Lanz
Junior Strategist
Posts: 685
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Post by Lanz on Mar 8, 2017 17:53:44 GMT
You have to keep in mind that the podcasts and places like facebook have a lot of bias AGAINST the forums. That's WHY they found/created a different medium to talk about the game.
It's also important to keep in mind that entire metas may view the forums but don't all post on the forums. My local meta is something like 30-60+ players depending on how wide you want to cast the net. The monthly tournaments at my lgs can turn out 20-30 participants and we even have a local major tournament convention. Of all these players, MOST of them view or browse the forums, but only maybe half a dozen of us regularly post on the forums. As far as I've experienced this is not atypical of a healthy normal meta. That means that the hundreds of active forumites potentially represent thousands of players who still utilized the forums.
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Post by heckler on Mar 8, 2017 18:33:02 GMT
The current state of the PP forums are not necessarily helpful to new players. The only real true function seems to be to release spoilers and to ask rules questions. The problem with this is that people will have to stray to other forums in order to get the other information that they seek to the point where some will end up just posting rules questions elsewhere. I believe that not keeping faction communities was a folly.
PP just gave away their oversight to the largest coherent group of discussions about their own product.
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Post by Korianneder on Mar 8, 2017 19:23:13 GMT
The thing is though that the number of people who use the forums is only a small portion of the total number of players. Even the top players rarely visited the forums. A lot of players on podcasts I listen to openly admit to not visiting the forums. I went to a tournament that had a bunch of muse on minis guys and they said they don't go to the forums that often. The forums were openly mocked on facebook and other sites. Muse on minis used to have a whole article devoted to mocking stupid shit people said on the forums, and they have a rule over there that you can't badmouth the main forums because it happened to frequently. Getting rid of the faction and general discussion forums removes 90% of the whining that was on the main forums, and even though they'll lose some customers because of it, I guarantee they sat down and calculated that this move will make them more money in the long run. Plenty of top players visited the forums and participated in conversations. It may be "cool" to say you don't visit the forums, or to make fun of dumb crap people say, but I guarantee you people who are deep into the game visited the forums. I don't know why you think they calculated anything. PP went from ignoring complaints completely, to making a few comments about complaints, to opening a sub-forum that was (theoretically) meant specifically for complaints, to nuking the site from orbit, all inside of six months. That speaks to me of hurt feelings and a groupmind, not a rational, calculated response. I think they calculated it because I worked in retail for 18 years. No company makes decisions without weighing the pros and cons. I know it's cool to look at company's as these evil cthulhu esque entities that don't think things through, but that's far from the truth. My guess is they knew people were going to complain about mk3. We're nerds. We complain about everything. The development forum was probably their first attempt to contain it. They expected, possibly naively, that people would contain their whining to that forum. They were wrong, so they moved onto plan b which was to shut the forums down for a few days and remove the forums where most of the complaints were. Hopefully this would make the most vocal find another place to post. Businesses make bad decisions all the time, but most of the big ones don't make them due to hurt feelings. I guarantee this decision was planned and based on some research. They made this decision because they think it will help their business in the long run.
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sezmra
Baby's First Wargame
Posts: 5
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Post by sezmra on Mar 8, 2017 19:36:25 GMT
I think the OP is overstating things. One of the reasons I decided to play WMH after getting tired of GW's BS was that the online community existed. I doubt I'm alone in that. The current craptastic forums wouldn't have drawn my interest. Sure, PP is a business. So is Blizzard, and they have forums, and are about 100x the size of PP. It is plenty possible to find a solution to what the OP perceived as the problem without simply taking their toys home in a tiff. People need to hold their feet to the fire. Ask them for explanations at a conns. They want us to go to social media? Cool. Ask for explanations there. Fragmenting the community was not a smart business decision. I also provide this as evidence that they made their decision based on the wrong ideas. This is PP's description of forums: "Online communities are notoriously toxic and nasty to deal with. This is partially because humans are naturally more motivated to complain about things they don’t like than they are to praise the things that they enjoy. It is further compounded by what is known as the online disinhibition effect (the abandonment of social restrictions and inhibitions found in normal face-to-face communication when using remote electronic communications). The anonymity provided by the Internet makes it very easy to dehumanize and disrespect people who are not in the room with you. It is easy to forget that the “they”—often used in a condescending manner—is actually referring to real people, most of whom are sharing an office while we read your feedback." That sounds pretty negative, yeah? I have a degree in the area they are trying to instruct me about, and I know what they are saying is bullshit. Yes, online interactions can indeed fall into a spiral of negativity, but there are approaches competent community managers can take to reel that crap back in. There is tech available to help as well. PP went the easy route. I feel like they've amputated limbs without any real diagnosis, ya know? With professional experience in this field too, watching this debacle go down has been frustrating. I don't recall PP taking steps to improve the situation, real steps like re-focusing community involvement, taking the reigns of moderation and buckling down... pick a thing, any thing out of the standard community-management toolset. PP didn't give their fan-base enough credit here and straight up avoided any transparency about what they were doing. Tack on a few days notice to react, provide feedback, save data, spread the word...? That's nowhere near enough time for the changes that were incoming. Oof. Marketing perceptions, eliminating negativity, trolls, whatever your reasons are -- instead of a community that's angry with the forum changes, you've got a community that's just perplexed at what a business has done, why they've done it, and if they should trust their intentions in the future. I guess it's working, we're debating motives on another forum instead of complaining on theirs.
