The Daily Grind: Official or unofficial WAR forums?
Filed under: Culture, Forums, News items, Opinion, The Daily Grind
With the recent announcement that Mythic would be bringing the Warhammer Online forums in-house, the topic of the pros and cons of official and unofficial forums have been brought out again. Ryan Shwayder argued very eloquently that developer interaction, ownership, and support for integrated features, and we've now heard from some of the forum managers who will be affected by Mythic's decision to put out their own forums. There are great points across the board, but this morning we thought we'd ask you - in specific relation to Warhammer Online - do you think that Mythic should (or should not) be opening forums at this (post-launch) stage? Perhaps you think they should limit them to only customer service and developer interaction and leave the more free-form discussions elsewhere? Or do you think that the fully-featured forums they're planning is absolutely the way to go - if only to (hopefully) have a moderated forum to discuss all things WAR on? How about those indie forums; what could they do to keep readers coming there? What balance of official and unofficial forums would you like to see for Warhammer Online?


















Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
MrGutts said on 8:33AM 2-11-2009
I think they should make a official forums so when people bitch or criticizes the game on the official forums they can see how quickly EA deletes the post.
Oh wait that is maybe Funcom and Blizzard I am thinking about.
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Vulturion said on 9:49AM 2-11-2009
Well I think that official forums will be be in a better state now than they would have been before launch or at launch - surely the most disgruntled elements have moved on by now ?
With a 6 month plan already laid out, I cannot see there being too many explosive topics left now beyond the eternal class balance maelstrom of any MMO.
Having said that ; building an MMO on PvP players divided into 2 camps AND with access to the minute detail of every battle they have... that doesn't make for a moderator position I'd be volunteering for.
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Leshrac said on 10:26AM 2-11-2009
The worst fan-run forums have to be Warhammer Alliance. The censorship that goes on there is worse then anything EA will do. The best thing that could happen is those fuckers over WHA see a drop in daily hits and visitors. I cannot wait for official Warhammer forums.
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Joshua Meadows said on 10:35AM 2-11-2009
I have to agree with that. I liked Warhammer a lot personally, but therer was (and may still be, I've given up) a long-running issue where the game was completely unplayable on mid-range to high-end equipment. You'd get horrible stuttering and pausing problems, regardless as to whether or not you had settings set max or high. As much as I liked the game, doing anything was near to impossible because of this. My first instinct upon joining was to search out online to see if anyone else was having a problem and I found the WHA forums. I had little interest there beyond the threads talking about solutions for this issue, but even still I saw moderators locking threads about it, saying it wasn't real, even while fifty/sixty people were complaining about it.
My personal last straw was when their swear word filter edited my post for containing "crap"-- in the context of, "I replaced my good graphics card with a crap one and the game works fine now"-- and I edited the post with a comment to the effect of "Wow, that word gets moderated here? That's better than you'll hear on prime time television." I got a nasty warning from a moderator for that, and I haven't gone back to the forum since.
Sammael said on 1:12PM 2-11-2009
I agree whole heartedly about Warhammer Alliance, when the Combat and Careers patch notes, the big one that Mythic had been telling everyone was going to fix everything came out and indicated Mythic didn't know what the state of the game was, carpet bans happened.
Not 1 day, or 3 day bans. But 30 day bans, not for profanity, not for harrassment, but for what goes on everyday on other forums: Passionate discussion of a game people are paying to play and care about.
If Warhammer Alliance cared about the fact they were used as forums since Mythic did not have it's own, they shouldn't have just started mass 30 day bannings as a reaction then should they?
Mythic was cheap to not have it's own forums, this is the post-WOW era and MMO's can't opperate like pre-WOW days. EQ2 had forums, why didn't Warhammer??
If Mythic had made forums from the start, their patch notes would not have confused and depressed as many as they did because they would have had a clue what was going on with their game. But since they did not, they were unaware of the issue threads on different class forums, sticky'd for months but they knew nothing about it.
Mythic should have had forums from day 1, hopefully every MMO company from here on out that has a ounce of brains will see what happened with Mythic and not try to cut corners and peddle support of their game to others.
I bought the CE, I played in Beta, I had high hopes for Warhammer. The lack of forums had a greater effect on the games after launch success then I think many think.
I'd love to see a example of how having no official forums has brought long term success and better customer support as a result. I hope Bioware does not follow in Mythic's footsteps on the forum issue.
Mr Angry said on 10:57AM 2-11-2009
What they need to do, is to temporarily debuff your characters for poor forum performance and breaking the rules, as an incentive to prevent behaviour that is not 'permitted'
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Leshrac said on 1:28PM 2-11-2009
The problem is if Mythic is visiting the Warhammer Alliance forums and everything is being censored then they don't get a true sense of what the issues are and what the temperature of their subscriber base is.
Bottom line - boycott Warhammer Alliance!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Holgar said on 1:52PM 2-11-2009
WarhammerAllaince is run by a bunch of fanboys that make Abriel look tame..... anytime ANYONE makes a post that dosen't conform with their rose tinted version of the game gets told to get stuffed.
I refused to post there for that very reason, if I was to post my opinion (Which is shared with about 70-80% of the people I've talked to in Warhammer) that while the game is Good and has come a long way from the craptastic luanch it still has a LOT of room for improvments some of which are desperatly neededI would undoubtdly get banned for being a trolling WoW fanboi.
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sc2071 said on 3:32AM 2-12-2009
The biggest concern for me is the fact that they will be separating the NA forums from the EU forums. It could be another case of making us in the EU feel like second class citizens. However, I hope we see an effort and face time from Mythic on the EU forums to prove me (and many others) wrong.
I wish they could find a way though to offer up one set of forums for all Warhammer subscribers.
BTW, Warhammer Alliance is fine. There's plenty of "constructive" criticism abound on their forums. I think they are doing good work.
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Micah said on 4:41PM 2-17-2009
Warhammer developers have been saying since day one that they are looking for, and heeding gamers ideas when it comes to future content within the game and ideas for future patching.
Warhammer run forums just seem far over do imo.
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