"State Of The Boards and What’s Changing?

One of the biggest single parts of my department's job involves board moderation and watching the boards for useful ideas and feedback. Since that's such a time-consuming procedure, I've often thought about the main purpose of the boards, how we spend the majority of our time on the boards, and whether our time is being spent in the best ways possible for the service as a whole. I’ll start with my take on the purposes the boards tend to serve, and then go into more detail on how effective I feel our boards are in each of these areas (sort of a "State of the Boards" speech). This document is – admittedly – extremely long, so if you don’t care to read through all my explanations, feel free to skip down to the bottom and read the section entitled "So What’s Changing Today?", where I explain the changes we’re making. Then, if you want more background as to the reasons behind the decisions, it’s all here.

What’re the Purposes of Community Message Boards in an MMORPG?

2. A place for players to give direct feedback on game changes and policies
3. A place for dev team members to solicit focused feedback and ideas that suit their needs at the time
4. A place for players to get new insight into what the dev team is thinking and planning
5. Catharsis. Players will always vent about things they don't like, and praise those things they do like - preferably where they know that it's heard by someone with the power to change things.
6. Help from other players. Boards can be an excellent place for both new and advanced players to get advice and answers to their specific questions.
7. Community and Friendship between people with common interests.
8. Organization of events, gatherings, in-game trading, etc.
9. Marketing. Whether they’re seen as an official marketing tool or not, the bottom line is that our boards are seen by new players, and can make a very strong impression about the game.

So regarding our boards…what roles do we fill well currently, and where do we need work?

1. A place for players to give direct feedback on game changes and policies
How do we rank here? On a scale of 1-10, I’d say we’re at a 6. The boards are full of feedback, and a lot of it is good. But there’s also a huge number of posts that are simply not something we can use, or ideas for things that just won’t happen. Ever. They’re either ideas or requests for changes that would be cool, but would take major, MAJOR re-writes of the code (and essentially have to take the place of the next 6 months of updates), or something that would benefit so few people that we just can’t justify the time spent on it, or something that conflicts with the current direction of UO’s design, or something that – when compared to the other areas of UO that need desperate attention, just isn’t pressing enough for us to push other things from the schedule.

The other problem with our feedback at this point is how much of it is repetitive. When there are 19 threads on the same topic, it makes it extremely difficult to isolate the most important points, especially when it’s the same people posting in most of the repeated threads, making many of the same points in multiple places. Bumping threads also adds to the chaos, because often, a 45 post thread is made of 15 good posts, and 30 "Great idea, hope the dev team sees this!" or "Why hasn’t the dev team responded?" posts to keep it near the top of the page.

So the main reason that our feedback mechanism gets only a 6 from me isn’t the lack of good feedback - it’s the overabundance of white noise that obscures the feedback that we can really use. How do we fix this? We either need to find a way to somehow discourage the posts that are not relevant to our current needs (which is a dangerous road to tread, because that can cut off our players from feeling free to share their ideas), or we need to find a way to eliminate the repetitive and “beating a dead horse” type posts, or we need to more narrowly focus conversations by creating new and more specific forums (which is also not an idea I favor, because the more forums you have, the more difficult it is to read them all – and if posters feel that the main Dev forum is ignored, they will simply post the same things on the forum they feel *is* read by the dev team).

2. A place for dev team members to solicit focused feedback and ideas that suit their needs at the time
This is actually one of the most important features of our boards, in my opinion, and I’d probably give us an 8 in this area, in the boards’ current state. There are many fansites in our community with boards that are just as capable of filling some of these roles as we are, such as providing a place to rant, or fostering close community relationships – but the fact that we control the official boards makes them the best place for us to request specific, focused feedback, and organize it in such a way that it can actually influence our design processes.

