3 reasons why the design team shouldn't visit ENWorld

[Steelwill]

I disagree with this guy. Perhaps that's the difference between Indie and not so Indie?

You have to take the good and the bad, the love and the hate...but LEARN NOT TO TAKE IT PERSONALLY. Divorce yourself somehow from taking it personally, because THAT'S when it actually affects you.

Forums are important for various reasons. First, if you are there on your personal forums and they see some sort of presences, it shows that you care. It doesn't matter if you actually care or not, the fact that it APPEARS that you care is what is important (I suppose that puts me as Lawful Evil in this context?).

Second, apart from surveys and market studies, forums are feedback. If the crowd hates what you've done, you get immediate response and feedback.

This is important if you release a product. The immediate response will be from hardcore fans...but many times these fans will relay their feelings of a game or other item to the world at large. Once this is done, this portrayal will stick unless something else has already been done.

I remember a computer game series a few years back called Star Fleet Command. Star Fleet Command 2 was known to be buggy, but still had decent gameplay. People stuck with it. Star Fleet command 3 was created ignoring any of the fans inputs, their responses to changes in the system, and basically telling the forum fans that the new way was better then the old. The game was reviled overall by the hardcore fans (a few liked it, but a majority did not) and word of mouth sent the game to the dumps. It's worth a decent sum these days in the right circles...but the events of that game meant that it may have made money, but not enough for the company to continue the game line or even give it decent support. SFC III kind of was the end of the line you could say.

Word of mouth is a powerful thing, and if you don't pay attention to what your hardcore fans want or at least say, it can end up biting you.

In many ways you don't even have to heed what they say, much like Activision did with SFC3. What you DO need to do is to be aware of it and be able to find ways to counter their bad press they will undoubtably give you (there I go again, showing the colors of a LE character). If you can do this, bonus to you, and even better for being aware of it and countering it before damage was done.

So, unlike the author of the article, I think it's actually VERY important for the creators to pay attention to their forums and heed what the general mood and attitude of those forums are headed and what is occuring in your own community.

I generally agree with the above quoted post, but would like to add, the forums will contain alot of feedback,good and bad, but as far as the outright flame and vitriol or in some cases nonsense entirely, isn't that what forums are moderated for? I mean even an angry opinion can be conveyed without being unintelligible fury.

 

[Jarrod]

One final point that I didn't see mentioned:

4) It can be legally dangerous.

I remember the old Babylon 5 forums where JMS (the writer/creator) would absolutely _not_ read threads. The reason was simple: if a person posted an idea that was later used in the show that person could claim JMS copied them. This included if JMS already had the idea, or came up with it independently, or or or...

So what happens if I start a thread about the Gerbil People, some fancy new race, and then WoTC releases a source book about the Gerbil People? If I can show that the developers read these forums, I can claim that they stole my idea. Even if they didn't! In effect, by reading forums the developers limit what they can produce to things that nobody else has thought of, rather than the things they think of. That's dangerous.

 

[kinem]

For a company like Paizo, that actively works to maintain good relations with the fans, it makes sense to visit the forums.

For a company like WotC, that seems to screw the fans at every turn for short term profits (making some shoddy products even in the 3.X era, withdrawing old edition PDFs, killing the old Dragon & Dungeon magazines, randomizing minis and card packs, promising and not delivering products, requiring subsciptions and online access to use the character builder, regularly firing designers that get too experienced, always pumping out too much new rules material, etc., - not to mention giving us the controversial 4e which many fans dislike and trying to tell us it's "better", and which has no useful online SRD) - it makes sense for them to stay the hell away from feedback.

 

[Umbran]

I don't see how getting as much consumer feedback as humanly possible is anything but a good thing.

Oh, that's simple - because having a ton of information is not useful if it is bad information. Using information that is biased, incorrect, or just of the wrong type can harm your decisions. And, having the information is not helpful if you don't use it properly.

The people on internet forums are usually easily demonstrated to be a non-representative sample of your customers. Thus, the information from forums is apt to be biased.

Also, it is known (and easily demonstrable) that a user with a complaint frequently doesn't tell you what their problem is - they tell you what their proposed solution is. If you follow that information blindly you make changes in your product without understanding the actual problem, which generally leads you into trouble.

Now, there are folks who are skilled at the art of weeding through information from customers, and plucking out the useful data, and feeding that into the design process in a constructive way. However, those people usually aren't designers - they are product managers and business analysts. You'll occasionally find a designer who is also a capable analyst, but generally speaking, the skill sets are different, so they're different people.

