Curse

luilui · Nov 16, 2006, 01:16 AM // 01:16

Guru is one of the biggest GW forum. There are many posts and ideas in this forum, some are good some are not so good. I suggest if a thread that have 200 replies or reply from 100+ people (or whatever number) deserve a respond from an Anet staff. Rather they like the idea, dont like idea, why they like it or the reason why they dont like it.

I'm not asking them to reply to every thread, only those popular ones. Would be better than now, people put in a lot of effort to describe and explain their ideas, if the idea get enough respond from the community i think Anet should at least tell us what they think. Just some basic respect from them to those who try to contribute.

Thallandor · Nov 16, 2006, 03:23 AM // 03:23

Well to start off, first i would like to express that i agree with the OP to some extend that some poster make extreme efforts to express their thesis style ideas or 30+ pages of flames and debates on some highly divided issue and theres has been call for more developer invlovement on more occassions than once. There have been some responses either from Galie or Alex in the past on many issues but seemingly its not enough. And that primarily is part of the problem. However we must understand that:

Whatever they say, its not ever going to be enough or satisfy everybody.

There are several reasons against the idea:

1)The forums here contains posters from all background, those who love to rant,give ideas, QQers, Forum PvPers and what not. If we were to set a system that demands developer response from view counts or replies to the topic, soon you will start to see posters relpying to their own post/spamming just to keep their threads alive and try to hit the limit making this a modding nightmare as well as a PR disaster for Anet.

2)Dev response/community interaction are usually most valuable during developmental phase of the game/project while Bugs reporting/testing post release of the game. A game in development usually recieves more Developer response than one that has already been released for months/years, this is not surprising.

3)Based on Anet's model of staggered expansion/Chapter production, one must understand that not every person responsible for the production of each chapter or in the company itself understand every single issue that the community brought up just as not everyone on these forums understand the significance of every issue raised if we actually agree on anything at all. Hence often the answers that we want maynot always be those that we expect or are looking for from Anet. Which is partly the reason why Galie cant answer everyone's questions everytime she logs into LA and expressed that she needs to check back with HQ.

4)To ask Anet representative to post and express their views more often is like asking them to set themselves up for flames since negativity almost always resides over logic and reason in forums most of the time. Since policies will no matter how perfect usually will be unpopular with one group or another, its impossible to please everyone. Considering the rate of updates and changes that occurs in GW as compared to some other online games, Anet would also have to hire a team of forum readers who rotate in shifts just to try to scratch the surface of most of the concerns/ideas expressed on this forums and others.

5)Ask yourself why NCsoft support always ask you to post here in these forums to attract more disccussions and you will understand that they do this to aviod having to spend too much resources dealing with day to day things like: "Hey Anet, i cant play GW cause my internet connection is busted HELP!!!". But legitimate responses usually get more attentions and dicsussions and the community usually provides its own form of solution since one must remember that whatever problems that someone had encountered, someone else probably has experience the same thing at one time or another and have already solutions or advice to offer.

6)There has been more feedback channels that have opened up from Anet like the recent thread in the general discussions thread: "Ask Anet a question" by Gaile and hopefully more of such focused techniques will be used in the future.

I hope this post helped explained things alittle.

Kool Pajamas · Nov 16, 2006, 05:51 AM // 05:51

Yea theres been some threads where I really wish an Anet employee responded in it but I'm sure that if they dont respond they have a reason for it, so it doesnt really bother me.

Scutilla · Nov 16, 2006, 06:04 AM // 06:04

I think Thallandor summed it up pretty well.

Only thing that I would add is a reminder that about 90% of the posts on the forums are from Gaile, with a few from Alex Weekes and a couple other people. Gaile is PR, she is not the development team. She has no way of determining if a given idea would be considered by the dev team, or if it would even be possible.

To do so she would have to go around asking them about every single thread that broke the 200 (or whatever) post mandatory response limit. Putting this on top of her many many other duties would unnecessarily increase her workload.

Now, I'm not saying that she doesn't do this already- there have been plenty of threads where she says she's not sure about something, but will go check with the appropriate dev and get back to us, and she usually does so. But making it mandatory for her to do it for certain threads is a bit unfair towards her, no?