The reason it only gets an 8, though, is kind of ironic – when we ask for feedback, we get WAY TOO MUCH! Part of the problem stems from the repeated posts (several people repeating the same feedback in multiple threads (and even within the same threads!), but the other part is just the fact that people are very eager to give us their thoughts when they know we’re listening. This isn’t a bad thing at all, but if we had a way to somehow limit the amount, or perhaps institute a way to see that people only contribute once to the thread, it might be better.

Another issue we run into when it comes to getting reliable feedback is the inability for us to know what percentage of those reading the boards are actually posting. Since you can read the boards without being logged in or having a MyUO account, there’s likely a very high number of people who may read new proposals and not have strong enough opinions to warrant them actually logging in to post… but if they were actually logged in already, they might just go ahead and post, and they might just find their opinions more relevant than they had thought. Encouraging everyone to actually have a MyUO account and be logged in while reading the boards would give us a much better view of not only how many people are seeing our proposals, but also help to see that the responses we get are from a larger percentage of our readers.

3. A place for players to get new insight into what the dev team is thinking and planning
This one’s tough. When the boards were first opened, they weren’t necessarily meant to be a place where people could come and be assured of getting a response from a "red name". First off, the time it takes for a designer to write out a post explaining a system is time that’s not being spent working on our current schedules. And second, even reading the boards is extremely time-consuming (see point #1, and the parts about too much white noise). Not that dev folks aren’t posting – unfortunately, our boards don’t currently save or mark "red" posts clearly, so dev posts that are made generally tend to not be seen by the majority of folks on the boards. Also consider the fact that dev posts expire just as fast as regular posts, so even when you do a search for dev members’ posts, you’re only seeing those posts in threads whose last posts are less than 3 days old. Overall, this just isn’t the most efficient way to communicate – it’s much better to post the info in FYI, or Comments from the Team, or somewhere that’s more permanent.

Generally, Greywolfe and Sannio (our community moderator and coordinator) read just about everything on the boards, and reply when feasible, but a lot of their time is spent focusing on individual posts and acting on them. When we see major bugs or shard outages, we check to see if the GMs are aware of it, and we show it to QA, to make sure they know about it. Depending on how major it is, we may go sit down with the producer and programmers, and they’ll get the process started to fix it immediately (not that this means bugs should be posted on the boards instead of submitted to QA – if they’re sent to uobugs@uo.com, then they’re generally *already* being worked on before we ever see them on the boards). When we see complaints about marketing, or reports that people can’t buy the product, or upgrade their accounts, we copy those posts off and go converse with the appropriate people to find the root of the problem, and see that someone’s working to fix it.

Despite all this, I do understand that the bottom line is that the posters don’t really have a good way of knowing what’s being read and what’s not, and without more responses from us, it’s easy to feel ignored. So I’m actually going to give us a 5 in this particular area. Maybe the answer is getting our contracted board moderators more involved in actually letting people know what information they’ve passed on to us. Maybe the answer lies in cutting down on the white noise to the point where it’s easier for us to keep up and reply to the things that are more important. Maybe we need more headcount. Or maybe the answer is setting the expectations more clearly as to what kind of posts will receive responses and what won’t. No matter what the answer is, it’s an area where we still need improvement.

4. Catharsis. Players will always vent about things they don't like, and praise those things they do like - preferably where they know that it's heard by someone with the power to change things.
This is probably the common purpose of the Discussion board currently, and this phenomenon is also often referred to as ranting. In facilitating this purpose, I’d probably give our boards currently about a 7. People come to our boards to let us – and others – know just how upset they are about our decisions (sometimes it’s praise too, but more often than not it’s rants, so I’ll focus there for now). I’d almost say we’re a 10 in this since there’s so much of it on our boards, but there’s that nagging little issue of having your board accounts linked to your game accounts, so some people don’t feel that they can really be completely free with their opinions on the UO Boards.

