Manfred Rickenbocker
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Posted - 2008.02.18 20:40:00 -
[1]
 Originally by: James Lyrus
Sweet. Dev posts about community being hostile, pounding a drum about offtopic issues, and how that's put them off devblogs.
Community proceeds to be hostile, pound a drum about offtopic issues.
Seriously guys.
Give it a rest.
Jumping down the throat of the dev team, every time they try and interact with the community DOESN'T HELP.
The forums are busy busy. As someone who can read 'em from work, and who slacks off a bit more than he should, I have trouble keeping track.
I can well imagine someone, on the devteam, who's 'day job' is working on EVE, has an even harder job - I mean, what would you rather - work on EVE, or get whined at about your work on EVE? (And everyone elses work on EVE, whilst they're at it, because clearly holding a grudge against the guy who cooks the burgers at lunchtime, for the server going down is BIG AND CLEVER).
Now, I'd like to see more dev<->community interaction, but increasingly I'm thinking that there's a vocal minority of the forum community who simply cannot be polite and constructive. I've seen the mods ... well, working pretty hard actaully, to improve the average quality of the forums, but at the same time... they shouldn't _have_ to. Mods and Devs don't exist to tidy up and follow and otherwise baby endless diatribes of spam and filth. They're there to bring a bit of order from the chaos, to bring a fun and more interesting game.
Moaning at anyone about pet issues, sadly, just makes you come across as a whiner.
QFT
The issue (as mentioned) is there is no way of community policing and easy access to anonymity. Slashdot (as mentioned) works by way of the mod points which is a good way for simple moderation. The "Report" button is a little on the extreme side. The other issue is that players can post with alts specifically used for flaming people (adding to the anonymity factor) and this needs to be discouraged in some fashion. If, perhaps, the portraits were able to be clicked on to get personal info (like in most forums) that also list their alts, this would help. Furthermore, applying mod points to the account instead of just the character would promote some sort of responsibility. I personally take pride in the fact that I have no alts or second accounts with which to post and everything I say is me.
A right-foot-forward so to speak for Developer/Community management will be the CSM if it gets implemented. And, as CCP Nozh said, the Game Development Forum and the Features & Ideas forums need a revamp from their current disarray. To be fair, the job of a Dev is tough, so you have to give credit where credit is due. Its practically impossible to see -every- side to an issue, and insight should be encouraged over flaming.
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