe that livestream is coming? I sure don't. And having your customer not believe you is much worse than letting your customer see you screw up.

[ChazDoit]

Here's the problem with BW style communication.

 

Eric: We'll have more information for you about the alliance system in the time leading up to Gamescom.

Us: Hey, hasn't Gamescom come and gone? Where was that info?

 

Now, let's say plans changed. Okay, that happens. You don't have to be a developer to understand that a smart person would come back and say

 

Eric: Hey guys, we had to change something, so we're not quite ready to talk about that yet. We'll talk about this other feature instead in a couple weeks.

 

Instead, we got

 

Eric: Livestream unrelated to anything coming soon!

 

Do you believe that livestream is coming? I sure don't. And having your customer not believe you is much worse than letting your customer see you screw up.

 

Yeah, but expecting them to do what they said they were gonna do is just very entitled of us, haven't you read all those articles saying gamers are entitled horrible people? must be true!

 

Also, you're not a game developer, you don't understand how things work here so you can't complain when they leave you hanging and give no explanation.

 

Don't forget that a game dev was harassed, that means we're just not worthy of getting updates anymore, because we're all guilty of what one person did, and we can't really blame Bioware if they don't want to engage with us anymore.

[MeNaCe-NZ]

Yeah, but expecting them to do what they said they were gonna do is just very entitled of us, haven't you read all those articles saying gamers are entitled horrible people? must be true!

 

Also, you're not a game developer, you don't understand how things work here so you can't complain when they leave you hanging and give no explanation.

 

Don't forget that a game dev was harassed, that means we're just not worthy of getting updates anymore, because we're all guilty of what one person did, and we can't really blame Bioware if they don't want to engage with us anymore.

 

FYI Eric's not a developer either and I don't think the poster referring to developers but to Eric directly and how he communicates.

[CDRWirbelwind]

>Cynical things.

 

You're reeeeaaaaaally not helping... Oh wait, maybe you didn't want to.... Meh !

Edited August 20, 2015 by CDRWirbelwind