If you simply ‘let community happen’ then you will get precisely the community that you deserve.

Regarding the point about ideas rarely coming from the community to the game, I think a lot of people are conflating ‘good ideas’ with ‘feedback on what is broken’. Certainly in a beta community, feedback on bugs, unpopular features and broken systems is relatively easy to pass up the chain so that someone who can use that information sees it. Stuff like your lovingly crafted 30 paragraph post on a realistic Were-weasel life-cycle mechanic, not so much.

Sanya :I hate to say this, because it’s a dearly beloved sacred cow, but the idea that ANY studio gets any measurable percentage of ideas from the forums is simply not an idea based in reality.
The reports generated from the forums are the Top X Threads as seen by traffic. Five thousand people claiming that an encounter is bugged are not usually wrong. That thread is sent up the chain.
The thoughtfully written post with a clever idea is almost certainly never read if it is made in a forum with critical mass, unless you have an exceptional community manager both IN PLACE and EMPOWERED to pass up ideas to the people who actually matter.
I’m sorry, but the explanation as to how the clever ideas get from the forum to the game is almost always “coincidence.” The people at the studio are usually gamers and love games, and are paid to have ideas. They had the idea, whatever it was, six months or even a year before it was posted.
You can usually trace a direct line from a player reporting a bug to the fix, but not content.

As a professional tester this isn’t surprising but a good bit annoying. Sure the ideas of better ways to spend the money are good if you are hell-bent on community but frankly games have prioritized community way too high. As pointed out community will happen and doesn’t require official sanctioning… decent QA on the other hand?

Not trying to be bitter but I can go read a post-mortem in J Mulligan’s book (which isn’t exactly new these days) and yet the SAME game company repeats a lot of the very mistakes they indicated they learned years ago.

I dunno.. I guess I’m tired of seeing people talk about WoW numbers when they don’t have WoW numbers and aren’t likely to ever have them. I get that you folks like to fantasize about it but let’s stay focussed on having successful non-WoW games first and worry about how to handle the BIG numbers between dips in our Scrooge McDuck swimming pools filled with money.

Yes its going to take an experienced set of brains to filter the noise, but guess what, you have a boatload of cash coming in the door, pay good people and keep them.

You just realize there is a cost associated with it, and you need to budget accordingly.

D-0ne :
A forum with 5 million members would be a mess. I know this because, I was one of 25 admins on a forum of 75,000 people. We had ~200 moderators and each was working about 4 hours a day moderating. Each admin was working about 6 hours a day.
It was absolute chaos. For whatever reason, when you’ve got a forum that popular the bots attack with a vengeance. We were getting 12-20k actual posts from members per day and the bots were breaking in and getting 200-1000 posts a day on old threads…
You know someone has to try and read all of those new posts.

Online communities are a broken windows thing (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixing_Broken_Windows). If this is what’s going on in the forum, then the community managers either allowed it to go to hell and just lack the skill to deftly steer and work with a community. CM is not an easy task, and not one to be managed with hammer and tongs, nor spin and PR.

Bad communities can also be a sign that the product just plain sucks. No amount of community management is going to fix a bad product. People coming into your forums to tell you things suck may be right, and you don’t fix that by shutting down your forums or moderation. You do it by fixing your product.

What a responsible developer does is use their forums to have the players describe symptoms and to understand what their preferred result would be. The trouble with really large forums is that it turns into a popularity contest, and suddenly there’s far too much pressure being put on the developers to make the wrong decisions.

Boanerges :
I’ve been part of those private discussions (SOE boards) and I can say that they bore fruit FAR more often than anything in a public forum. It was even beneficial to have a dev say why they wouldn’t do something rather than making 50 bazillion posts about it in vain. Your characterization about what feedback players can give is flat out wrong.

I’m not sure how that has anything to do with what I was saying. Sure, a forum can be used to make announcements to the players.

However, my point was that you can’t trust the average player to understand (or care) how the change they want will impact the long term health of the game quality. The core of this is that the vast majority will go for instant gratification if they think it’s being offered.

What you can determine is if they’re currently enjoying themselves, and that would encapsulate their explanations as to why they’re not currently enjoying themselves. Even they won’t understand the exact reason why, but a good developer can extrapolate where the real source of the ill stems from.

Sanya :
The thoughtfully written post with a clever idea is almost certainly never read if it is made in a forum with critical mass, unless you have an exceptional community manager both IN PLACE and EMPOWERED to pass up ideas to the people who actually matter.

The last phrase is the critical piece.

It doesn’t matter how many great/smart/sane/useful posts are made on a forum if there is nobody actively trying to look for those posts and nobody on the dev team who wants to hear the feedback. In my book, mining good posts and passing them along the chain is one of the most important functions of a community manager–regardless of community size.

Any company that doesn’t hire exceptional community managers and/or lacks devs willing to listen to them isn’t practicing any kind of community management worth a damn.

Devs and players get the best interaction when you have invitation-only forums where you pull one troll maneuver and you’re out. You’re there because you make good, non-ranty posts and the devs can get info from you. People tend to scream “Elitist!” when they find out but that’s just because you had a party without them. Private forums make for a good hub-and-spoke system where third parties with class and guild boards get a rep or two in and those reps filter from their own boards and disseminate down. Thus you get good STN ratios where actual improvements can be made.

Basically, the only good response you can get out of a player is whether or not they’re enjoying themselves… and even then, you have to be on guard that they’re not just faking the pain in the name of favorable balance adjustments.

I’ve been part of those private discussions (SOE boards) and I can say that they bore fruit FAR more often than anything in a public forum. It was even beneficial to have a dev say why they wouldn’t do something rather than making 50 bazillion posts about it in vain. Your characterization about what feedback players can give is flat out wrong. Players are often the first to notice something is wrong and can sometimes even tell you how to fix it. Show me a MMO that fails to listen to its players and I’ll show you WWII Online. I never had a dev just up and capitulate to a request. If anything, they erred on the side of caution and verified for themselves before saying or doing anything.

In the end, you don’t NEED official forums of the public variety, especially when everyone who plays your game is automatically registered to post in said forums (hence 5 million posters in a game with over 10 million subs). It’s not a sign of failure in shutting them down because we’re talking about forum tied to a MMO. As Jeremy said in his linked post, if it were just about anything else then you’d be crazy to can it. But those 5 million people mostly expect something from their posting, or they wouldn’t be wasting their time posting about a game when they could be playing said game. That’s not a successful forum, that’s a towering inferno waiting to happen.

The lazy or efficient automatically avoid unnecessary responsibility. (“5 million subscribers? Shut it down!”)
The foolhardy or daring automatically shoulder too much responsibility. (“5 million subscribers? Hell, make it 10 million!”)
The enlightened automatically question everything. (“5 million subscribers? Why?”)

5 million subscribers on a forum are problematic in that you can’t really strain that much information from them. At best, you can expect to pull some pretty gnarly, “Majority Rules” polls. However, forums are the usual survey bias, and useless towards the long term benefit of the game because most forumites care more about instant gratification.

SOE tried listening to their customers, and we hated them for it. Even the NGE in SWG was the result of the surveys of the players that left (who far outnumbered the players who remained). Basically, the only good response you can get out of a player is whether or not they’re enjoying themselves… and even then, you have to be on guard that they’re not just faking the pain in the name of favorable balance adjustments.