Jeff Freeman

Not so long ago, Chris Cao posted a post to the official SWG forums which some folk wrote about elsewhere.

I will not discuss that post.

I am a total outsider on this. Just want to make that clear. I have no inside knowledge. I read things on the internet, just like everybody else. I haven’t been on the SWG team in a long time, and I don’t work at SOE now. Just so you know where I’m coming from here. If you have your own opinion, good on’ ya.

I’m mentioning this post only because suddenly the number-one essay on this site is bit of half-formed, sensationalist rambling from eight months ago. Because that old chestnut is commonly linked as being relevant to the post mentioned above (in at least one case, mislabeled as being a response to the above).

Example A: Lum pointed a mad finger my way:

This is mildly interesting in an SOE-watcher sense (one wonders how much commitment post-Raph Koster SOE has to a vibrant forum community, especially given the unrelieved anger of disenfranchised pre-NGE players) but more interesting from a more general standpoint. Specifically: is Cao correct? Are MMO forums so high-volume and high-noise that they are useless as forms of usable feedback?

Example B, Raph links it as discussion about whether forums should be run:

Tide’s Horizon and Lum are both talking about this, but I am frankly a little loath to. I don’t want to come across as criticizing, since that’s not really my intent. But lately there’s been a spate of discussion about what community relations is, whether forums should be run, etc.

Example C, Tide’s Horizon went link-mad in an opening paragraph:

It’s been debated not that much, but providers are starting to question the need to have official forums. This was one of the first things I ever wrote about. And later I realized that forums were a really important part of MMO’s for players not just communicating and sharing information, but establishing their personal reputations.

Example D, MMODump reblogs Lum (We can do that? Man, I’d have been updating a lot more frequently if I knew that!).

Example E, Star Wars: Blogs | Fairy tales really do come true….kinda blogs this:

Recently Chris Cao preformed the flame of all flames against SWG subscribers. Raph Koster (Original SWG game designer) Jeff Freeman, among others, were quick to blog the errors of his ways.

That last one is the real kicker. I get hits from that daily, whereas the other blogs have moved on to more recent events. I think it’s terribly misleading.

One: Raph Koster was very careful to explain, twice, and in bold as well as italic:

this post isn’t about SWG or Chris Cao’s statements.

He then wrote on, as promised: Words which were not about SWG or Chris Cao’s statements.

Two: My post was written eight months ago, so it couldn’t possibly have been a response. It doesn’t even address the same topic, saying nothing explicitly about the value of forum-communities. Implicitly, a person might assume that I post about things that I care about, and so therefore might care about forum communities. One really must read beyond an update’s title. Sometimes I am snarky.

Lum was unfair as well.

I am not post-Raph Koster SOE. SOE has it’s own website, and this ain’t it. Know what they have on their website? Forums! Of all people, that one knows better than to post to a developer’s snarky blog and assign their silly opinion to their employer.

My personal opinion about the usefulness of official forums with moderators to police speach as compared to an official blog, plus fan-blogs, plus fan-forums and an active, network-building community relations team doesn’t mean I am uncommitted to vibrant forum communities. I’m criticizing software and strategy. “Forums are Bad” is a snarky title.

I’m not against vibrant forum communities, I’m for vibrant community networks.

Raph linked to “Forums are Bad”, under the pretext of it being part of the discussion contextually subtitled “recent discussion of whether forums should be run”. But it’s old discussion of where, how and what-else; not a lately discussion of whether to run them.

But all that linkage has brought me up as the poster-boy for anti-forum communities. I need to clarify, and I’ve been wanting to for weeks. Just puttin’ it off, ya know?

Most game companies run official forums. I do not fail to consider that this may indicate my personal opinion about forums is incompatible with just about every professional community manager’s strategy. That’s fine. I’m thinking of a different strategy. And this is my blog, so n’ya.

If my personal opinion were not contrary then I wouldn’t have bothered to post.

