Official forums announced

[Aiteal]

I liked this bit

The forums will be laid out in an easy to access manner, low on the graphics/flash nonsense and we will not be running ads of any kind on the forums

hehe

Mythic Entertainment | Warhammer Herald

 

[Tallen]

Hmm, bit tired so only skim-read it, but i didn't see anything in there about EU accounts soooooo.....as it's the US site, can we assume it'll be only usable by players with US accounts and we poor euros will be stuck on an EU forum segregated from our US bretheren?

 

[Aiteal]

aye
According to mods at WHA
GoA are working on the EU forums

So maybe the flash nonsense is back on the table?

 

[Nate]

Any news on this Magnus/Nic? Will the forums be tested/released at similar times, will the dev area be accessible by EU/AU players who contribute well, etc? What can expect to see thats different to the way it was handled in beta? Have to say the forums were quite nice in beta, there wasn't any flash it used vbulletin, we ripped the skin(with permission!) aswell as it's quite a nice warhammer one.

Bring back the Screenshot competitions!!!

 

[Idris]

Agreed on the beta forums, they were very nice.

 

[Ctuchik]

So maybe the flash nonsense is back on the table?

you bet it will. and even if it werent i wouldn't use that forum anyway.

getting all the info i need from this one so why should i use that?

 

[Ctuchik]

Any news on this Magnus/Nic? Will the forums be tested/released at similar times, will the dev area be accessible by EU/AU players who contribute well, etc? What can expect to see thats different to the way it was handled in beta? Have to say the forums were quite nice in beta, there wasn't any flash it used vbulletin, we ripped the skin(with permission!) aswell as it's quite a nice warhammer one.

Bring back the Screenshot competitions!!!

why would there be a dev area on the EU forums?

 

[Nate]

why would there be a dev area on the EU forums?

Why answer a question with another question? I didn't ask if they would be on the EU forums.

 

[TheBinarySurfer]

So it's what, 5 months after release and theres still not even a confirmation if the EU will have an official forum, or access to the US ones?

Laughable on both Mythic and GoA's part. It's a forum for Christs sake not Einstein's theory of relativity!

 

[twix112]

well we have seen how much time it took to get the realm war pages up and running, and what I've heard still very buggy... So sometime around july maybe we will have a forum, which means that we can use it in a intended way sometime next christmas....

 

[Flimgoblin]

GOA announced their forums in the new year's message

However I would like to know what access we have to dev posts etc.

Having separate forums suggests we get something like in Beta. Iain did his best to keep us informed of all the dev posts (both the larger official updates and the smaller comments) but it wasn't ever quite the same as on the US beta forums.

Can't blame GOA alone for that though - it's the Mythic devs that would need to post on the euro forums, and both companies that need to sort out that happening.

 

[TheBinarySurfer]

Why not just give EU players access to the US forums though? After all we are supposedly playing the same game, and are supposed to have the same level of service?

Am i missing an obvious reason for a separate forums?

 

[Nate]

Why not just give EU players access to the US forums though? After all we are supposedly playing the same game, and are supposed to have the same level of service?

Am i missing an obvious reason for a separate forums?

Data Protection Act I'm guessing.

 

[Downanael]

They did decent job on their official forums back on time when daoc started,now when i think about it it certainly was miracle how fast they were up.

 

[Tallen]

They did decent job on their official forums back on time when daoc started,now when i think about it it certainly was miracle how fast they were up.

Official DAoC forums?

 

[TheBinarySurfer]

Data Protection Act I'm guessing.

DPA applies to UK law only afaik? GoA are based in France, and i can list at least 8-9 clear violations of the UK DPA in recent memory (last 12 months). They've never shown the slightest regard for it before, i see no reason why they would start now.

 

[Arrandor]

I liked this bit

The forums will be laid out in an easy to access manner, low on the graphics/flash nonsense and we will not be running ads of any kind on the forums

hehe

I'd love to see the GOA WEB coders and CSR's (that argued for flash) faces when they saw/see that.

Nicely said, Mark!

Now sit up and take note, GOA, the guy in charge thinks flash is nonsense too. Ofc GOA will continue to ignore all common sense when it comes to flash, much to the detriment of their users, especially their disabled users.

