Rant: Don’t Make me Pull this MMO Over!

LOL!! I was wanting to write something to this effect as well, but I’m glad you got to it first! The QQing is almost unbearable on the forums, and I can’t believe how short-sighted some people are being. I can hardly believe that anyone has exhausted all of the things that went into Book 7 in one day, so noone really has any perspective on the whole thing. So sad that people have to find things to complain about 24/7.

Exactly. Posting something like “Turbine you suck, fix this or I am gone.” will not get a positive response.

Bring up issues in a level headed and polite way. How does the old adage go? You will catch more flies with honey instead of vinegar?

The Hunter stuff is getting to be absolutely horrible. Try reading that forum, honestly. I can’t even do it anymore. Before this book complaints were generally constructive and friendly… but now it seems like a floodgate of meanness has been open. If you disagree at all, you’re a troll.

I guess it was too much to hope that this would never happen to LotRO. I mean, at the end of the day, every one but people with Hunter mains thought the Hunter was over powered. I’m sorry for them and maybe the changes were too strong, but I have to imagine there’s better things to do that directly flaming one another.

You know, of course, that simply responding to the out lash to legitimate criticism in a similar childish way does nothing but make you look like a hypocrite, correct? Or rather the way you have exaggerated how people put across their opinions on a Book that has certainly turned the game into something unrecognizable.

I’ve been around in LotRo for two years now and there has always been feedback right before a Book comes out. Usually it’s not so bad. You get a few threads here and there and that’s pretty much it. Book 7, however, was horrendous. If you are bothered by the number in frequency of the number of players voicing their opinion, you might consider the following.

A) Why is this happening in a larger frequency than it has before
B) Why does a Turbine CM have to post a sticky topic telling people to calm down

Of course, you’ve answered the first part to our question. “Because they cry, because they QQ, because they whine,” et al, ad nauseum. All very adult answers, by the way, in light of calling others childish, but I don’t think I should have to point that out twice.

I can’t help but be reminded of all other cases of customer feedback. Usually if there is a large outcry from the customers, guess what, it’s more than likely due to poor service. Flagship Studios most certainly didn’t receive a backlash of negative feedback simply because “omg my char isnt uber.” And much like the good Turbine we all know, the one that brought us AC2, which sold so horribly they had to bring it down after a year, is too vain to think that their baby jewel in the rough of MMO Country can’t actually have something wrong with it.

Bringing up being around for two years, I can distinctly remember a difference in developer feedback back at launch. They were out in full, answering questions, being friendly, even in light of some real idiots out there, and taking many player suggestions into consideration. Of course that was the idea to it on launch day; build a fan base. It worked. Founders and lifetimers galore (I’m one of them). We all thought Turbine could do no wrong. So when you see all these people “QQing” with over 2,000 posts and a join date that says April 2007, you may want to delve a little deeper than a common drivel answer to a situation where people don’t like to hear what the other side has to say.

The only reason why so many players have become so vocal in their pursuits to voice their complaints is because it’s the only way they can be heard nowadays. Much of what we say as a community as whole falls on deaf ears for developers who proclaim they are listening. Lets skip the effects of what a self-rez has on the game; who the hell even asked for the feature in the first place? The answer? No one. Turbine had a doozy for that one; “We mine in-game data that determines our decisions.” I’d like to shake the hand of the guy who designed a system that could read players’ minds in-game.

And if they’re not listening, they’re doing worse; they’re censoring and banning legitimate criticism. Hey hey, this looks familiar. No wonder Turbine hired David Brevik and Jeff Lind; it would seem they were trying to imitate Flagship Studios’s success. Book 7, on the other hand, tries to imitate World of Warcraft. Put the two together and try and figure out why people are not happy about the changes.

I disagree. I do have first-hand experience from Turbine’s new policies. I myself had my posts censored and then later banned simply because I made legitimate and constructive complaints against the LotRo game engine. As soon as the art director, Floon, saw my post, and responded that he was not going to respond to “insults” (apparently citing past bad experiences with the LotRo game engine is an insult), my posts were censored and I received warnings from Sapience. After that he must’ve been browsing through my post history just to find the smallest things he could warn me for no legitimate reason other than to permanently ban me off the forums. I even tried to contact Patience, the head CM, and I heard nothing from her. A week later I was permanently banned.

I am perhaps one of the small experiences that this has happened with players, but the experience has left a distaste that will never leave my mouth from my experience with Turbine. My opinion and view point on them has radically changed simply because a Turbine developer didn’t like what I had to say about the game engine. That alone proves to me that things are going a different way with them. Book 7 was the first hint to it; it will become more prominently known in the upcoming updates, until the next expansion hits and the game drastically changes to the point where we might be calling it World of Middle-earth.