![]() Never having been a part of the EQII forum community, I must admit to a wee bit of schadenfreude at their privileged position being assailed. It seems like the EverQuest II devs are now headed towards Reddit, The EQ2 subreddit may soon be an official thing. Well, until SOE starts pushing other game discussions towards Reddit, and then there is some wailing and gnashing of teeth. If you want to talk about the game, the official place is Reddit. The forums are for news and support issues only. The General Discussion part of the H1Z1 forums points to Reddit and Twitch. Smed started doing Reddit during PlanetSide 2, and when it came time for H1Z1 he and the company went full bore on Reddit, leaving the forums behind. There is actually a forum listed off of the actual H1Z1 site, but the emphasis since the game was announced has been on Reddit. If you go to the main Daybreak site (which is still there under the SOE domain two months down the road) and look for forums, you will find links for every game… except H1Z1. In the end, it has always been “back to the forums.” These ventures have never really played out well, serving as more of a distraction and, of course, pissing off the long time official forum followers. They have had dalliances with Facebook and Twitter and every so often they form some sort of partnership with Zam or Wikia or somebody to be an official news source. SOE has, at various times, attempted to remedy this. You won’t seem a tenth of what you probably know if you depend on the news feed on the main web page. To follow EverQuest II, for example, without spending time in the forums every day, you need a site like The EQ2 Wire. They have favored their forum followers with special insights, dev access, and used them as a primary form of feedback on many occasions. SOE/Daybreak, on the other hand, has often felt over dependent on its forums over the years. I sometimes feel like CCP is veering in that direction, though they will then put out a huge and detail Dev Blog or something else on their main site, away from the forums, so that people outside of the forums are at least aware that a discussion is going on. I gather that it can start to feel like you’re talking to the whole community, rather than what can often be a very small subset of the community, in the official forums, so why not use them for announcements and such. There is a receptive audience that will comment on anything you post. ![]() Of course, once a company has forums and a segment of their user base invested in them, there seems to be a strong temptation to simply use the forums for everything. And there was certainly no similar question when it came to Camelot Unchained, the forums were a given. Even Mark Jacobs, who was dead set against having official forums for Warhammer Online eventually relented. Your biggest fans, who are the type of people who would set up such a thing, can become your bitterest foes if they feel wronged. There a costs, both financial and in political games, but those seem to me to be balanced out by having an area under the company’s control that services the percentage of the game population that wants a forum.Īs we have seen, if you depend on a forum out of your control to support your game, it can quickly go toxic. I have always been of the opinion that online games ought to have official forums.
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