I am disappointed that Calan Caitin's thread was deleted

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Rinaldi, Aug 31, 2019.

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  1. ldykllr

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    You can disagree with what the devs do and still be respectful about it. I don't understand why this is so hard for people.
     
  2. Aetrion

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    It's frustrating when you feel like the devs don't really care for what you have to say and you're stuck between either saying "Oh well, I give up" and walk away from the game or scream louder and more obnoxiously. Nobody wants to be angry and annoying, but nobody wants to be ignored either.
     
  3. Bowen Bloodgood

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    Problem is.. if the devs took the time to respond to every single post they wouldn't have much time for anything else. People also need to understand that they as an individual can't be the center of the dev's universe. Personally, I can say from experience that we're not ignored but I understand it's easy to feel otherwise. There is also a vast difference between listening, and agreeing. That being said, communication has always been a struggle. There's a lot of room for improvement but I think that goes players to.
     
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  4. Aetrion

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    Of course players have a responsibility to give good feedback, but at some point I feel like they just have to either admit that they don't care about people who liked the simplicity of classic UO or actually give them a little consideration for example. There are a ton of things where I wish they would just tell me what their intentions are so I can either commit or leave. They made the XP system a lot more fun for me by removing the upkeep, but the gear system is still a moloch that some people, like me, just don't want to feed. So where does that leave those people? Hope for a similar improvement, or walk away knowing it will just never be for you? There are tons of questions where you can only speculate if things will get better and you can put in the time, or if there is absolutely no intention to change anything and you should just cut your losses and leave.
     
  5. OzzyOsbourne

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    They shouldnt care what you have to say, they should only care what their boss says. Their PR department should care about what you have to say. :)
    But they dont have a PR department LOLZ
     
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  6. Bowen Bloodgood

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    Giving good feedback is great but wasn't really what I was getting at. A big part of it I think lies in our expectations. It's pretty fair to say that when our expectations aren't met we are disappointed and we don't always know how to deal with it or even why it happened.

    To give an example.. way back around the kickstarter days there were quite a number of folks who believed SotA was the "spiritual successor" to Ultima Online.. and by extension that meant there would be open, non-consensual PvP. To say they were disappointed may be a bit of understatement. However, Portalarium never billed the game as such. It is the spiritual successor to Ultima.. not just UO. (Plus they seemed to ignore the fact that UO did away with non-consensual PvP). Those people did not inform themselves or really listen directly to Portalarium when they set their expectations and it led to feelings of being lied to and whatever else.

    Did Portalarium fail to correct a misunderstanding before it was too late? Perhaps.. did they even see it coming? Who knows? But it was still the responsibility of the backer/player to have reasonable expectations. Many of them left disappointed and angry and many blamed Portalarium but they really did it to themselves. If they had listened to Portalarium themselves instead of hearing "UO2" and getting their hopes up with little or no real information it would've saved everyone quite a bit of trouble. (At least that's how I remember it)

    Dev's can't respond to each and every individual. So if you have that expectation you need to put yourself in a position that let's that expectation be met. That means being active and/or putting your question right in their face such as asking on a livestream and hoping they have an answer and time to give it (as an example).. and usually not being discouraged if you don't get that answer. Get yourself in a position to talk to them directly.. that may take patience and persistence and a moment of opportunity but it's possible. But if you're just here posting on the forum, that might not be a realistic expectation to have. Not because they don't care, but because their time is limited and there are a LOT of us and so very few of them.

    They still read the forums of course, but we all want to see that reply that acknowledges they saw your post and cared enough to reply. I understand that but we can't let ourselves translate the perceived silence as being ignored and by extension transpose motives on the devs.. That is literally reading something into nothing and isn't really fair to anyone, especially us when we do it.

    I realize what I'm suggesting isn't always easy, but neither is trying to get someone's attention when they have a lot of other people all trying to do it too at the same time. That's just the position we're in as individual players in a much larger community.
     
  7. Feeyo

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    This was exactly where I was trying to go with my question if it was specifically attacking a person.
     
