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Cantina events.
Flintsteen
Member UncommonPosts: 282
Reaching your community via cantina events and twitch streams at the cost of a real presence on forum. I don't know how much time and money is spend on this, but to me it's definedtly not worth the effort. It's not that I don't appreciate the team reaching out to the community, but I would much prefer they did it via the official forum.
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You mean the forums many called TORchan? I stopped going to their forums, for the most part like 2 years ago, when I got a few warnings about calling trolls tolls. Most of whats on there is just the same whiney posts and demands, from people who hardly understand the game, over and over and over again. Just look at the slot machine nonsense that took over the boards for like a week. The new slot machines come out and within days they are tanking the economy bad, yet when the devs fix it the first 3 pages of general forums were nothing but whine posts and demands they be changed back, despite overwhelming evidence of their negative effect on the game.
Besides what little good comes of the forums get passed on to the devs by Musco anyway.
If you stopped going to the official forums, how did you know what took topics over the boards for a week? :P
If the community team did their community job and actually moderated the forum, it wouldn't be a bad place to leave feedback and interact. BioWare just lets the wrong people run rampant and ban/suspend the users that stand up to the garbage posting. I totally agree with the OP that Eric Musco should be on the FORUMS posting instead of travelling the US/world's bars for 3-4 days a month on the player's dime.
Reading comprehension ftw! In the English language when someone says I stopped doing something for the most part, it means the preceding statement is true, with minor exceptions. Let me translate that another way for you. I still go to the forums on occasion, but generally try to avoid them because its people whining/talking about things they don't really know about. For example...
Musco does post on the forums, quite frequently as a matter of fact. Twice in the past week even.
Excellent komrade, thanks very to the valuable english lesson on star wars internets, will save many rubles by not having to pay tuition for capitalist American community college to master the decadent western English, ???????
"Quite frequently" to me is not twice in one thread in a week; if those are your expectations from someone paid for 40 hours a week to interact with the community, that's your opinion but I expect more. I can easily get 20-50 posts a workday on various forums I visit, while at work for my actual job, and I know there are users out there in IT fields or similar situations who probably post more than I do, on the clock. Whether or not that's fair to our employers isn't the issue(lol), but it's interesting that as community leads these people at BioWare can't even come close to that kind of interaction.
Tait was chatty with seven replies in prelim patch note thread and while that's a step in the right direction, history shows the three community staff are very inconsistent with the official forums, and that's a legitimate criticism. The cantinas are a waste of money and community staff; the hard and meaningful questions the players ask are ignored on the official forums, and the players can't be expected to travel hundreds or thousands of miles and present them before others in a potentially(I'm cool with public speaking) difficult social situation. Snave struggled to get the interview that he did on a stream last year.
IDK if you realize but you started talking all Russian immigrant like in the beginning of your post. In Soviet Russia internets post you!
If you honestly think they should be spending any significant amount of times on those forums then I guess we just disagree as to what constitutes a "community". For every "hard and meaningful" question posted on the SWTOR forums there are ten thousand moronic questions that show a complete lack of understanding of the game, and there are a hundred thousand whiney bitchfest posts from people who are either 12 or have the mentality of a 12 year old. "I don't care if the slot machines were tanking the economy I want my prize machine back and I want in now!"
And of those "hard and meaningful" questions very few would get anything more than a token response even if every dev in the game posted 100 posts a day simply because, at the end of the day, they still work for a company. That means outgoing information is tightly controlled and even admitting a problem really is a problem might take days because someone would have to get approval before they would be allowed to post a confirmation that said problem is in fact an actual problem. To say nothing of what it would take to get a response to the so called fixes everyone comes up with to the problems they have actually admitted to. Everyone has five suggestions about what should be done despite the complete lack of any programming skills/knowledge or insight as to whats going on behind the scenes which would invalidate 9/10 of the solutions even if they were any good, which most certainly are not.
Would it be nice if none of the above were true and not only would the forums not be a maze of stupidity and avarice, and so the devs would be on the forums all the time responding to the questions people have? Yes, it would be nice. It would also be nice if all broccoli in the world was bacon, but it broccoli isn't bacon, and forums ARE a maze of stupidity and avarice, and the devs do work for a corporation, so the devs won't be responding to every post (nor should they) and so the world is.
They don't have to admit anything. The community manager just have to let us know he hear our concerns and will foreward it to the development team. He don't even have to promise a fix of said problems. All he needs to do is to let us know we are being heard.
In the slot machine mess the team made a statement that no further balancing would be made in a cantina event. Why not post that after the cantina event in the huge thread about slotmachines. If he just made an appearance in the thread and told the community that he hear us and he will voice our concerns to the development team, but as of now there will be no more slotmachine balancing.
You need 2 to communicate. IMO musco does a poor job of communicating. Most, if not all the yellow posts are more information that communication.
I was thinking that but didn't articulate it, thanks. It's a really simple thing they could be doing, but don't. Dulfy and other attendees shouldn't be the only ones posting the Q&A of a cantina; they sticky when a cantina comes up, but don't officially recap what's discussed there. You shouldn't have to visit an outside site like hers(no offense to Dulfy, she runs a good site) to get up-to-date info about the game.