The big question, though, about ranting on the UO boards is this – who does it help, how much of our time does it take to deal with, and is this something that is better served on our boards than somewhere else? For the most part, it helps the ranter to get their frustrations out in print. It helps us a little by showing what parts of our game elicit the most emotion, but generally, we can get that information through other, more positive ways, such as tracking player habits, tracking those issues that generate the most GM calls, and seeing what kind of questions and issues people submit through the Game Wizard, etc. And does it really help to facilitate this through our own boards? The sad fact is that rants take - by far - the most time to deal with from a moderation standpoint. Our current policy says that you’re allowed to be negative, provided you back up your thoughts with something constructive, and you don’t bring insults down to a personal level. Unfortunately, this means that people can essentially post “I hate this game” in every single thread on the board, as long as they throw in an idea for something that they think would make it better and don’t stoop to “I hate this game’s designers.” The line between being negative in a constructive manner and being simply disruptive is very, very fine, and we spend hours trying to keep that line firm - hours that could be much better spent trying to improve our score in area #3.

People will always rant. If our boards weren’t available, they’d go to another board, like Stratics, or CoB, or the Chosen or UOPowergamers, for example. And in all truth, when we do something controversial, and we want the no-holds-barred reaction, where do we look? The UO Boards first, but we have quite a few others bookmarked as well.

5. Help from other players. Boards can be an excellent place for both new and advanced players to get advice and answers to their specific questions.
This is the ideal use of our boards from a player standpoint – a place to go to get answers when you need it. No having to wait for a GM, no having to submit questions into a Game Wizard… just being able to say “Ok, how the heck do I do this?” and being answered by a friendly veteran player or someone else who has had the same question you have. How do we rate here? Sadly, probably a 5. The biggest reason for this is the aforementioned white noise and ranting – those two things cause the board traffic to be so high that posts rarely stay on the front page for more than an hour or two without getting bumped. The consolidation of the In-Game Support board was partly to blame for this, but the purpose of that Board was to provide a place for people to discuss in-game Support, and get answers from our Support staff – answers which, unfortunately, our support staff rarely had time to give, since they were busy supporting people in-game. However, I think we can increase this rating to at least a 9 with one of the changes that’s being made today – more on this when you get down to the “So What’s Changing?” section.

6. Community and Friendship between people with common interests.
This one is a trademark of all successful board communities, and it’s strong in the UO Forums. I’d say we’re at about an 8 in the strength of our community and the ties made between the posters. The biggest thing keeping it from a 9 or 10, though, is the flames and insults that go rampant when people decide to be disruptive. Again, we’re making another change today that should make a big difference here. See that “What’s Changing Today?” section at the bottom for more on this one too.

7. Organization of events, gatherings, in-game trading, etc.
I think our boards facilitate this very well, and it’s one of the smoothest areas of our forums. The Trading and Selling board and the Luncheons and Fan Events forums require almost no moderation on our part, and there are events arranged in the Roleplaying & Events forum from time to time. Of course, the traffic in those boards is generally low, so I suppose we’d only rank an 8 or so in that area. If these boards were used more often, we’d be doing better.

8. Marketing. Whether they’re seen as an official marketing tool or not, the bottom line is that our boards are seen by new players, and can make a very strong impression about the game.
The perception from some players, when told that the boards are a marketing tool, feel that it’s an underhanded way to justify deleting things that we don’t like, and only posting things that make us look good. I’ve always been very adamant about not simply deleting things because it’s negative, and I firmly believe that negative feedback can often be more helpful, ultimately, than positive. But when negative feedback moves beyond “I don’t like the changes to this skill, and think you guys should really re-think your choices on this,” and moves into “This is the worst change I’ve ever seen, and can’t believe how badly this has ruined the game,” then it becomes a serious problem from a marketing standpoint.

When a new player comes to the boards because they’re hoping to find someone talking about their first steps as a blacksmith, or looking to see if there’s anyone they can meet from their shard who knows of a good guild, and they’re faced with a page of posts about how UO has been ruined, and how the dev team doesn’t care, and how the support is nonexistent, and the art is horrible, etc… the first reaction could easily be, “Wait – everyone who plays this game says that it sucks! Why would I want to spend any money on this?”

