Getting the Community back to where it needs to be

Getting the Community back to where it needs to be

I have read through the thread twice now. I don’t get it. Where does the community need to be? Who is going to make the determination of where it needs to be? How will we implement it? Will it need policing? Will it be better in the long run/short term? What will the costs be? Where do we begin?

It is easy to talk about, but what is the plan? Do we need a plan? What are the benefits of getting the community to where it needs to be? What is the purpose of the thread? Do we just want to express opinions about the subject, or do we want to make the actual change?

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Originally Posted by Sapience

If I can save blogging features I will (though they may not be part of the initial relaunch of the site even if I do manage to pull that off). Though any blogs in the future would probably end up being the Vbulletin built in blogs and not wordpress as they are now.

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I don't imagine it matters much, but I resisted the lure of my.middle-earth.com to keep blogging here. I have four years of blog entries (RPing the epic quest, mediocre Tolkien fan fiction, random RL opinions), will they all be erased? *starts to cry*

I guess I'd approve of more reliability, it's just... oh Elbereth Gilthoniel, all those entries, all that work (labour of love) to vanish...

​

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Originally Posted by Sapience

the issues with integrating WP with the sites and the major issues it creates on the backend

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Managing and maintaining a website, patched around with WP, being part of my day job I testify for you Sapience. Even getting a simplest additional page propagated correctly takes up to an hour's work of code cleanup and rewrite, and I promptly decided (and convinced my employers) to have the site rewritten from scratch, without the WP; which is one of the best blog frameworks available by itself (and one that I do use) but simply no good for anything beyond that.

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I'd like to think I'm right in saying we'd all like more reliability and are willing to lose some features to get it. Yes?

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Absolutely! Security and stability before fancies.

*sits and waits for a troll to accuse him of "not understanding/knowing" anything and "parroting"*

I just avoid threads that have negative titles and those that might start off well but turn sour from overly aggressive posters.

There have been times when I'm about to log into the game but decide to check the forums for anything interesting. By the time I read a few negative or complaint filled posts that might catch my eye, my enthusiasm is all but gone. Negativity really spreads easily.

Lately I rarely visit the general discussion forum except to look for actual news and interesting threads like this one. I'd rather look through the suggestions forum, the wiki site, or play the game.

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Originally Posted by RKL

Getting the Community back to where it needs to be

I have read through the thread twice now. I don’t get it. Where does the community need to be? Who is going to make the determination of where it needs to be? How will we implement it? Will it need policing? Will it be better in the long run/short term? What will the costs be? Where do we begin?

It is easy to talk about, but what is the plan? Do we need a plan? What are the benefits of getting the community to where it needs to be? What is the purpose of the thread? Do we just want to express opinions about the subject, or do we want to make the actual change?

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In the original thead post I made it clear how the community attracted me to the game. How it influeneces other decisions on playing this game or not if they have not tried it. But as you can see above my thread about the General Forums has become about forum widgets and blogs. Even a forum mod has come into the thread and helped further derail it. So it really doesn't even matter anymore.

Face it if I'm an MMO player looking for a new game and I see the first 3 pages of the general forums I'm looking elsewhere.
The game needs new players to keep spending money so we can keep getting great content.

Since my thread has been taken in a new direction I'll just say after todays nerf bat I am even more worried about the state of the game.

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Originally Posted by DestroyerXXXX

I just avoid threads that have negative titles and those that might start off well but turn sour from overly aggressive posters.

There have been times when I'm about to log into the game but decide to check the forums for anything interesting. By the time I read a few negative or complaint filled posts that might catch my eye, my enthusiasm is all but gone. Negativity really spreads easily.

Lately I rarely visit the general discussion forum except to look for actual news and interesting threads like this one. I'd rather look through the suggestions forum, the wiki site, or play the game.

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TY for the compliment btw.

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Originally Posted by Minquinn

In the original thead post I made it clear how the community attracted me to the game. How it influeneces other decisions on playing this game or not if they have not tried it. But as you can see above my thread about the General Forums has become about forum widgets and blogs. Even a forum mod has come into the thread and helped further derail it. So it really doesn't even matter anymore.

Face it if I'm an MMO player looking for a new game and I see the first 3 pages of the general forums I'm looking elsewhere.
The game needs new players to keep spending money so we can keep getting great content.

Since my thread has been taken in a new direction I'll just say after todays nerf bat I am even more worried about the state of the game.

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Well, if your idea is for people to change their behavior in posting, (which by its interpersonal nature is ego-driven due to our current level of evolution/fate) then I don’t see much hope for your idea. But who knows, threads have been known to pick up again in activity.