  8. Heradite

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    Saying that the people who aren't happy with SOTA are the problem and not the product itself is pretty off. If a game (or movie or book or whatever) is good, people's expectations might not be met in some areas but they would be MUCH more forgiving.
     
  9. Hornpipe

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    Apparently, "he was" would be a bit more appropriate. Approximatively like almost any player who has been driven off the game since its very beginning. Like me, for exemple. As long as you understand that some people here won't take any critic positively and will prefer to erase it, you are done with the illusion of constructive discussions about this game.

    Take the "My latest developer challenge!" Thread from @Jack SinAssist as an exemple. Many constructive feedbacks coming from regular players here. Gone. Nowhere to be found. Of course someone will point out that some rule will be broken at some point. But, I mean, really ? The whole thread ? If you have the time to read it, you have the time to answer and adress the concerns, give warnings about the broken rules, etc... The lack of time argument is not valid anymore if you can go through tens of pages of comments in this forum and delete the only threads where critisms doesn't fit your agenda...

    That's ridiculous. At least, I can see that the couple of people behind this mess are getting the proper reputation for that, outside of those walls... and it's totally deserved in my opinion even if I personaly would have prefered a succeeding game without any of this toxic ambience. Like any other player who have quit, I guess.
     
    Last edited: Sep 1, 2019
  10. Bowen Bloodgood

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    It's a good thing I never said that..

    Couple of things. First, mismatching comparison. You're taking what I was talking about out of context. The subject was not the product.. it was communication. The quality of the product is irrelevant in this context. Second. I specifically referred to Portalarium not having the greatest communication multiple times in this thread and was simply elaborating on an earlier point about other side of the issue. Communication goes two ways.

    At no point did I imply, even in the very small bit that you quoted that it was all 100% on the player. If anything "a big part" in your quote suggests that it's not all the player. Nor did I say anything one way or the other about the 'product'.

    It's very simple. You play a part in setting your expectations about anything. You are responsible for that much.
     
  11. Sulaene Moon

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    Release after release there are tons of bugs and it has started to really frustrate people. Then you have a nerf that really wasn’t needed and effected half the player base. Seems this game is running people off in an effort to keep everything balanced and implement so much at once that it causes tons of bugs.

    In the long term Portalarium needs to really think about how they are developing this game. You are frustrating and alienating your players to where they go one to play other game on a better development track.

    Edit: Especially when the only communication is via streams. This is so unacceptable but people don’t want to upset the devs and tell them to communicate via the official forums like every game in the history of gaming.

    Just my two cents
     
    Last edited: Sep 1, 2019
  12. Aetrion

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    I was more just saying I also posted some very critical stuff in that thread, that wasn't meant as an insult, but certainly questioned the wisdom of some decisions in this game, and when stuff like that gets deleted it makes me wonder if it was over the line. Then I realize that a lot of the anger just comes from the feeling of not knowing if I'm supporting a game that's getting better (or at least heading in a direction I consider better), or if I'm just projecting my ideas on something that will never change. I just want to know which direction we're even going, because that determines whether I'm in full support or I simply leave and make no more trouble. It's not knowing that has me posting negative comments.
     
  13. kaeshiva

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    In the name of balance, its necessary to take the overpowered build that everyone's doing and take it down a few notches. Either that, or look at why every other skill tree is less appealing, and give it more appeal. Either of these would arrive at the same endpoint ("balance") but from a dev perspective its much easier to nerf than to buff. So they nerf. Again and again.

    The problem is that they are making changes based on what a data printout says and not based on actual gameplay experience. This change to archery was not because all the archers were doing something overpowered. It was because of a handful of fringe cases who were repeatedly spamming out 1k+ crits with non-skill attacks. The difficulty lies in trying to address the fringe cases and say (no, you can't do this), without screwing it up for everyone else. The door gets slammed behind the top 2% who figure out ways to game the system through minmaxing and everyone else never gets the opportunity to get there because as soon as the first people figure it out, it gets nerfed.