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Post by redoctober on Mar 8, 2017 19:55:08 GMT
There's no point. PP keeps deleting posts.
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Post by jynxed on Mar 8, 2017 20:33:08 GMT
Plenty of top players visited the forums and participated in conversations. It may be "cool" to say you don't visit the forums, or to make fun of dumb crap people say, but I guarantee you people who are deep into the game visited the forums. I don't know why you think they calculated anything. PP went from ignoring complaints completely, to making a few comments about complaints, to opening a sub-forum that was (theoretically) meant specifically for complaints, to nuking the site from orbit, all inside of six months. That speaks to me of hurt feelings and a groupmind, not a rational, calculated response. I think they calculated it because I worked in retail for 18 years. No company makes decisions without weighing the pros and cons. I know it's cool to look at company's as these evil cthulhu esque entities that don't think things through, but that's far from the truth. My guess is they knew people were going to complain about mk3. We're nerds. We complain about everything. The development forum was probably their first attempt to contain it. They expected, possibly naively, that people would contain their whining to that forum. They were wrong, so they moved onto plan b which was to shut the forums down for a few days and remove the forums where most of the complaints were. Hopefully this would make the most vocal find another place to post. Businesses make bad decisions all the time, but most of the big ones don't make them due to hurt feelings. I guarantee this decision was planned and based on some research. They made this decision because they think it will help their business in the long run. I don't really agree... For starters, PP is a pretty small company in the grand scheme of things, and they're not exactly business wizards. In fact, they're much more like your stereotypical nerd who went into business because he/she liked wargames. In fact, they've shown highly emotional reactions to criticism before, specifically the comments after people complained about skorne after the Mk3 leak, and the comments after PoMs insider when many disgruntled menites raged on the boards. So I think PP does actually make decisions based on hurt feelings occasionally because they've shown evidence of it before. As for the fact that forms aren't maintainable, it's already been pointed out that that isn't the case, as many much larger companies have huge thriving forum communities, and people like me frequent forums of games they like to discuss and share ideas. People have complained on forums since the dawn of time. Take a walk over to the league of legends forums for instance. You don't see those companies nuking their forums though, only wargames for some reason. I thought the game would be better when PP released a medium to make quick 'patches' to their game to improve everyone's play experience. You can only imagine my dismay when instead of interacting on a logical level with their community, they decided to butt heads with them and tell them they were wrong instead. Even when they had to errata Skorne because of the obvious design flaws, they kept the same attitude. Designers should listen to their communities, instead of treating them as lessers who couldn't possibly be better at theorycrafting or design than they are. And that's how I and I'm sure others feel they're treated by PP.
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Post by iamlegion on Mar 8, 2017 20:57:27 GMT
Designers should listen to their communities, instead of treating them as lessers who couldn't possibly be better at theorycrafting or design than they are. And that's how I and I'm sure others feel they're treated by PP. Absolutely, PP clearly is still acting in an emotional way rather than rational. I remember a few months back getting a "temporary ban, for inflammatory posting" because I called out PPS_Soles for being rude towards someone in an insider thread. PP has made a business decision, it's just a bad one. Closing their forums will hurt them dramatically.