 

[Mabs]

They did decent job on their official forums back on time when daoc started,now when i think about it it certainly was miracle how fast they were up.

Official DAoC forums?

you can spot the really old school daoc people and the wannabes

 

[Nate]

Gah, no weekend CM's?! Freeloaders!

 

[Flimgoblin]

you can spot the really old school daoc people and the wannabes

Wonder if they'll bring back Brannor to mod

 

[NicGOA]

Good morning guys,

In our new years message as well as in our January newsletter we did confirm that we will have official forums alongside Mythic's.

To answer some other questions I can respond to now:

• There will be three different forums, one for the US players, one for the European players and one for the Russian players.
• The Mythic and GOA forums (not sure about the Russian one at this time (in Soviet Russia Forums host you?)) will be using the same forum software. There will be no Flash.
• To be able to post on these forums you need an active account, currently the plan is to allow anyone to read the public sections of the forum.
• Both forums are currently being prepared.

More information in the weeks to come.

 

[pikeh]

(in Soviet Russia Forums host you?)

really made me laugh, lol!

 

[Punkcheese]

Good morning guys,

In our new years message as well as in our January newsletter we did confirm that we will have official forums alongside Mythic's.

To answer some other questions I can respond to now:

• There will be three different forums, one for the US players, one for the European players and one for the Russian players.
• The Mythic and GOA forums (not sure about the Russian one at this time (in Soviet Russia Forums host you?)) will be using the same forum software. There will be no Flash.
• To be able to post on these forums you need an active account, currently the plan is to allow anyone to read the public sections of the forum.
• Both forums are currently being prepared.

More information in the weeks to come.

Which is all well and good, but how do you intend to insure that we get the same level of "access" to the devs as the US players? Force the devs to cross-post?
Now, I'm sure GOA will do their best to make it work (apart from keeping that crappy Flash site, you actually do a pretty good job by now), but it will never work as well as a single forum. All it will do is give you more work for no real benefit - you'll probably be plenty busy keeping the non-english speaking parts of the community up to date.
Like others, I'm sure, I would really like to hear the rationale behind having separate forums, since, to me, it just seems to go against all common sense.

This post over at WHA really says it quite well.

 

[Nate]

Good morning guys,

In our new years message as well as in our January newsletter we did confirm that we will have official forums alongside Mythic's.

To answer some other questions I can respond to now:

• There will be three different forums, one for the US players, one for the European players and one for the Russian players.
• The Mythic and GOA forums (not sure about the Russian one at this time (in Soviet Russia Forums host you?)) will be using the same forum software. There will be no Flash.
• To be able to post on these forums you need an active account, currently the plan is to allow anyone to read the public sections of the forum.
• Both forums are currently being prepared.

More information in the weeks to come.

Hmm no Australian forums?! What will they do if they want to put a shrimp on the barbie and Mythic don't give them forums to talk about recipes!?!

Good to see it's not going to be flash! Will it be using vbulletin then? ;o Although I've heard most mmo official forums are made by themselves.

Gifv some screens of the new forums imo!

 

[pikeh]

Lets hope they have a seperate section called; "I Don't play this game but I want to slag it off"

 

[TheBinarySurfer]

Which is all well and good, but how do you intend to insure that we get the same level of "access" to the devs as the US players? Force the devs to cross-post?
Now, I'm sure GOA will do their best to make it work (apart from keeping that crappy Flash site, you actually do a pretty good job by now), but it will never work as well as a single forum. All it will do is give you more work for no real benefit - you'll probably be plenty busy keeping the non-english speaking parts of the community up to date.
Like others, I'm sure, I would really like to hear the rationale behind having separate forums, since, to me, it just seems to go against all common sense.

This post over at WHA really says it quite well.

Agreed and repped.

 

[Killgorde]

I'd love to see the GOA WEB coders and CSR's (that argued for flash) faces when they saw/see that.

Nicely said, Mark!

Now sit up and take note, GOA, the guy in charge thinks flash is nonsense too. Ofc GOA will continue to ignore all common sense when it comes to flash, much to the detriment of their users, especially their disabled users.

