During my hiatus, I still semi-regularly browse the SPvP forums. I currently see very few threads being made and far less DEV posts. I just wanted to say and reiterate my opinion that your silence as a company is hurting far worse than it could ever help. The silence gives the appearance that nothing is being done (the truth doesn’t matter, perception is paramount here).
I just wanted to repost something that I posted in Zoose’s thread a month or so ago in regards to the SoTG and their “strong silent type” approach. Here are my thoughts, and they haven’t changed.
Clearly it’s your company philosophy and I know it’s probably not going to change, but I think it a terrible philosophy. You don’t say anything in fear of causing a stir on the forums, but your silence (at least on the SPVP boards) causes one of the biggest stirs.
Here is the best way I can describe it:
Let’s say that you had decided to come to the forums and tell the players “We finally have our PvP system in place and it’s going to be an 8 team tournament system where you need 40 people to start and it will be 3 rounds.”
I can assure you if that was discussed during the initial implementation, it would have never made it in and then had to be changed 6 months later because it clearly was a bad idea.
My fear is, you guys are being so secretive about stuff because it may or may not be fully ready, but what if it’s a terrible idea? It doesn’t matter how good of DEVS you guys are, there are few of you and exponentially more of us. We can quickly pick out flaws and give positive constructive feedback….for free.
I am in no way saying we are better at developing a game than you guys, we most assuredly are not; however, we play the game non-stop, and we have very good ideas about what would be great for the game, and what would be terrible. Just go look at SWTOR to see examples where DEVS were completely silent on features and when they were rolled out, they sucked…bad.
Case in Point
WoW, for all its flaws, is actually pretty open about what they are planning. The perfect example: Blizzard was going to implement a feature where your real ID along with your real name would be displayed on the forums with things you posted: a terrible terrible idea. They were dead set on it and people voiced concerns about how our privacy would be at risk and how we could be attacked in real life by players that didn’t like what we posted. Bashiok kept stating that we shouldn’t have any concerns and were being paranoid and your real name can accomplish nothing from someone trying to find out who we are. Someone challenged him to say his real name if he didn’t care. He did. Next, they found his address, his salary, a picture of his front door via street view of Google maps and even facebook pages of his parents.
That feature never saw the light of day. Had they secretly implemented it, someone could have been killed by some crazy forums stalker.
Food for thought
That does not mean necessarily that they are not here, listening.