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Post by Azuresun on Mar 8, 2017 23:56:57 GMT
Plenty of top players visited the forums and participated in conversations. It may be "cool" to say you don't visit the forums, or to make fun of dumb crap people say, but I guarantee you people who are deep into the game visited the forums. I don't know why you think they calculated anything. PP went from ignoring complaints completely, to making a few comments about complaints, to opening a sub-forum that was (theoretically) meant specifically for complaints, to nuking the site from orbit, all inside of six months. That speaks to me of hurt feelings and a groupmind, not a rational, calculated response. I think they calculated it because I worked in retail for 18 years. No company makes decisions without weighing the pros and cons. I know it's cool to look at company's as these evil cthulhu esque entities that don't think things through, but that's far from the truth. My guess is they knew people were going to complain about mk3. We're nerds. We complain about everything. The development forum was probably their first attempt to contain it. They expected, possibly naively, that people would contain their whining to that forum. They were wrong, so they moved onto plan b which was to shut the forums down for a few days and remove the forums where most of the complaints were. Hopefully this would make the most vocal find another place to post. Businesses make bad decisions all the time, but most of the big ones don't make them due to hurt feelings. I guarantee this decision was planned and based on some research. They made this decision because they think it will help their business in the long run. Problem was, shutting down the forums should have been somewhere around Plan E.
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Post by Korianneder on Mar 9, 2017 0:13:36 GMT
I think they calculated it because I worked in retail for 18 years. No company makes decisions without weighing the pros and cons. I know it's cool to look at company's as these evil cthulhu esque entities that don't think things through, but that's far from the truth. My guess is they knew people were going to complain about mk3. We're nerds. We complain about everything. The development forum was probably their first attempt to contain it. They expected, possibly naively, that people would contain their whining to that forum. They were wrong, so they moved onto plan b which was to shut the forums down for a few days and remove the forums where most of the complaints were. Hopefully this would make the most vocal find another place to post. Businesses make bad decisions all the time, but most of the big ones don't make them due to hurt feelings. I guarantee this decision was planned and based on some research. They made this decision because they think it will help their business in the long run. Problem was, shutting down the forums should have been somewhere around Plan E. Maybe it was. Everything combined seems like a total overhaul of the company. The forums being taken down seems like just a piece of a huge change in the company. Wonder if I can convince my local players to pick up some Guild Ball models.
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Lanz
Junior Strategist
Posts: 685
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Post by Lanz on Mar 9, 2017 0:18:28 GMT
They just nuked the Press Ganger program today too. PP's CEO has been replaced by a GW Synth or something.
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Haight
Junior Strategist
Posts: 396
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Post by Haight on Mar 9, 2017 0:41:54 GMT
There's no point. PP keeps deleting posts. Not all of us were. Some of us made it very clear that we did not agree with the new terms of service and the removal of the faction / gen dis areas and could not in good conscience moderate along their guidelines. I essentially handed in my resignation effective monday evening, pending a few administrative details. I have not lifted a finger in moderation since, nor do i plan to under the new terms of service. I know I am not the only one that feels that way, but i'm not certain if anyone else has expressed it like I have. We also got absolutely no notice, it was as much a shock to us as it was to the user-base. The notice of the gang being cashiered is both shocking and not surprising: I bet this has to do with the M:tG judge lawsuit. ---- I would like to say that PPS_Valerie, the Mod handler is a very cool person and I would be extremely surprised if the new ToS or forum shuttering were her ideas. I had a lot of occasion to interact with her, and it just strikes me as something out of character. She was always VERY open minded about differing opinions, even ones that may not have been very popular. That said, enforcing it is literally her job, so i'm sure she's in the unenviable position of having to follow orders or go without a paycheck, which is always a shitacular position to be in. Anywho. I see a lot of comments in a lot of places referring to the heavy handed PP board moderation. I handed out 11 infractions and one temp ban in my ... 16 months as a mod. I preferred to ask people to stop cutting the shit (sometimes even noting i agreed with them). I probably was one, if not the most lenient of the mods, but still. They are a good bunch of people for the most part, and don't deserve a lot of the shit they are receiving in various places, at least up until Monday (which i know what i'm replying to above is regarding this weeks moderation, i get that, this is more of a general comment). They really were a hardworking crew which did their level best to keep a balance between acceptable levels of expression without delving into hostility or edgelord forums. Some may have had different personal lines where that fell, but they all were doing what they were doing to make the place better how they saw it.