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Originally Posted by Sapience

I've also made it clear that based on feedback I would happily take a nuclear option of blowing everything away and having just basic forum functionality if it meant we can have a faster system and reliable ability for players to log in and post. We've gotten the ball rolling, and a new site is coming, but there will be systems that are removed because they simply are too fragile and cause much of the issues players report on a regular basis.

I'd like to think I'm right in saying we'd all like more reliability and are willing to lose some features to get it. Yes?

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A thousand times thank you. You have no idea how glad this makes me to know that you guys are finally considering getting rid of this unusable and maddening "beta" community site that you foisted onto us several years ago. Words cannot describe how much I hate these forums. They should have been scrapped years ago, but I'll settle for better late than never.

I have played this game for 4 years. I love the game and have no real issues and as for trolling I will leave that to the little kids sniggering behind their screens. The community is just like the world. There are a huge diversity of people and ideas and just like the real life community you live in, there are a proporion of people who are never happy with anything, continually moan and complain. While the forum is used for genuine issues it also attracts the whiners. The game isn't perfect but what is and I would doubt other MMO forums are full of constant praise for the product.
As I said, I love this game and get a lot of joy out of it. If folks get too frustrated (unless they are just wasting time trolling) with Turbine and the game, they should just move on as they always threaten to.

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Originally Posted by ferdinanda

I don't imagine it matters much, but I resisted the lure of my.middle-earth.com to keep blogging here. I have four years of blog entries (RPing the epic quest, mediocre Tolkien fan fiction, random RL opinions), will they all be erased? *starts to cry*

I guess I'd approve of more reliability, it's just... oh Elbereth Gilthoniel, all those entries, all that work (labour of love) to vanish...

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Please do not let that happen, Molly. Your writings and those of Sophie and Olalie and Perlina are far too precious to let fade away.

After I get some rest, I will try to post a guide showing how to import your journal here to one at mymiddleearth with (hopefully!) relative ease. I read your writings often, and it would be devastating to see them lost.

I just wish those who have the power to make these decisions truly understood how precious what we have created here really is. Then there would not be any talk about how sacrificing our work to help improve stability and reliability is a worthwhile sacrifice. It would be, like the lotteries, just a given that it is worth saving.

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Originally Posted by Sapience

I've gone round and round with this with the web team and I can honestly say that having seen the issues with integrating WP with the sites and the major issues it creates on the backend (including issues with the WP software itself), I can understand why it's not on the web team's list of favorite things.

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I couldn't agree with them more, i have a lot of experience working with Wordpress (i've written a lot of plugins and designed dozens of themes, as well as hosting and running six wordpress based web site), Wordpress is a brilliant piece of web software, with great customization options, but only standalone, as soon as you try to integrate it with anything (especially shared logins) you're going to have a bad time of it, best to use something that is built into the system you already use, so yeah if you're going to use vBulletin for the forum (i personally wouldn't, i hate it) then it's best to use a built in blog plugin for vBulletin than to mess around trying to get WP to integrate.

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Originally Posted by Minquinn

In the original thead post I made it clear how the community attracted me to the game. How it influeneces other decisions on playing this game or not if they have not tried it. But as you can see above my thread about the General Forums has become about forum widgets and blogs. Even a forum mod has come into the thread and helped further derail it. So it really doesn't even matter anymore.

Face it if I'm an MMO player looking for a new game and I see the first 3 pages of the general forums I'm looking elsewhere.
The game needs new players to keep spending money so we can keep getting great content.

Since my thread has been taken in a new direction I'll just say after todays nerf bat I am even more worried about the state of the game.

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I think you're missing the point of those posting about the web site: you can't have a positive, thriving, interesting, active community without a working site for that community to post on. As I said in my first post, there are many reasons why the community doesn't seem to be quite what it used to be, and the state of the site itself is one of them. If I'm an MMO player looking for a new game, I'd be looking at the community home page which also has blog posts, service announcements, and a list of the most recent threads, not just those in General Discussion.

If you only want to talk about the General Discussion forum, you're missing a huge piece of the rest of the community. General Discussion, while it occasionally has interesting and useful discussions (and I consider this to be one of them), is the place where the most unhappy players come to get the greatest amount of attention for their bitterness. As Sapience has said many times, if a player has an issue with a specific part of the game, and they want an actual answer from someone who really knows, they will post in the other sections. So you'll see a lot of helpful advice, collaboration, and healthy community activity in sections like questing, instances, cosmetics, and to a lesser extent the RP and server sections. The General Discussion and Suggestions forums are the ones at the very top of the page, the ones that lots of people check regardless of their specific game interests, and therefore the ones where everyone wants to post in so that their pet peeve gets the largest amount of visibility, and often they don't care if people post helpful information or answers, they just want to vent. In other words, those two sections are troll magnets, and you're always going to see some degree of negativity there.

