I think the current state of the WAR community is proof that you need official forums. It’s such a pain to find the information I want to find out about it, I’ve given up looking and just wait for people to tell me anymore. They usually just post on WAR Alliance and WAR Vault, but those are two distinctly different but yet the same communities and the devs who post on each differ. It’s too much.

And now DAoC 2, er, I mean Warhammer, is going the same route. Unsurprising, but lame nonetheless.

Personally, I believe Mythic had a huge sting to its ego and a wake up call about the type of people who use gaming forums with the now non-existent DAoC Development board at IGN, made worse because of the game’s RvR centricity. This has led them further away from actually listening to their team leads and has even resulted in a mind set that any feedback they receive from players should be heavily filtered using oftentimes very limiting poll options that don’t allow players to address certain issues they have with the game, but only issues that EA/Mythic is willing to handle at that time.

Looking at the WoW boards in comparison, though, and they got off very easy from the community. But, I can see how EA/Mythic came to their decision. Doesn’t make it right, but I can at least sympathize with them at a certain level.

So I answered them.

Nearing and after launch, things change. People have more ready access to the game, so the anticipation is lower. People seeing a dev announcement are more likely to jump over to experience the change, not stick around and chat about it, so you need a larger critical mass of users to maintain the same illusion of activity on your boards. Their needs change from “getting excited over new disclosures” to “making sense of all this information” and that means that the successful fansite needs to adapt to that new need.

This is where the community relations team can probably mitigate some risk. I love features like EQPlayers, the WoW Armory, and the upcoming CoH Vault, but can you imagine how a fansite developer that just spent months building an “item database” must feel when the official site suddenly replicates much of what he has? The more “vision” that community relations can provide, the better the fansites can plan their purpose out.

I’d love to see more developers take advantage of rss feeds, XML data, and the “mashup” capabilities you see flourishing online to give the community members a huge toolchest.

- – -

Should there be an forum? Absoloutely. You’re not going to have the datamining functionality when you’re just a visitor on someone else’s site. You’re not going to feel as much of a “pulse” on a community, nor have as many tools at your disposal when you see a problem with that pulse. You’re not going to have the fidelity of message or level of control that you’d have on your own site.

You do NOT want to lose any of that.

As my title on VNBoards says: Community > *

cgoodno, the reason I am so adamant in my point of view is that I realize we screwed it up on the EQ2 boards. Instead of channeling the strong pre-release community via minimal official forums, we pulled the rug out from under them by trying to cover every possible topic of discussion. It wasn’t intentional by any means, but the result was the same.

You *can* achieve a healthy balance, and I believe that this approach is what will work best for a “classic” type of MMO (which, as far as I can tell so far, both WAR and SGW are). But you need to plan the balance in advance, not do it ad hoc.

This goes for website features too, by the way. Instead of trying to wrap up every single feature you can think of into a single service, consider supplying some of those data streams to approved fansites instead. Use the official site as a conduit for getting people to branch out in the community.

I’ve learned what I know by virtue of watching my own mistakes and the mistakes of others. The next generation of gaming communities should learn from us as well, which is why posts like Jacobs’ frustrate me.