Human nature is such that people tend to seek out venues to complain when they’re the most upset, while people who aren’t upset do not typically seek out those venues, and when they do post, it’s typically at a much lower rate. In other words, someone looking to use our boards to ask about the properties of the new Jukan bow might post once or twice, while someone who wants to make it clear that they are upset about the state of archery as a skill might post 40, or 50, or 200 times over the course of several months. Therefore, an extremely small minority of our players have the power as it stands currently to show a highly skewed version of what “all the players” think about UO, and this can be extremely damaging to the first impressions for players who are not regulars to the boards – which is why, as a marketing tool, I’d give our current boards about a 3.

So What’s Changing Today?

Now that I’ve discussed some of the good and bad sides of the UO Forums, here’s what we’re doing today to fix some of those problems.

1. Welcome to the New Player Haven forum!
We’re creating a new forum for game questions and advice. Both new and advanced players can exchange tips, advice, and help each other with specific game questions without the fear of their questions or answers scrolling off the page within an hour due to hundreds of other posts.

This forum will be fully moderated, meaning that all posts will have to approved before they’re seen (and we’ll make a very strong effort to see that the approval time is short). This will be done for two reasons: one, it will ensure that new players won’t be insulted right off the bat by people calling them a n00b for asking silly questions, and two, it will prevent the legitimate game questions from being scrolled off by other things.

2. You must now be logged in to read the MyUO Forums.
This change will mean that in order to read the main forums, you’ll need to sign up for a MyUO account and be logged into the boards. The two exceptions to this will be the read-only FAQ board and the New Player Haven board, which will both remain visible to all visitors, whether they have a MyUO account or not. This change will help us in two major ways – one, it will give us real numbers on how much visibility we get on information and assets that are posted to our boards. Two, we hope it will encourage more people reading the boards to actually contribute – people who have very legitimate concerns or thoughts, but who may not have been driven before to actually register to post. And three, there’s the fact that our boards are a marketing tool, and confronting a potential player with pages of complaints and concerns about advanced game features can be overwhelming.

3. Our boards will no longer be a rant forum.
In the past, we’ve leaned more towards the lenient side when it came to rants, allowing many things to stay simply because they were honest opinions, and we wanted people to feel free to voice those opinions. But what we’ve ended up with is an overabundance of rants, and a multitude of posts on topics from how incredibly out of touch the dev team is, to why people shouldn’t buy the new product, to how evil the corporation is, etc. These kinds of posts, while perfectly valid and honest opinions, do not benefit anyone by being on the official UO Boards. As said above in the “Catharsis” section, the web has no shortage of places that cater to free and unfettered rants, and I’m sure that we, being the masochists that we are, will visit those sites often to see what kind of fun things people are saying about us. But when they’re on the UO Boards, then they’re our responsibility. Greywolfe spends an enormous amount of time watching and monitoring these posts to make sure they don’t get out of hand, and I see that as time that could be better spent dealing with something that could improve the game, such as helping Oaks compile suggestions on taming, or collecting feedback on the German UO translations to send on to our EA UK office.

Online games are one of the only industries that exist where customers can essentially walk into the business, stand on a table and tell every person in the store how horrible they think the food is. Well, there’s a reason that’s not allowed in most instances, and it’s because it disrupts the playing/eating/purchasing experience of the other customers, and it’s bad for business. Granted, that same person can picket outside the store, and that’s fine. Rant sites all over the web are essentially “outside the store” for us, and we’re accustomed to seeing all sorts of things there. But the UO Boards are part of our store, and we will no longer allow people to be disruptive by posting vitriolic rants towards UO or OSI there.

