Folks,
The age we are living in is definitely a different one. I've gone from moderating forums with hundreds of people to seeing forums that are supposed to support games with millions of people. I wish it was as simple as set a few rules, apply them fairly, be honest with the players and then everything will be all right. It just isn't that way, no matter how much we would like it to be. Heck, even on our own beta forums we have people who refuse the follow the rules, break NDAs, ignore stickies, etc. and we do all the right things. No matter how well-intentioned the mods, unless a company is ready, willing and able to devote a ton of staff to the forums (24x7 mods, ruthless enforcement, limited topic creation ability, large staff), there are simply too many people to handle unless you have either an incredibly thick skin or so few available posting venues (as opposed to reading venues) to make it less than worthwhile. Scale is a wonderful and terrible thing and I'm sorry but you can't compare a game(s) that are small to games like WoW or even what we hope WAR will be in terms of number of subscribers. Also, the type of game has a direct effect on the style of the community. Let's face it, in a game like WAR or DAoC in which conflict between the races, sides, etc. is a main selling point, the forums for these games will be rather, hmm, enthusiastic. Lots of screaming and yelling, lots of false reports and tons of exaggeration. Whether it is WAR, WoW, DAoC or any other game in which RvR or PvP plays a major role, all these games share a very similar community. And I've seen more than enough from DAoC and WoW alone, to tell me that I am indeed right in my assessment. And I am happy to make a prediction here, when AoC launches, if they have official forums (I don't know their stance on it), they will have the same kind of behavior that the aforementioned games have had, count on it. If I'm wrong, I'll be also happy to admit it.
From my perspective, I'm not as concerned with the cost in terms of dollars (but the players should be) but rather what I will have to put my people through to run those forums. If WAR is as successful as we hope, we will have more users than any other MMORPG other than WoW. If that is true, we will be flooded by good users and bad. When things turn ugly, and they always do, my people will be insulted, yelled at, cursed at, threatened and told the vilest things possible. When we launched DAoC, one of my rules for our Customer Service Reps was that they didn't have to sit still and be abused by customers. I believe it is every customers' right to complain about the service but I also do not believe it is every customers' right to treat other human beings as people that they can dump on and treat in a manner that I know they wouldn't want to be treated themselves. I've said this before but unless you have worked the backend for one of these games, you do not really understand how ugly players can get when dealing with CMs/CSRs. I've seen more than my fair share of this ugliness directly and no amount of wishful thinking will make it otherwise. I care greatly about providing my customers with a great game but I also care deeply about my people, whether developer or CSR, and I don't want them to have to go through what I've seen happen both in other games as well as our own. While the percentage of people that are truly abusive is small, when you get to the kind of numbers we hope to have with WAR and given the type of game we are, that small percentage can suck up a lot of time and energy if you want to run forums properly. Just so you know, I would never want to have official forums that we ignore just so we could say we have official forums. That is, quite frankly, BS. As I've told our CM people when we talked about this issue, if we are going to do it, we would have to do it right.
Now, this doesn't mean we won't communicate to the community directly. Our Herald system was the best in the industry when we launched it for DAoC and we want to take it to the next level with WAR. We will have internal tester forums and we might have what we had with DAoC in terms of outside, specifically focused forums to help the players as well as to get additional feedback for us. However, even those had their share of false reports, exaggerations, etc. which diminish their usefulness and cost us time and money. We will also continue to post in places like these and make ourselves available to the community where we can. I want to reiterate that both official forums and internal forums, we have misspent a fair amount of time based on what users have sworn said happened, they saw, etc. At least with internal forums (and they can get heated at time), we know that the people there actually want to be there and help and not just post something to waste our time. And we've had our time wasted so often that it is ridiculous (even with QA sometimes you have to pass things on to devs quickly if it is potentially serious enough).
However, if you are looking for Mythic to provide wide-open official forums where people can threaten, curse, vent, etc., we have no intention of doing that now or in the future. There might be a hybrid solution but for now, I'm choosing to err on the side of caution.
Oh, BTW, I've said this before as well, I also post as myself, never an alias. I do this so people know who they are talking to and what I stand for, even if they think/know I'm wrong. I do believe if people posted under their own names the Internet would be a lot more polite. Anonymity is a very good thing at times but when it comes to issues like these, it isn't. It certainly is not true for everybody but it couldn't be much worse than it is and has become over the years. Twenty years of dealing with online communities has taught me many lessons, one of which is that most people (not all) will say things under an alias that they would never do under their real name or in person. I've lost track of the number of people I've met who on the boards/Internet were angry, vicious, unreasonable and nasty but in real-life, the exact opposite. Heck, even some people say that I'm a lot nicer in RL than I might appear to be at times here.
In closing, I do wish I believed that having official forums would be a great move for WAR. Even with the jerks/griefers/flamers/etc., I love online communities, I just cannot be convinced that in 2008, the right way to launch an MMORPG like WAR is with wide-open official forums.
Mark