[MUD-Dev] in-game vs web-based boards (was: Geometric content generation)

[Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com]

> From: Koster, Raph [mailto:rkoster at verant.com]

> In other words, by putting a tightly-integrated community on your
> website you hope to attract more people into game communities. But
> instead, what you did is create a public complaint line. And
> complaint lines aren't conducive to community-building. So you end
> up with better communities on places where the developers do not
> participate, or where there is no expectation of a reply.
 
> Which completely runs against the grain for me--I strongly believe
> in having developers maintain good contact with their players.

This is pretty topical at the moment since AO has had to follow in
Verants (EQs) footsteps and censor their message boards. Its amazing
how destructive they were to Funcom, people were posting their
account cancelled messages on a thread, and I'm sure some were just
jumping on the bandwagon and quitting because everyone else was.

I don't think such strict censorship is necessary, alternative
approaches which would require custom board software could
definitely be investigated.  Some ideas that might make things work
a bit better:

  a) Limit number of posts someone can make to one a day. I've
  noticed in Mud dev that sometimes the more interesting discussion
  develop more fruitfully when the posts don't arrive everyday. It
  moderates the speed of the discussion, and people tend to feel
  less inclined to rush off a reply knowing they have another 30
  messages to 'clear' today. In addition a slower pace seems to stop
  too many posts of duplicate info (although that could just be
  great moderating). This is probably more a discussion for Meta,
  and you may all disagree, its just my perception ;)

  b) Limit posting to those who currently have game accounts. Its
  amazing how many people want to grind a game vs game axe in these
  forums when they have no intention of playing both. Maybe they
  think they are missionaries.

  c) I was going to suggest a form of peer review whereby the
  threads have a floatiness (to the top) based on the rank of the
  posters on the thread. The poster's rank being determined by peer
  review (both positively and negatively), but it dawned on me that
  it would just be used as a pvp weapon in personal/class/balance
  wars. Maybe there is a more effective way to handle this. I want
  to create a feedback loop so that people are encouraged to make
  constructive and polite observations by a score of some kind. I've
  noticed that people who write rudely tend to completely change
  their tone when they get some developer feedback, so I'm thinking
  that another scoring mechanism might motivate this without direct
  contact. In addition, if it worked it would work as a basic filter
  for the devs to use when scanning the forums for quality. How to
  not make it gameable I don't know :D

Dan
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