Is it more than ever? Yes and no, in my 4 years of experience. New releases/updates, and the period just before/after they are released, bring huge waves of conspiracy theories, dire predictions, and general craziness about why this or that change was made. Then the madness dies down a bit and other types of conversations surface. A new change is announced, and it starts again.

So don't dismay: your thread has not been derailed, just expanded, as often happens with interesting topics of discussion. A community comes together to talk because we like the social connections and mental stimulation of a good conversation, so we do sometimes go in a variety of directions, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

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Originally Posted by Sapience

I'd like to think I'm right in saying we'd all like more reliability and are willing to lose some features to get it. Yes?

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Well, in my opinion it depends what features. I am a little bit afraid of loosing all the lorebook, kinship/character roster and data.lotro.com functionality there, as it is very useful. Yes, it seems a little bit broken and outdated sometimes, "fragile" as you named it, but I will gladly trade this for some forum slowness, as it is really great stuff for maintaining personal kinship sites. For example, with data.lotro.com we are keeping our member roster up to date, using Lorebook for shared chests item list on our site, etc. I can hardly imagine to do all this stuff manually.

Mmm...

As a mother of three children and having a husband, thus make it 4 children to care for; I tend to have a bit different look at folks behaviors in a forum and in the game itself.


The first observable is a phenomenon that has risen since the advent of the internet: Anonimity

Because we hide behind a "handle" we say and do things we would not normally consider in doing. The less mature a person is, the greater the degree of loss self-restraint, and thus trolling is enabled. Trust me, being an Army wife, and well loved by my husband's unit, if the troller ever shows up by my door, there would be an entire division of rangers willing to explain to him the facts of life. But because there is no real repercusion for our "words" in the internet, people do what they do.


The second observable is that has impacted the community's emotional status is: Scarcity

There are several fairly well defined play styles and preferences, which in an environment of plenty would never have any friction with each other. On the other hand when the providers of the game provides too little new content, ergo scarcity, you see the playing styles turning on each other. Many years ago there was a very interesting psychological study about rats in a tub of water" essentially if you had a plank of wood large enough to allow all the rats to get on it and out of the water, there was peace. But as the scientist made the plank smaller, friction began among the rats for who would get to be on the plank or not; as the plank began to get even smaller, the fights became deadly. That effect is happening here, and the communities are clearly reflecting it.


The third observable is the quality of the game, quality fluctuates over time but when not: Deterioration

Obviously time is hardly generous to anyone of us, oh my aching bones, and so it is true with servers, game engines, coding practices and what not. I have noted in the MMORPG community that the once solid practices of providing a well polished product to the costumer was job #1 and beta testing was truly significant. Now days, I see more and more beta quality software released, and then let the disatisfied customer via complaints identify the problems; and as a result you see the many postings in forums that otherwise would not be present or very rare; add the anonymity factor and it gets ugly real fast.


The fourth observable is the values of a person, and how well they stand to them: Integrity

Here is where all too many of us fall short, we quickly put first our preferences and likes, an immediately discount's those of others. We make no honest judgment to value what others want, much less be able to concede their want may actually be better justified than mine. Too much "me, me", and hardly no "We, we"; "If I don't have it, then they should not have it", "Only I can have, they can't" There are times I read the posts, for instance raiders vs the world, and somehow they remind me of my children's kindergarden age fights.


Oh well hugs

Sue

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Originally Posted by warriorpoetex

World Peace has a higher chance of happening than getting any MMO Forum to a place of constructive discussion as the norm. :)

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I beg to differ. There is a place where one could have constructive discussions as the norm regarding this particular MMO, aside from the official forums.

Even the simple fact that they would rather have a 'costume festival' (http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.p...01#post6719101) instead of tackling real issues, tells you all you need to know on what their priorities are.

The site is equally important to the community as the game itself. It should meet the same standards and be treated as an equal part of the whole community.

4 years in BETA...very sad state of affairs...

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Originally Posted by Sapience

If I can save blogging features I will (though they may not be part of the initial relaunch of the site even if I do manage to pull that off). Though any blogs in the future would probably end up being the Vbulletin built in blogs and not wordpress as they are now. I've gone round and round with this with the web team and I can honestly say that having seen the issues with integrating WP with the sites and the major issues it creates on the backend (including issues with the WP software itself), I can understand why it's not on the web team's list of favorite things.

I've also made it clear that based on feedback I would happily take a nuclear option of blowing everything away and having just basic forum functionality if it meant we can have a faster system and reliable ability for players to log in and post. We've gotten the ball rolling, and a new site is coming, but there will be systems that are removed because they simply are too fragile and cause much of the issues players report on a regular basis.

I'd like to think I'm right in saying we'd all like more reliability and are willing to lose some features to get it. Yes?