    The difference is now, as opposed to two years ago, the pendulum would have swung a lot farther and the best use of a bow post-nerf would have been whacking something over the head with it. They've gotten a lot better at making smaller, gradual nudges to things rather than all-out ruining a build. Its not perfect, but its a necessary evil to prevent a handful of elite players trivializing the content. The challenge will always be finding a way to do this that doesn't make builds non-viable for non-extreme use.

    I'm still hopeful that we'll start to see less-popular skill trees made more appealing and brought up to the level of fire-mages and archers. In an uncapped system such as we have any sort of balance is a complex problem. At the end of the day though, it may be a lesser evil to just let the handful of people who will always figure out 'that build' do their thing, and instead try to balance the game toward the majority of players instead of toward the 2%.
     
  14. Heradite

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    I think an expectation that people get proper warning points and posts aren't deleted just because they have some criticism is actually pretty fair. I run a forum that's more active than this one and people openly criticize my staff all the time-only when they resort to personal insults do we step in. We edit parts of posts that are against the rules when possible and when the whole post is against the rules we'll hide and hand out a warning so that user knows which rules they broke. We thread ban people of they are causing problems in a specific thread and when they reach 10 points, they can expect a temporary suspension. Only after a few temporary suspensions in most casts do we permanently suspend people. My staff is 100% volunteer-based doesn't get paid (the forum is non-profit after all).

    (Oh and we prefer locking over hiding opening posts of threads so we can not only let the user know why we're not letting that thread happen but future users as well).

    Every forum is run differently but I find one where the forum staff (and this shouldn't be the devs) works with the community rather than above it that people might not be happier (some trolls will complain no matter what) but the community does run smoother. If expecting basic moderation techniques from this forum...than man, I hope they have stopped charging people money for the right to post here especially since the devs seemed to have moved to communicate mostly through the livestreams.
     
  15. Bowen Bloodgood

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    I think the point of contention is the why it was moderated. It's a little more work but I certainly wouldn't be opposed to a policy of "you moderate it, you tell them why" and by them I mean everyone whose posts were affected.. privately. I know they did that to some extent. If not you could always ask and they would tell you exactly what the issue was. Though I haven't been involved in any such threads since Berek was here but in my experience here it's never "just because there's criticism".. However, it's almost always portrayed as such. Devs could do a lot better on that front.
     
  16. Dulayne

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    No, that is your interpretation of what I said. It could be said from your response is that you are looking for an argument from it, but that would be unreasonable for me, even though you chose the words you did. Ah well.
     
  17. Kabalyero Kidd

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    like I said, not arguing... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
     
  18. Sol Stormlin

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    Constructive criticism seems to go further, instead of attacking. I agree that this environment has gone through some pretty bad cycles of extreme negativity which is really hard to deal with. However, I do understand how frustrating it can be when your repeated posts and suggestions for improvements are repeatedly ignored by the Devs when they have asked us to give said suggestions and feedback. I wonder when they will be able to hire another community manager?
     
  19. Alleine Dragonfyre

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    One way to preserve pages you think might wind up on the chopping block is to submit them here for archiving: https://web.archive.org/

    Not that anyone should be deleting posts here that are not personally attacking anyone, however. The moderation on this forum has always been out of hand.
     
    Last edited: Sep 1, 2019
  20. oplek

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    They should look at how Eve Online does it (though I believe some of this is mostly done here).
    • There's a bunch of volunteer moderators (the ISD).
    • It's largely a turn-key operation. They have a set of procedures to follow, instead of winging it.
    • Troll posts, for instance, are locked with the rules cited. (It's also important enough to have enough volunteers so this can be consistently applied).
    • Repeat offenders are escalated to the community manager.
    • If individual comments are too egregious, they're redacted, with rules cited.
    What they don't tend to do is nuke entire threads without a word. That causes a few issues.
    • It makes it look like they've got something to hide, and are trying to squash dissent. Whether you think this is true or not is irrelevant. It's about perceptions.
    • It generates more resentment from those who spent time/effort discussing a topic, even if the original post was trollish.
    Personally, I'm fine with redacting personal attacks on individual devs. It shouldn't be a hostile work environment for them. Just state what your beef is with the state of the game.
     
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