General Discussion

Staff Writers Dan Fortier and Derek Czerkaski take opposite sides of the issue of game official forums. Are they needed, or is it enough to have third party forums?

Dan Fortier:

As often is the case, this week's debate was inspired by recent events in the world of MMOs. Many of us take having official game forums hosted by the developers for granted, but several weeks ago Sigil, the developers of Vanguard: Saga of Heroes closed down their forums prior to the launch of the game and moved them under the auspices of their Affiliate Program. This week Derek Czarkaski and I will be taking opposite sides of this issue for your amusement.

I'm not a big forum person and I can't really think of any time I needed to use a forum for any game I have played, but this move just seems like the ultimate cop out to me. If you are going to go through all the trouble of hosting support forums and have them moderated, why not just have regular open forums? While I agree most game forums after release are nothing but a massive whine-fest, these people are paying you as much as I pay for people to take out my trash every month. At the very least they could do is put up with their customers. Pawning them off on your 'official fansites' is really just passing the buck..

You can read the debatehere.

Having forums or not is just a business decision.  With the very low quality of posts I think it is a good idea to ship off forums to somewhere else and let those people deal with the headaches.  As long as there is ingame abilities to report bugs and petition for issues you will be able to let the devs know about problems.

The benefits of getting rid of whiners is a good thing.  Controlling your press in a sense.  You also get rid of those with an agendas trying to get the forum masses behind their pet issues.

In the end, I think the players are forcing devs to take the position of taking away a forum.  There is too much negative press on them vs the positives IMO.

It's my opinion that an official forum needs to be maintained by the company producing the game. I expect it as part of my monthly fee and feel as though any company pawning it off on anyone else is just trying to save money and drive a wedge between themselves and their player base. Official forums ARE a central source of current information, as well as a place to vent frustrations, hopefully in a constructive way. They are also certainly places where people with limited abilities to communicate, either because of language barriers, lack of education, or anger issues will gather, and those types, if the content of their posts is suitably destructive, can and should be censored. For the most part, those people are merely frustrating to those who want to communicate, and are easily ignored, especially when the proper forum tools are made available.

Not hosting an official forum is the equivalent of a company saying "we don't care that much about our paying subscribers to moderate a forum where you can all gather and bounce ideas off of each other. It is my hope that this is NOT the MMOG trend of the future. It will only stifle the good ideas that forums generate.

Originally posted by delateur

It's my opinion that an official forum needs to be maintained by the company producing the game. I expect it as part of my monthly fee and feel as though any company pawning it off on anyone else is just trying to save money and drive a wedge between themselves and their player base. Official forums ARE a central source of current information, as well as a place to vent frustrations, hopefully in a constructive way. They are also certainly places where people with limited abilities to communicate, either because of language barriers, lack of education, or anger issues will gather, and those types, if the content of their posts is suitably destructive, can and should be censored. For the most part, those people are merely frustrating to those who want to communicate, and are easily ignored, especially when the proper forum tools are made available.

Not hosting an official forum is the equivalent of a company saying "we don't care that much about our paying subscribers to moderate a forum where you can all gather and bounce ideas off of each other. It is my hope that this is NOT the MMOG trend of the future. It will only stifle the good ideas that forums generate.

I Think that Vanguard should have had forums, tho they should have locked them publicly and open for subs to their game, the public can still get their info from other forums, and we players might get aheads up whats going on with patches and such, yes their is some news now and then on the official site, but still especialy with Vanguard there is so much then can be discussed between the playerbase and the devs. Forums are not always 1 way trafic, i expect also news and info that devs can provide on the forums.

official forums are great, as long as nothing breaks, and everyone playing the game is a fanboy.  otherwise, all they do is piss off paying customers by locking/deleting posts about OBVIOUS problems ingame.  pretty much insert any game's name and you'll have that going on.  a recent, excellent example, is eve-online.  but, like i said, any game, any time there's issues, they'll lock/delete posts, ban users, and pretty much piss off the fanbase with their favoritism.

going to "official" forums is probably good if you're ONLY reading guides.  outside of that, unless you're a mindless fanboi, all that will happen is that you'll hate the game because of mo-rons enforcing the communist party line of thought on everyone involved - the state is never wrong, conform or be banned.  or is that borg?  i forget.

Originally posted by Thony

I Think that Vanguard should have had forums, tho they should have locked them publicly and open for subs to their game, the public can still get their info from other forums, and we players might get aheads up whats going on with patches and such, yes their is some news now and then on the official site, but still especialy with Vanguard there is so much then can be discussed between the playerbase and the devs. Forums are not always 1 way trafic, i expect also news and info that devs can provide on the forums.

You know they can still provide information on