An open letter to whom it may concern.
Firstly, I do want to thank the developers for not only keeping UO alive but also adding a lot of great content over their tenure. Personally, I believe the pet revamp was one of the best editions to the game all time. It allowed a tamer to basically customize their weapons so to speak.
Accolades aside, there are areas that are... lacking. This forum for example. It's an unmitigated disaster. The overall design of uo.com is dated both in optical and technically speaking. The site looks like it's from the early days of the internet and is not even mobil friendly.
The forums themselves are OK, however all the nonsense posts from certain malcontents dominate the posts. I have little to no doubt that UO has lost subscribers because of this. Why they are allowed to post nonsense for days with not much more than post lock. Kick their ***** out. There are only a few reasons I can think of as to why it's next to impossible to get banned here:
1. Mods just don't care - It's not this reason. I know enough about the mods in here that I am confident they are incredibly passionate about this game.
2. Overzealous management - This has been batted around for years as the reason. If it is then said management figure needs to become a lot more involved in these forums or they have to allow their mods to make decisions.
3. Technical reason - These forums use our game login as login credentials here. This leads me to wonder if it is tough or requires additional effort to ban someone here without banning their UO account. Also by having our logins associated with game logins is not really a great idea. At least with the EA login system there is adequate security measures. These forums... well less certainly isn't more in this case.
Other areas of improvement include both communication and NL. I won't beat a dead horse here but there are a lot of valid complaints and I just hope they are not falling on deaf ears.
Again, I do appreciate everything the current development team has done over the years but all those great things are being overshadowed but just silly crap!
Accolades aside, there are areas that are... lacking. This forum for example. It's an unmitigated disaster. The overall design of uo.com is dated both in optical and technically speaking. The site looks like it's from the early days of the internet and is not even mobil friendly.
The forums themselves are OK, however all the nonsense posts from certain malcontents dominate the posts. I have little to no doubt that UO has lost subscribers because of this. Why they are allowed to post nonsense for days with not much more than post lock. Kick their ***** out. There are only a few reasons I can think of as to why it's next to impossible to get banned here:
1. Mods just don't care - It's not this reason. I know enough about the mods in here that I am confident they are incredibly passionate about this game.
2. Overzealous management - This has been batted around for years as the reason. If it is then said management figure needs to become a lot more involved in these forums or they have to allow their mods to make decisions.
3. Technical reason - These forums use our game login as login credentials here. This leads me to wonder if it is tough or requires additional effort to ban someone here without banning their UO account. Also by having our logins associated with game logins is not really a great idea. At least with the EA login system there is adequate security measures. These forums... well less certainly isn't more in this case.
Other areas of improvement include both communication and NL. I won't beat a dead horse here but there are a lot of valid complaints and I just hope they are not falling on deaf ears.
Again, I do appreciate everything the current development team has done over the years but all those great things are being overshadowed but just silly crap!
Comments
I firmly believe that this is the cause of a lot of the issues that tend to come up. It's the lack of communication. At this point the players are left only guessing and theorizing since there is hardly a drip of information from our developers. They don't utilize these forums —or any means really— to connect with their user base. Concerns about the state of UO then begin to sprout up and it's all downhill from there. The developers communication helps bring order and ease to what is otherwise just us guessing what's going on.
Basically what it translates to —or what people translate it as— is if the developers don't care enough to communicate with the player base, why would they care about the game?
It is a dead horse, but a very important one that seems to be lacking from this development team. You simply have to communicate with your player base, especially with a live game like UO.
*edited for clarity.
Anyways, I agree with most of Red's post and I really do stand behind the whole communication thing. Like I said on stream last night, at this point, the silence is just unprofessional and is worrying the player base.
NL is only weeks overdue (see my previous post uo update) and it was only an alpha release scheduled. Posting such inflammatory comments is a breach of the forums TOS. k, ty