I will use the bold and italics trick, so as to be certain this comes across:

I think that a lot of what developers are currently doing with forum software should be done with something else.

My crazy theory is that some helpful things might have been invented in the past decade or two.

Forum-tech with features to enable non-forum functionality is not the best. Some new stuff has been invented and perfected, and some of that is better even than forum software which can be abused just-so to deliver similar functionality.

By the by, the suggestion for supporting player-run rather than company-run forums is for the players’ benefit. Some have said that they’ll only be able to express themselves openly and honestly if what they are saying is on the official site, where it will be moderated by the developer. They accuse my enthusiasm for fan-run forums to be a desire to silence them.

That is daft.

I am not advocating just shutting off official forums, nor even outsourcing forums to the wilds of the internet. It is to say: some of the things you need to do, you could do better with more modern software than the decade-old junk you are using. Other things you are hosting which are also good, would be even better if they weren’t being handled by your big clumsy company mitts.

They’re still doing IRC dev chats and posting logs of the chat text. Dudes! Do it on Ventrillo, record it and podcast it. What the hell!?

Back in the day, Ranger’s Glade, EQMonks and the Druid’s Grove (ferexamples) were better than the class-forums on the official EverQuest site. They didn’t really flourish ’til the EQ forums went away for a bit.

Interestingly, the specific forums they replaced were never really the hate-filled angsty mess that I complained about. That just supports my position all the more: These were (are?) better than even quite good official forums.

Raph disagrees with what I said in that update anyway:

It may be true that having forums is just a big money sink that provides a hellish pit of whining and contradictory drivel. But you should have them anyway, because it is evidence that you are actually listening. It is the equivalent of posting your phone number, directly comparable to meeting someone’s gaze across a table. It’s inviting people to come over to your place to catch up on what’s going on in their lives. Telling people you’ll plant bugs in their houses instead (aka “monitor the fansites”) is not really an acceptable substitute, though you should of course feel free to go visit from time to time.

I believe it is possible to provide evidence that you are listening, without running official forums.

Actually listening, for example.

Also by portaling from your official (blog) site to interesting updates, threads, people, on fan-run sites. Point-out things you find great to say “Hey, we are listening and we love you!” as much or more than official forums currently do.

A little quote box, link and one-line comment on an official site to my wee fansite would mean more to me, all my fansite regulars, and every other fansite, than any number of replies on an official forum (especially when for 99% of your users, said number is going to be zero).

I’m suggesting community networks as a replacement to community forums wearing a corporate gag, not “planting bugs”.

Then there is issue number two: official forums weaken fansite communities. Fansites cannot thrive for long without folk.

Exception: If Raph Koster is on your team, then yes, run your own official forums regardless. Spend less on community managers, though, ’cause he’ll be doing about 75% of their job in his spare time, off-hours, lunch-breaks and into the wee hours of the night and he’ll also be out on blogs, fansites, game news sites, mailing lists and newsgroups, too; helping those to thrive in spite of an official site capturing all the eyeballs. No one else does this, because he started doing it before community management pulled-in the reigns on that sort of thing and by the time it did, he was a big enough wig to be excepted.

Alright, so official forums aren’t all bad, as “Forums are Bad” would seem to (’cause it does) say. In comment-replies to that update, I was criticized for failing to mention the positive things that forums do.

I have positives, right off the top of my head:

How Forums are Good, whether official or fan-run

• Having online out-of-game (or more accurately, between-game-session) virtual hang-out places is good. People frequently cannot play (from work, etc.) all the times they want to, so this allows them that. They want it, and if you don’t offer what they want, then a competitor will.
• It keeps them “in the game”, at least mentally. If people lose interest in the game before they lose interest in that community, so what? You’ve still got ‘em as customers, and Raph will tell you that forum is part of the game anyway.
• Forums are multi-brained sources of information about games too big for any one brain to contain, which is an irreplaceable resource when you’re a one-brained dev trying to upgrade, enhance, fix, or completely-ruin said game.

