"To blame the community for being outraged at the state of the game is a slap in the face, imo." No one is blaming anyone for being upset. Aasha acknowledged the fact that people have a right to be upset. All she was saying, and rightfully so, is to keep it constructive, and keep it in the proper section of the forums.
everyone expresses thier rage in differnt ways. some spam the forums others complain about the spammer. at the end of the day the only real solution is to fix the issues. if someone wants to be a forum mod then apply in the correct channels
Pretty please fix the BS happening in Telon! It would be awesome if things worked normal again. I would totally log in more and say really nice things.
I actually find it hard to believe that you (SOE) understand player frustration. If you truly did I do not believe you would have rollouts of patches without a way to roll back, rollout patches that are not tested enough to go to live, or rollout huge changes with a propensity for problems right before a holiday when you know you will be short staffed. Furthermore, I would think you would have stepped up GM presence GREATLY during this time of instability and as a result this game perhaps would have been more playable this past weekend. None of those actions are consistent with the current SOE support of Vanguard. While I certainly would like to do more of the things that will help this game get fixed faster, the things that have been going on lately are either already posted (debuff window and other gameplay issues) or things that I cannot explain like the fact I just crash to desktop repeatedly with no symptoms or anything that I can report about it. For many of these issues I feel the only way to understand them better would be if I had in depth knowledge of the software which I do not. That is why I feel it is important for some SOE presence on the live servers when things are so unstable. Not only does it provide assurance and possible restarts, but it also can have the people with much more knowledge actually experience the issues firsthand. I beg of you to please treat this software in a way that is fit for a company like Sony. That means proper development, QA and support. If Sony cannot devote the resources to have Vanguard function like it should I feel you are only hurting your own reputation by keeping it alive.
I would like to apologize for my "scream from the rooftops" comment. I was caught up in the spirit of the movie "Network" where the main character hollers that "I am not going to take it anymore". I have always advocated working towards solutions and to that end I have posted in the support forums hoping for clarification on how we can help the /bug reporting process be more helpful. In the meantime I still am entirely sympathetic with the frustration and anger that many are feeling because of the many issues currently preventing us from a pleasant gaming experience. Lets be proactive and provide at least times, dates, locations and what we were doing at the time when the crashes or CTDs. or drops to character select occurred. Perhaps a pattern will emerge that can help resolve the issues.
Okay...back after a very long day and will reply... I do understand, Kimja, and I do agree with this, as in not treating the "squeak" can often result in far more damage in the end. But there comes a time when a squeak becomes a squawk which could end in being ignored completely. Hemorhage, I am not certain how much of this was in reply to me or to Yaivey or to the both of us, so I will just reply as if to me... Please know, I do not at all disagree with you in the damage caused by the powers that be to the game's reputation in the gaming community. I completely appreciate and agree with your points about the means by which patches are handled and the aftermath of updates and so on... Here's the short of my concern: We are, as we have many times in the past, dealing with community monitors that are just getting to know many of us. The knowledge of post histories and the typical candor of a comment, thread, etc., will not be readily known. To what end, to what good end, would it be if members of our community who have worked diligently on giving in depth and critical feedback to SOE regarding concerns in the game are banned from the forums and/or game, because they have not followed the previously agreed upon guidelines? Additionally, yes, the issue is great, it certainly is and anyone trying to diminish it is evidently not paying attention at all to what is happening in game for a great many people - but airing our issues in every forum possible doesn't help either. It doesn't help our cause, it doesn't help the perception of the community and it doesn't help the game over all...and losing parts and people of our community who know much of this game inside and out will never be good. So what do we do? We fight with the power that we have so as to make a change and not have our voices ignored because we are degraded into perceived petulant children angered that we are not getting our way. We are, and have proven ourselves to be so many times before, better than that. Thank you, very much, Glenzig for this reply and the previous one, that was indeed what I was hoping to communicate. You are missed, Cind! You and Lor both. I hope that you are well and am here if you ever need anything.