So, it may be that the company should have someone looking at forums, but that person probably shouldn't be a designer.

 

[DEFCON 1]

For a company like Paizo, that actively works to maintain good relations with the fans, it makes sense to visit the forums.

For a company like WotC, that seems to screw the fans at every turn for short term profits ... it makes sense for them to stay the hell away from feedback.

Or looking at it another way... those of us who don't give a rat's ass about Paizo or their products just don't go onto their forums at all (let alone go there to complain about what they are doing). Whereas there are thousands of people who don't like WotC does, but still can't help but go there or here to bemoan that fact.

And kinem... your post was a perfect example of why listening to forum posts such as yours is not actually useful for many people/companies... because it's all just complaining white noise.

 

[kinem]

defcon1: The Paizo folks don't just read their own forums, they come here too and probably other places. And not all of the posts at their own forums are positive, but they deal with it and often in a constructive way.

Why do I care about WotC when I no longer buy their products? Because they hold a lot of intellectual property rights, the future of which I do care about.

As for your attack on my post as "complaining white noise" I think it is rather foolish of you. Yes I complained about WotC, but I gave a lot of specific reasons that they would do well to pay attention to (or would have done well to, though it may be too late for WotC as a company to get customer favor back) and certainly not random "noise".

 

[DEFCON 1]

As for your attack on my post as "complaining white noise" I think it is rather foolish of you. Yes I complained about WotC, but I gave a lot of specific reasons that they would do well to pay attention to (or would have done well to, though it may be too late for WotC as a company to get customer favor back) and certainly not random "noise".

Except you gave no evidence to show why some of the things you mentioned were actually true, or in fact necessarily a bad thing.

Taking Dragon and Dungeon in-house had a specific and worthwhile reason... making sure product produced for it had been designed and vetted by the R&D department.

You can't use the Character Builder without a subscription to DDI. So what? Why should you be able to?

Did the firings at WotC have any appreciable effect that those of us outside the company can actually point to it and say "if this person was still here, this bad result X wouldn't have happened"? Or is it just people who like certain designers don't get to experience a "Dungeons & Dragons" product from them anymore?

The "controversial" production of 4E sold many more books than the last gasps of 3.5 books they had produced. So moving to 4E was necessary for WotC from a cashflow point of view because there was nothing left for them to produce on the scale they needed as a very large game company. While a small company like Paizo can live on the smaller scale of product moved by remaining focused on 3.5... WotC could not. Dunno why that's so hard for people to accept, but it's true. *EDIT* I should actually say I believe it's probably true, since I have no actual evidence that compares sales of late 3.5 books vs early 4E books and it's more common-sense speculation on my part.

I could go on... but the point is that your list of things were just items that you yourself did not like. They aren't empirical fact, nor even backed up with evidence to support why what YOU don't like is in fact actually bad. So as far as WotC is concerned... it IS just white noise of one person's personal disfavor. And when you have a forum full of threads of people just spewing lists of things they don't like about the game or the company without any indication about what is actually wrong or bad... it's much less draining on your sanity to just ignore it if you are a small company, or hire community supports to do it for you if you're a big one.

 

[Bold or Stupid]

I predict that as soon as Paizo release a Pathfinder 2, they will start to get haters on their own forums.

Wizards being the 800lb Gorilla of the RPG world attract a lot of flak from people railing against "the man".

 

[the Jester]

I just skimmed the blog post in question, but my overwhelming impression is that this guy is really saying, "I have a hard time not taking anonymous comments attacking my writing personally." I'm not impressed by it as a position.

 

[Herschel]

I think this guy is right.
I think 99% of the people here at Enworld are nice, but internet seems to make everyone an expert. If the creators would have a real discussion in an auditorium or something like that, suddenly things would change radically. Pressing "submit reply" is easy, but when you actually use your vocal chords to express your opion, there is something that sparks in your mind and filters all the BS you are thinking.

This.

If you could pre-ignore list the attack monkeys, forum interaction would be fine. As it stands, designers going to forums need rather thick skins but some posters are like ankle-biting acid blobs who attack without pause. Having a "professional filter" would make for much more efficient feedback gathering and interaction placement.

Of course then there's a cost/benefit analysis and sometimes the cash you spend is more than the cash spent in the time used.