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Post by Swampmist on Mar 9, 2017 0:45:24 GMT
There's no point. PP keeps deleting posts. Not all of us were. Some of us made it very clear that we did not agree with the new terms of service and the removal of the faction / gen dis areas and could not in good conscience moderate along their guidelines. I essentially handed in my resignation effective monday evening, pending a few administrative details. I have not lifted a finger in moderation since, nor do i plan to under the new terms of service. I know I am not the only one that feels that way, but i'm not certain if anyone else has expressed it like I have. We also got absolutely no notice, it was as much a shock to us as it was to the user-base. The notice of the gang being cashiered is both shocking and not surprising: I bet this has to do with the M:tG judge lawsuit. ---- I would like to say that PPS_Valerie, the Mod handler is a very cool person and I would be extremely surprised if the new ToS or forum shuttering were her ideas. I had a lot of occasion to interact with her, and it just strikes me as something out of character. She was always VERY open minded about differing opinions, even ones that may not have been very popular. That said, enforcing it is literally her job, so i'm sure she's in the unenviable position of having to follow orders or go without a paycheck, which is always a shitacular position to be in. Anywho. I see a lot of comments in a lot of places referring to the heavy handed PP board moderation. I handed out 11 infractions and one temp ban in my ... 16 months as a mod. I preferred to ask people to stop cutting the shit (sometimes even noting i agreed with them). I probably was one, if not the most lenient of the mods, but still. They are a good bunch of people for the most part, and don't deserve a lot of the shit they are receiving in various places, at least up until Monday (which i know what i'm replying to above is regarding this weeks moderation, i get that, this is more of a general comment). They really were a hardworking crew which did their level best to keep a balance between acceptable levels of expression without delving into hostility or edgelord forums. Some may have had different personal lines where that fell, but they all were doing what they were doing to make the place better how they saw it. Can I pin posts? Because this post deserves to be pinned Also, this is why we have a like button guys! Smash it, and show some support!
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Post by redoctober on Mar 9, 2017 0:48:49 GMT
Haight : I should have elaborated more in my post. I was referring to the random deletion of posts or entire threads since the reboot. Anything that is not full of rainbows and unicorns concerning PP is being shut down. I for one really appreciate you taking the time to give us a brief view of what has occurred. That is more than PP has done. I also completely agree that forum moderators are often put in difficult positions. You are unpaid volunteers that are tasked to bring some level of civility to a message forum. For that, I thank you.
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joedj
Junior Strategist
Posts: 513
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Post by joedj on Mar 9, 2017 0:52:41 GMT
The OP's theory for the 'purge' is intriguing. [Intrigue!]
I'm in business. When I sell my business, which I will eventually, I will want to eliminate 'baggage' prior, to make the business more attractive to potential buyers. The Faction Forums/Discussion Forums are a form of baggage. So is the PG program (which I am/was part of).
My concern is for an imminent sale of Privateer Press, Inc. I hope to enjoy many, many more years of this hobby, and yes, guided by THIS company and its enthusiastic/creative personnel. I think there could be worse, non-fans & in-it-for-ONLY-money folks at the helm...
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Haight
Junior Strategist
Posts: 396
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Post by Haight on Mar 9, 2017 0:54:39 GMT
Haight : I should have elaborated more in my post. I was referring to the random deletion of posts or entire threads since the reboot. Anything that is not full of rainbows and unicorns concerning PP is being shut down. I for one really appreciate you taking the time to give us a brief view of what has occurred. That is more than PP has done. I also completely agree that forum moderators are often put in difficult positions. You are unpaid volunteers that are tasked to bring some level of civility to a message forum. For that, I thank you. Hey man, i know. It's all good. No harm no foul. I'm a pretty easy to get along with guy. I know you meant nothing by it, and frankly your post was just a nice lead in for me to get some stuff off my chest, wasn't even really aimed at you. @swampmist - Heh, thanks man. Appreciate the kind words. I mean... it was symbolic more than anything, i knew it would accomplish zero, but still, it felt like the right thing to do. It made it hard because PPS_Valerie has been a great handler to us, and i was particularly a devil's advocate a lot of the time, and she was cool with that. I have ZERO bad things to say about her.
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