I think a valuable point is being missed here. My wife and I happen to own a small cafe and especially welcome any negative feedback. Why? Because praise means we feel good inside about doing a great job in the customers opinion, which means return customers. We smile, feel good and move on. Complaints on the other hand give us a chance to correct something that may have made a customers visit less enjoyable. If I can correct their problem and make them happy, then they might return or at the very least not trash our good name to others that they are acquainted with. The saying is true that it takes years to build a good customer base and very little time to destroy one. Some of us have either been here since Beta and are founders or returned after leaving for a couple of years hoping that the game that we loved to play has improved by virtue of patches and hardware (on our end) improvements. In the beginning we were told our lame systems could not support such a high end advanced game. Then we sat through many management changes because again, we loved to play the game. Since December, at least for our family and friends it has felt like SOE made it a game of us against them. Don't blame us, what do you expect us to do in a short period of time? Some of us that work many hours enjoyed the thought of playing a few hours during the holiday. My wife and I had 2 days out of 23. We questioned why, during the holiday season, such changes would be made that were bound to have complications and create even more glitches and downtime.We even questioned why they would put that much pressure on their own staff during a festive season. Today our family spent hours clearing to get to the Emperor only to have the zone reset as we neared our final target. We logged off frustrated and disgusted. I log into the forums and there is a patch to introduce CoW tomorrow for 24 man raids. Zones are crashing, bugs abound and we should be excited for new content for 24 man raids. We all know that won't go as smooth as expected as new content seldom gets released bug free. From my view, selfish or not, the meat and potatoes is being served cold and undesirable with promises that the desert will be excellent for those who live for that. MMO's by their very nature make demands on your leisure time. They are designed to do exactly just that. A good tittle brings out the passion in a player; passion brings out strong opinions. You can't expect to hook in our money (6 paid gold accounts, $100 a month on average in SC) and then expect us to simply sit back and be understanding all the time. Better a rant on the boards than a rage quit of subscriptions I say!
You are a true business man Zarrian, unfortunately corporations don't have the same sense of pride or concern as a small business owner. Great post, and I agree 100 percent. Just release more content/bugs on month old content/bugs, and then they can devote their time to "trying" to get it all fixed. Meanwhile most of us pay our monthly subs to beta, while our feedback goes largely ignored.
Not to make light of this conversation or to be rude, but this thread makes me think of the line from Brokeback Mountain ... "I wish I knew how to quit you." -- (in regards to Vanguard)
Ah yes ... well in light of the push of CoW's release, I'm going to say that we should have been more vocal instead of less. VG's dev teams will never learn. We want a playable environment and smooth content rollouts. Not rolling out a new mess on top of old messes. /sigh
I agree, Kimja, that does seem to be a major missed point, and has been so many, many times before. In the dealings that I have had with out past devs, it has been my understanding that they were merely acting upon directives given. So if that is the case, to what entity do we need to express our disdain? I know that Leav and I both have offered to help establish a player feedback community on many more than one occasion, and yet that idea gets pushed under the rug. There seems to be a misunderstanding in my opinion and reason for posting - I do very much feel that we need to speak up about this game that we love, I just had hoped to illuminate a situation in which the method might kill the message. So, to you, Yaivey - if you could please: What do we as a community do? We are told that our voices are heard but yet new content keeps getting pushed (and this is far not the first time) before old concerns are answered. We had at one time polls for what the player base wanted and needed to see in updates but that was a short lived process and in truth one that only partially worked do to little care given to our replies. We try to send in bug reports, but yet our report tools are not adequate and we have asked before what happens to those reports, how to give the necessary information etc., to no avail. We understand that our team is limited and have offered to help as much as we can. Appreciating that the forums rules and guidelines must be adhered to or repercussions suffered, what resource can we employ to have our voices more effectively heard because giving feedback on the forums, still, does not seem to be the most effective and efficient path? If there is no method, can something please be done so as to provide one?
I have to agree with you in all honesty here. I feel like a rat on a sinking ship that's part of a bigger fleet. We keep getting told on one hand don't worry about what the other ships (titles) are getting told, we did not think you needed to know, on the other, all the benefits we might get by saving money to have access to their other games. Go check out a Facebook or twitter feed, some 3rd party site, or the boards of another game of theirs if you want to know. I'm growing tired of reading responses from the CM reminding people to toe the line. There are players that are reaching the end of their patience with the game and silencing their opinions, even if they may be venting, or providing them with canned feel good responses only reduces the chances of retaining their subscriptions. When a few zones or encounters have a bug many of us log in an alternate and patiently await a fix because frankly, we enjoy playing the game and accept that the team is limited in how much can be accomplished in a short period of time. When I log in a main with family to do the Emperor quest in Tet. only to have the zone reset a few hours in, right before the target I get ticked off. Then I log in an alternate to farm stones in Afrit and get lag spikes every 15 seconds. Then we decide to help a friend with their class ability quest and they die while flying into a chunk. Still undaunted since it's our day off we decide to log in "baby" toons and just have some fun at the Riverbank. Oh well, that zone is borked as well. Then I check the forums in frustration and low and behold, we are getting a 24 man raid zone. Since our group of family and friends no longer raid (since 8 years ago in EQ1) what comfort is gained in that? The entire direction of all the games in the SoE stable for the past 8 years has been to allow the solo, small group and group players to advance beyond killing rat snakes as the only alternative to full groups and raids. It's been politely explained that frankly "That's where the money is" for the company. The SC store reflects that change with items that enhance the non-raid player. Now we are told a raid zone is really what's best for us; since the basic game is bugged to a point of being frustrating for many to play?
