Hey Mythic?

How, then, does WHA differ from an official forum?

 

Other than it being volunteer led without pay and without direct influence from Mythic, it really doesn't. Mythic is using it as their de facto forum, and has been for some time.

 

Quite brilliant to not have to pay for a community manager to police official forums. They know that the fan sites and community boards would love to take on that job for free, so why not take advantage of that so long as it doesn't backfire? While I do agree with your post, I don't know if I can blame them for this tactic. I wouldn't want the headache either. But again, your point is very valid.

 

Good, though I think the devs should post on more the just WHA. Why should Mythic pay moderators when there are people willing to do it for free.

 

Paying mods on an unofficial forum would mean you're basically inviting all the problems official forums have, only with less control over what's really going on.

The advantage of unofficial forums is that their mods can delete content-free complaints and vitriol from the boards with reckless abandon. If Mythic did the same thing it would get people ("I'm a paying customer!") ten kinds of upset.

 

I don't see any problem with them basically making it their unofficial forum. If some troll gets out of hand, and the current mods cut the thread, then no big deal. But if the same person posts on an Official forum, then it's "fascist Mythic" this and "they must be trying to fool us" that. Overall, the Mythic team has been great at making us see them as people, not just god-like devs, and I think that will help us to see where they're headed with the game, and help them to stay grounded and listen to player feedback.

 

Funny thing is - the mods aren't on the payroll - they can just as easily 'keep the Devs in line'. However I would think the mods/admins of WHA find just having the Devs frequent their site as enough payment.

 

The official forum decision really could come back to bite them in the tail end. I don't know anything about the WHA admins, and I'm sure they're nice people who support the game. That said, we've seen this type of unofficial online community situation cause significant problems both in gaming circles (e.g. the EQ2 Flames debacle) and elsewhere on the internets (e.g. several grassroots supporters of various Presidential candidates this past Primary season).

There will come a time when Mythic wants the WHA admins to do something that the WHA admins don't want to do. There are a variety of ways that situation could end, not all of them catastrophic, but all of them avoidable if Mythic would do their own community management for themselves. If they march in and play the "it's our game, and we have more lawyers than you" card, things can get very ugly.

How is WHA financed, anyway? They've got to be eating a fair chunk of bandwidth. This is precisely the situation that resulted in most of the major WoW database sites being owned by gold farmers (the only people willing to take a loss running them).

 

Eventually Mythic will launch their own forums and community sites. Especially if it garners anywhere near the attention of World of Warcraft. The choice to stay away from it right now was purely financial, so they didn't have to spend resource on something that wasn't receiving any return. When the game is live and they have (let's say and hope a few million subscribers) they will have the time, money, and necessity to have their own community site.

Imagine trying to deal with millions of subscribers apart from a very focused and interactive website / forum structure.

Peace,
Rodney

 

Green Armadillo>

I'm not too worried about that, it seemed to work out pretty well with the vn boards and DAoC back in the day.