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Yes. I'd take security, reliability and improved performance over a multitude of features I don't really use. Every day of the week!
The MyLOTRO lotteries are the one thing I do use that I think most people would like to keep, so please, be as steadfast about keeping that as you can.
The Reputation system can get nuked, along with post count and all the different titles that posters have. There should be only 2 tiers really, like Khafar has suggested in the thread named Feedback, New Member for the first month and then Member afterwards.

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Originally Posted by ferdinanda

I don't imagine it matters much, but I resisted the lure of my.middle-earth.com to keep blogging here. I have four years of blog entries (RPing the epic quest, mediocre Tolkien fan fiction, random RL opinions), will they all be erased? *starts to cry*

I guess I'd approve of more reliability, it's just... oh Elbereth Gilthoniel, all those entries, all that work (labour of love) to vanish...

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It might be time to start thinking about saving them to Word files or something similar. That way, you won't lose all your hard work and effort, which would always be a sad thing in my book.
I know I have lost creative things I've done by not taking due care in the past, so I can empathize with your situation.

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Originally Posted by Whart

SNIPPED FOR BREVITY

Is it more than ever? Yes and no, in my 4 years of experience. New releases/updates, and the period just before/after they are released, bring huge waves of conspiracy theories, dire predictions, and general craziness about why this or that change was made. Then the madness dies down a bit and other types of conversations surface. A new change is announced, and it starts again.

So don't dismay: your thread has not been derailed, just expanded, as often happens with interesting topics of discussion. A community comes together to talk because we like the social connections and mental stimulation of a good conversation, so we do sometimes go in a variety of directions, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

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Plus rep for this and your other post in this thread. I find the instance, quests and class forums are pretty much business as usual. There is a request from someone about language use in LOTRO. Lots of helpful, insightful and informative replies there.

We could necro some of the funniest and creative old ones. Sometimes just reestablishing an atmosphere and style of a community, venue, art form or culture is to dust off the old stuff and remember who we were....
I confess to doing this already----to make you smile----http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.p...78#post6720278

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Originally Posted by Acasta

As a mother of three children and having a husband, thus make it 4 children to care for [...].

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If a man posted something as sexist as that about his wife, I don't think people would brush it aside.

I have also been playing since 2007 and for me what started of as one community has overtime naturally divided into several communities all with their own agendas and opinions. The biggest issue I have with this is the lack of respect for cross community opinions. Why can't we all read a poster thoughts and opinions and respect them for what they are? To some they may not seem important, but obviously they were to the poster. Its basic etiquettecy (or netiquettecy :D).

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Originally Posted by Calta

Plus rep for this and your other post in this thread. I find the instance, quests and class forums are pretty much business as usual. There is a request from someone about language use in LOTRO. Lots of helpful, insightful and informative replies there.

We could necro some of the funniest and creative old ones. Sometimes just reestablishing an atmosphere and style of a community, venue, art form or culture is to dust off the old stuff and remember who we were....
I confess to doing this already----to make you smile----http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.p...78#post6720278

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Hehe, that link made it totally worth it to be home sick looking at the forums. I love the old classic humor threads (where's TSK when we need him?).

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Originally Posted by maxjenius

If a man posted something as sexist as that about his wife, I don't think people would brush it aside.

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Ayup. As soon as i read that very first line, i disregarded the rest of that post.

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Originally Posted by Sapience

I'd like to think I'm right in saying we'd all like more reliability and are willing to lose some features to get it. Yes?

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Absolutely, 100% yes on this. At this point, I'd choose a full-on vanilla forum with zero bells and whistles if it:

• Would stop logging me out in the middle of posts.
• Would load pages quickly and consistently.
• Would have a secure login.

Once you have all of the above, then adding back in a few things like lotteries or dynamic forum sigs could be done, but only as long as they don't screw up the core uses of a forum.

As for blogs... I guess I'm wondering how many people actually use them. A much as I post, I've never written one, and the only blog entries I've read have been A) ones Orion did a couple of years back, and B) one or two stray blog posts linked by the Suggestions forums. That's it. If they were removed, I doubt I'd ever notice.

I'm certain that some would notice, but really... what percentage? If it's 20%, they're probably worth whatever trouble it takes to keep them running. But what if it's more like 2%? A troublesome feature that 2% of your customers use probably isn't worth keeping, especially when alternatives are abundant.

Khafar

One could argue that there isn't enough challenge in the game to warrant asking for help on the forums anymore.

I remember when Moria came out, completing dungeons with a pick up group was almost unheard of. The dungeons were really really hard to complete and I often came to the forums looking for insight.

Today, you can basically walk into Dale with your eyes closed and complete the challenge mode. Forums not needed.