Honestly the forum guidelines are as much for the benefit of the player community as they are for SOE. They are there to keep non constructive comments from drowning out your constructive discussion. We can talk about the science behind the thinking, and the exact impact of non constructive feedback on discussions, but the main focus is we want to make your voices heard. We don't want to silence anyone, that's a loss for everyone involved. Ultimately it's really important for you folks to post about what you are happy about and what you are dissatisfied with. More so the dissatisfaction, because those are things which are immediate concerns. This is useful information, and it's being read and used for internal decision making. I'm not involved with the project in a day to day way anymore, although I do help support Yaviey in this regard, so I can't answer the reason why the Dev team chose to push content today. It could be due to dev needs relating to code branching (so they can more effectively address the chunk issues that have been occurring), it could be that this patch also has server side fixes that aren't in the patch notes because they don't directly relate to things that players can directly perceive. I do know that the Dev team is taking a number of actions to address the issues that have been impacting player experience and we hope to improve the overall experience of Vanguard for all of you. The reality is that what matters most is your experience and the causes for your feelings. Explaining those, in detail, is the best way you can make your voice heard and influence changes in the way the game is designed and implemented. We absolutely understand your frustration, we're pretty much all gamers too. I just rage quit a competitors product I had been researching the other week myself (they implemented something badly, and while I understand the whys a lot better than most people my experience was still hideously negative).
while we appreciate your input piestro, the fact remains that the reason the volume and intensity of the forum posts is up so much lately is because our game is broken atm. not just buggy and laggy. people are dieing simply from moving , or having to relog multiple times in a matter of minutes because of chunk instability. We are shouting and using angry language because we feel that SOE doesn't really understand how bad it is. We would love to provide whatever information we can to help resolve the problems. However, A. we are not Q&A trained testers, and B. We do not know what to report that is useful. So please ask someone to provide a guideline for /bug reporting or forum reporting the issues in a way that will help the team solve the problems.
Trying to be positive - at least now the code team has finished work on CoW - they can start working on the real problems.
Here are a couple reposts of mine from some old Beta Forums. They aren't specific to VG but I can post these quickly to give you guys some ideas: Feedback: Feedback comes in two varieties: objective and subjective. For a variety of reasons objective feedback is easier to act on and more valuable to us, however both forms of feedback can indeed prove useful. Objective Feedback: Objective feedback is feedback which is based on facts and will remain true for all users. This sort of feedback is usually grounded in stats or similar numbers, and is much easier for us to act on. Example: "The daggers in Rain of Fear have the same backstab values as daggers from Veil of Alaris". Subjective Feedback: Subjective feedback is based on personal feelings or perceptions, and can vary from individual to individual. Please try to include as much detail as possible when giving subjective feedback so that we can completely understand the perspective you are trying to convey. Example: "The focus effects on caster two handed blunt weapons are only a slight gain over the one handed blunts weapons. This is not enough in my opinion to offset the loss of the shield slot, especially when one considers the h/e/m sacrifices you make not equipping a shield". Bugs: Please include as much relevant data as possible when posting bugs, below is a suggested format. Name of Relevant Feature: Description of Bug: Is this bug reproducible? If so please outline reproduction steps:
Respectfully, going back to the analogy using the cafe that my wife and own as an example, allow me to respond. If I serve a gourmet burger to my customer that has not come out correctly and the customer is put off, I don't expect them to be constructive or scientific in their approach. I don't expect to hear "This burger was not cooked to 135 degrees as i requested and clearly was not set to rest allowing the juices to set in; the lettuce wilted as a result of being put on the burger too soon and the bacon failed to crisp since it was applied to the cheese before the cheese had a chance to set properly". What I expect to hear is "This burger is awful". After asking them further I might be able to ascertain where we failed. Cooked too long, too fast and assembled in a rush. As a cook I would know what I did wrong and as a business owner I would understand their "venting". If I then tell that customer that I was working on a roast for the dinner menu which should come out excellent, they don't care. They only care about their dissatisfaction. When you know things have gone wrong, then constructive, or not, you should be braced for the venting. The customer only sounds off to the person that they feel can communicate to, in this case the boards. The waitress took the order and served the burger. The cook was under pressure to not mess up the roast (a bigger project in their mind). No one intentionally caused the issue, everyone takes the heat and hopes to satisfy that customer.
After you've been slapped in the face you are supposed to lay down and take it? Or try and correct the situation? If being nice doesn't work you are supposed to walk away? Sometimes you have to ramp up your efforts.
