..end of april?

[old.giriam]

Im not one to get easily upset, but didnt an official statement on the daoc-europe boards say that the forums would be open out april?

It might just be me, but it seems a bit like they didnt like the complaining going on there so they decided to shut the thing down before even more people got a chance to say that they wanted the forums to stay.

oh, and one more thing.. "not even the american servers have official forums".. give me a break, they have more servers, higher patchlevel, the herald and all sorts of things we cant really use because the information is relevant to their patchlevel and server-park only. so now you go and kill the only thing the european comunity had going.

real clever.

and the "do it swift and silently, pretend it never happened" treatment just brings out contempt in your players guys.

if you dont want to loose a large part of your hardcore players (which is the part of your subscriptionbase that motivates and introduces the new players to the game) i suggest you start treating them like customers and not unwanted hangabout's.

 

[old.Niljindil]

I have to agree that this action was the lousiest ever made by GOA.

Seriously considering moving to the US servers to get the latest patches and play on the pvp server when it gets there for a nice fresh start.

Was gonna make a pvp cabalist :]

 

[Gordonax]

This was definitely a case of "close em quick, they natives are restless". And Camelot Herald provides much more than Goa is - a Guild database and event calendar, for starters, which makes up for the lack of official forums.

It's true that the old forums had a problem - too much noice, too much "own j00" rubbish at times, too many threads which duplicated each other (mostly about Albion raiding late at night ) but that's what you have moderators for. And if Goa doesn't want to devote the resources to support a full-time community moderator, then why didn't it just come out and say that? I have more respect for companies that are honest, even if I think their decisions are wrong.

Oh, and in case everyone doesn't know: The US client is now at 1.49B. The update from 1.48 was 13Mb. Given that we're not on 1.48 yet, you can expect the same chaos as last update when Goa *finally* gets down to opening the email that Mythic will have sent them with the update code in it.

Up till now, I've been giving Goa a lot of slack. After all, running an MMORPG is hard, and building a community is very hard. But the closure of the forums, and the way it was done, to me shows that the company really doesn't know its arse from its elbow about MMORPGs or communities.

I have a US account as well: I'm going to give Goa until the end of the six months I've signed up for and if it shows no improvement, I'm cancelling my Euro account, even though it will mean leaving the guild that I've brought over from UO, and starting my characters again.

 

[old.Zenwan]

customer service?

We were indeed told that the forums would be open until the end of April. Did GOA expect people to just say "oh well, we had better all be good little boys and girls and accept this change without trying to ask why or get people to change their minds".

People were upset, people felt betrayed. Some wrote to Mythic and I am sure that got GOA real worried - the Customer Service from all aspects of GOA is nothing but broken promises and downright lies.

 

[Gordonax]

Interesting...

According to a friend who I'll describe as "games industry insider" Wanadoo, the parent company of Goa, laid off quite a few people recently. I wonder if the closure of the forums had anything to do with that?

 

[old.Zenwan]

I doubt the lay offs (if indeed they are true) had anything to do with the forum being closed - there was hardly any official GOA presence on the forums (one of the main reasons for them drifting so far from their vision).

If only GOA had appointed a person (other than a GM) to be the visible forum "boss" and make them do nothing all day but work on the forum posts.

Oh well - they had the chance to do great things, and blew it.

Let's just wait and see how long this "new and improved" news service will take to see the light of day

 

[old.Sepiritz]

Whats the only reason to play in EU vs. US? The scene ofcourse.. And where would the scene be represented? On the server? Dont think so.. The only place to interact with other realm players would be an official RvR forum but GOA had to ruin the one thing going for them and I personally know of many who have had serious thoughts of moving to a US server because of this and their slow and distant support. Only thing that would fix this would be to somehow re-center the community somewhere, even if it happens to be here on BW forums..

 

[old.Hatchet]

Just think how it must make mythic feel to have the product they put so much time into destroyed by GOA.