How Forums are also Good, when official

• They enable the publisher to control the discussion. By stifling the popularity of third-party sites, they can ensure the majority of discussion takes place within the realm of their control. There they can guide forum communities toward particular topics as well as conclusions, promote specific agendas, reward agreeable members, banish contrary opinions, control access, and all that jazz. Mind, they don’t generally, ’cause few people are that good at doing the above, but they could.

Why players think that’s a good thing for them is beyond me.

This may be be something publishers see as a positive to overwhelm all negatives, but the number of players who think official forums are doing them some kind of favor is shocking.

If AFK Gamer ran some forums, that’d be a better place to talk about WoW (since that’s what he’s playing now) than the official forums. Few other fan blogs could get a healthy population of regular users. Mostly this is because the official forums create a gravity-well so deep that only great content can pull enough folk out of orbit.

The Rantings of Lum The Mad was just like that. You think the official forums would have allowed this? Would you know who Scott Jennings was if he just posted on whatever passed for official forums at the time? For that matter – and this was pretty much before there even was such a thing as a “blog” – would LtM ever have been popular if it were just forums? Have you noticed that blog thing has really taken off lately?

Even with official forums, why not at least use the ol’ blog-with-thread-links format which proved to be superior before there was even such a thing as blogs?

Moving on…

Since “Forums are Bad” keeps getting hit now from a reference embedded in SWG commentary, folk keep commenting on it about SWG, SOE and the NGE. That isn’t the topic of that update, and it wasn’t written in response to Chris Cao’s SWG post, and it doesn’t have anything to do with SWG specifically.

Most especially:

I cannot comment on SWG, SOE or the NGE.

I’ll probably regret even have mentioned the Cao post, way up yonder. Even with all the “my personal opinion” and “I know nothing” disclaimers around it. Even having noted that it is all I have to say about that, and that I don’t wish to discuss it. Someone’s gonna post a slam and challenge me to talk.

I’m gonna delete those comments.

I cannot comment on SWG, SOE, or the NGE and even if I could, I wouldn’t. I don’t even know you.

SOE has an official site with official forums so if you want to talk about them, go there! Or put up your own blog and go nuts. Whatever works for you. Send me a trackback, I’ll read it.

Comments to the “Forums are Bad” update initially tended to be responses from folks who had read the whole update. All of nearly a quarter-dozen people, ’cause my blog is not popular.

Then later comments mostly challenged the statement “Forums are Bad”. Unclear to me was whether the update had been read beyond the title. Many took “forums” to mean “people who post on forums” rather than “forum software as it is utilized” (rather even than just to mean “forums”).

Now thanks to examples A through E, the new comments (including some deletia, and some private email explaining – in depth, and sometimes threateningly – how much I suck), are mostly bristling attacks on SOE (and/or me).

That is all very far beyond my ability to address. I hope this has served to clear-up some misunderstandings in that respect.

Still, it makes me feel bad to ignore comments altogether, though there’s sometimes little I can address. For example, a lengthy comment from Phil of the internet obviously required a great deal of time to compose and deserves at least the courtesy of acknowledgment.

But snipping away all the things that I cannot talk about, I am left with this:

Phil wrote:

I’m almost certain Raph was the only one with half a brain.

Phil, thanks for writing. I disagree with you.

I cannot comment on whether this disagreement is a defense of Raph or a slam on the rest of us. So it goes. Anyway.

‘Love all you guys, really. Hate it when a forum is dev-only-post, reply-disabled, ’cause that tells me that it should not be a forum. And I like the fansites which used to be and seem to be no where now. I think LindenLabs has a strategy which is different than other publishers, beyond simply blog vs. forums. And it’s working for ‘em. Not proof I am right, of course. I’m just sayin’.

This, all of it, is just my personal opinion, man. Chill-out if you disagree. It’s ok. Really!

I need to get back to some old favorites of my own though, come to think of it… I miss ‘em!