As someone well-versed in Flash I take offense at everyone blaming that particular medium for the GOA website woes. Sorry to say it, but whoever is doing the actionscript (flash coding) at GOA must have learned their skills from the back of a cereal packet - their efforts are offensive in the extreme to anyone with a modicum of Flash skill. Do not blame Flash - blame the amateurish attempts from whoever was appointed by GOA to design and implement the website.

How good can Flash be (if a programmer knows what he is doing, of course)? Der Bauer are the masters. Check out IMO the best Flash guys out there.

I specialised for a number of years in optimising Flash performance for website usage. Here's a link to an incomplete demo I was playing around with 6 years ago when I left that particular industry drawing on a variety of FLA's pulled from Flashkit (a flash ideas and resource site for all levels of ability) - a work in progress which, although far from complete, will give you an idea of how smooth and fast Flash can be even with extremely demanding gfx content (which WH-Europe doesnt have) in the right hands. Please bear in mind the total filesize of that flash movie is around 3mb - half that with the audio taken out. If it takes more than maybe 5 seconds for that movie to load on a reasonable connection when uncached I would be surprised.

If you havent a clue what you are doing with Flash though, you end up with what GOA provide. Sorry Nic and Magnus, but your web guys are inadequate/incompetent/incapable of working with that medium and give Flash a bad name.

 

[Nate]

It looks nice, sure. It's still slow though. I've been on that Der Bauer site for 5 minutes now and I haven't even got through the intro videos, your site is hitching every now and then though I can see it's a lot faster then the Der Bauer one. So it's not very useful for people with low bandwidth and can you make flash usable for disabled users? I've seen software which can be used to increase the size of text / images like you see in firefox with zoom but by a much, much higher amount.

 

[fatgit]

Good morning guys,

In our new years message as well as in our January newsletter we did confirm that we will have official forums alongside Mythic's.

To answer some other questions I can respond to now:

• There will be three different forums, one for the US players, one for the European players and one for the Russian players.
• The Mythic and GOA forums (not sure about the Russian one at this time (in Soviet Russia Forums host you?)) will be using the same forum software. There will be no Flash.
• To be able to post on these forums you need an active account, currently the plan is to allow anyone to read the public sections of the forum.
• Both forums are currently being prepared.

More information in the weeks to come.

We appreciate the updates Nic, but the "big" question has not been answered by anyone yet.
The US players are being given almost direct access to (and from) the developers /Mythic, and access (for those deemed worthy) to private boards with devs. Are we, in Europe, going to get that same level of access, or will we be relegated to having bits passed to & fro via EU mods ?

I've seen this kind of thing happen time and time again in various MMO's. US only "team leads", major changes to the game based purely on US feedback and dynamics etc. DAoC comes to mind, where everything happened 6 months later in Europe, and we had little, or no, feedback or input.

The current situation, with Mythic & Goa using multiple third-party forums isn't anywhere near perfect, but at least everyone is on an even footing.

We're all subscribers to the same game, surely we should all have the same level of access to the people that make the game, not just the US subscribers?

Good call on not using flash in the forums though

 

[Killgorde]

Nate, in the days of 56k dial-up modems when Flash started, Macromedia incorporated a number of optimisation methods to make url loading fast(er). "LoadAtRunTime" is one example - basically a command which only pulls in images/swf movies/data from an external directory etc when they are about to be used (and therefore not required at the initial loading phase). In the early days some of us also worked out other ways to "cheat" the 56k modem ceiling - something that shouldn't be needed these days with the extreme dl speeds now available.

On GOA's site there appears to be no "symbiosis" (for want of a better word) between the swf (Flash) movies - it is as if the designers created a different swf for each sub-section and cobbled them together (badly) with html - imbedding multiple swfs into a html backdrop is fraught with (simultaneous) loading issues for the inexperienced.

Der Bauer's front-end portal itself should load pretty sharpish - load speed on the secondary demo material on the site is mainly down to the actual file size of that material. As a reference point for what is possible with Flash, created by scripters a hell of a lot more talented than I ever was, I know no better. And besides - the artwork is to die for and may give some of you pleasure .


I just find it annoying that Flash is denigrated by so many, when in capable hands it can be a fantastic medium. A bad workman blames his tools. If GOA are desperate to use Flash they should get guys on board who know their tools well enough to make it (War-Europe) rock performance-wise.