4. The “Banned from boards = Banned from UO” disciplinary policy is changing.
This is probably the biggest change, and I recommend that everyone read this one closely! When these boards were created, the policy was that if you were banned from the boards, you would also be banned from the game. This was done to ensure that folks knew that if they ignored board warnings and kept violating board guidelines, they would lose more than just their board posting privileges, and that it would affect their UO account. Unfortunately, it’s had a different effect.

Generally, a person will not get banned from the game for simply being a jerk. There are certainly exploits and unfair practices that will get you banned, but just being argumentative or insensitive isn’t enough to warrant being banned from a game. So in the interest of fairness, since the penalty for being banned from the boards has been so high, we have provided PLENTY of warnings (unless the offense was so grievous as to not even leave a question). Since I have taken control of OCR, we have banned only 4 or 5 people due to board offenses, despite the fact that we give out several warnings a day. An unfortunate side effect of this is the apparent lack of action perceived by others in the board community. For example, John Doe calls another poster a moron, and others see this. It’s deleted, and he’s given a warning. He then comes back the next week, and people conclude that apparently, he was never punished for his blatant misdeed. He then tells someone to grow up and get a life, and he’s given a second warning and a 24-hour suspension. He’s back three days later and insinuates to another poster that he should learn to read, and posters see this as well. Other posters then start saying things like, “Why hasn’t this guy been banned yet? It’s obvious that you only care about the griefers.”

So let’s take a look at what’s happened here. A person has called another player a moron, told him to get a life and grow up, and then insinuated that he should learn how to read. Is this really something that should be a bannable offense in UO? Granted, he’s a jerk, but banning isn’t called for just yet. So according to our board rules up until now, he still has 2 more suspensions before banning. John Doe would be given a 3rd warning and a 72 hour suspension for his third insult, and the next insult after that would be a Final Warning and another 72 hour suspension. One more offense results in being banned from the boards and game. Of course, if his offenses were significantly worse than simply telling someone to “grow up”, we might have skipped a level or two, but generally, people have been getting MANY chances on the boards – and the reason for all these chances was the significance of the punishment.

So here’s the new system. The first time someone is found breaking board guidelines, they will receive a warning. This warning will explain that they have broken the board guidelines, and will include a copy of those guidelines. It will also notify them that any other instance of breaking the board guidelines will result in being permanently banned from the boards, and will result in a mark being placed on their UO account. This means that being banned from the boards will not mean being banned from the game, unless the person’s UO account is already on Final Warning for other offenses. It will, however, count as an official strike on their UO account – so yes, a player’s behavior on the boards will still have an effect on their UO account!

By lessening the consequence associated with being banned from the boards, my department will be much freer to remove those people that are being consistently disruptive, knowing that the punishment more aptly fits the crime.

Last Word

I’m looking back at this and thinking, OMG, did I really write 7 pages’ worth about the boards? Apparently I did… the boards have been a constant source of both pride and concern for me for a long time, and it’s important to me that they stay a place that benefits us and the players as much as possible. While some of the changes (such as the rants crackdown) may not make me the most popular figure at OSI, the task of making the boards a more constructive and positive place is an absolutely necessary thing, and I believe this is the best way to do it.

Online Community is an ever-evolving thing, and who knows if we’ll ever get it completely right? But as it evolves, we have to keep evolving with it.

Feel free to send me email at cynthe@uo.com if you actually made it through this novel and have thoughts for me!

Amy "Cynthe" Sage
Manager of Community Services
ORIGIN Systems


Feb 14 2002"


Fun hum? I wonder where those boards are...?

They were closed and the "official UO boards" status was granted to Stratics
When Mythic took over UO, that status was revoked and the fansite program cancelled.

I still miss the old MyUO Boards. (but not Cynthe, I don't know she just always got on my nerves)

Still love they the way they just shut them down with virtually no warning. I go on a one week vacation, come back and they are already gone! (no, I'm not bitter )

She moved onto the UX:O team, but that game was cancelled.

Not sure where she is now.

she's obviously addicted to elderberries.