778 réponses à ce sujet

[Yara C.]

Jessica Merizan wrote...

Jesse and I have been keeping an eye on the thread and we will look into any ways we can keep projects active based on your concerns about lack of viable alternatives. Thanks for voicing your feedback in a constructive manner guys. I know it's frustrating, but we appreciate it. 

And for those asking, no - we don’t have any plans to remove the DA Toolset Wiki..

Thank you for the clarification on the toolset wiki, Jessica.
Thank you as well, Jessica, Jesse, ...for caring about the concerns about projects and looking for smoother ways of  transition.

[rak72]

This sucks, there were a lot of good blogs that explained how to get mods to work, or fix your game if it got borked, ect. :-/

[Sunjammer]

Jessica Merizan wrote...

Jesse Reid wrote...

I don't think BioWare wants to get into the practice of charging for user generated content. I'm sure there would be numerous legal hurdles to overcome if we did.

I'll get together with Jessica next week and we'll see what we can do about delaying the read only changes for projects.

No no. We do not want to charge for fan art (cosplay, modding, fiction, art, etc). It's just not ethically right. 

Jesse and I have been keeping an eye on the thread and we will look into any ways we can keep projects active based on your concerns about lack of viable alternatives. Thanks for voicing your feedback in a constructive manner guys. I know it's frustrating, but we appreciate it. 

And for those asking, no - we don’t have any plans to remove the DA Toolset Wiki..

Thanks for keeping an open mind, listening to our concerns and and being willing revisit your decisions. And thanks for confirming the Dragon Age Toolset Wiki is unaffected by this round of changes.

Modifié par Sunjammer, 16 novembre 2013 - 10:43 .

[Ravensword]

ElitePinecone wrote...

You know, calling people fascists for closing down underused niche features on an internet forum doesn't really help your case.

Agreed. I fail to see how cost-cutting measures are fascist.

[Ottemis]

rak72 wrote...

This sucks, there were a lot of good blogs that explained how to get mods to work, or fix your game if it got borked, ect. :-/

Yes, it does.
It might be a good idea if we open a thread where people can dump links to modding resource blogposts so they can all be listed and backed up asap.

Edit: Created here, gogo. I'll start adding the ones I know of after dinner.

Modifié par Ottemis, 16 novembre 2013 - 09:04 .

[Dova]

rak72 wrote...

This sucks, there were a lot of good blogs that explained how to get mods to work, or fix your game if it got borked, ect. :-/

With blogs being removed, I'd say hurry up before they are phased out and just copy and paste the wall of text on so-and-so open up a online note-pad or word pad and just copy and paste it there and save it.
I know thats defiling the owners work but hey if you're gonna share it just give the credit when due.

[MrFob]

Wow, that was unexpected … and not exactly good news. Ok, the polls were never really great anyway, etc., etc.. Like most other people here, I am going to focus my response on projects (although the blogs and albums are also a great loss as far as I am concerned and you can think of them as included).

Even though my my main mod moved off site due to size, I'd still have liked to maintain and create other projects. Now that's not going to happen. I am still not quite clear what these changes mean exactly. As far as I can see, it doesn't exclude the possibility that there will be a replacement, although skimming this thread does not bode well.
I can think of a couple of reasons why BW would want to get rid of the projects, hosting and traffic costs mainly, although I am still puzzeled since this entire site is after all a huge advertisement for BW and EA. Anyway, I can understand their reasoning to some extent but it's simply a really bad gesture towards the community. I was hoping BW would eventually embrace modding again (as they used to) but now they tell us rather nonchalantly to please take out stuff and go somewhere else. I think that makes the company policy on this subject very clear. I am sad and disappointed but hey, it's their business. They don't want to support the community in this fashion anymore, it's their call (other developers don't do it either).
However, what really gets me is how this message was phrased. They evaluated feedback and got to the conclusion that all these features should go? Who asked for that?!? I haven't heard a single person ever complain about that single button that gets you to the projects section. Frankly, at this point, I am wondering if BW just uses the phrase "We listened to feedback" as a standard sentence for every single announcement, it's simply not believable for me anymore. Then, they want to improve the user experience? How am I supposed to interpret that one? Does it mean that our mods decreased user enjoyment of this site? They try to sell it like everyone will be better off if these features are removed but unless they actually replace e.g. Projects with something better, rather than just removing it, that is simply not the case.
If something new and better comes up, then ok but otherwise I find this message just offensive. It insults the intelligence of the reader and – sorry to go back to it but it's appropriate here – reminds me very much of the messed up initial responses to the ME3 ending backlash.
Why can't BW just post an honest message? Apparently their PR department thinks by putting out crap like this, they can fool people into happiness. Well, I think they might find that if they would just make a clear and honest argument, people might actually understand. Why not put out a message lalong these lines:
"Hi everyone, we'd like to inform you about a few upcoming changes to BSN. We are really excited about some of the great new features and improvements we have in store for you and we will reveal these over the next few months. Just be prepared for a major overhaul of the site which will improve … blablabla."
Then throw in a paragraph like this:
"In the course of these changes, we also decided to remove some features like polls, which often are more confusing than informative. Unfortunately, we will also have to phase out the projects feature since it it simply generates to much server overload and traffic to be sustainable and since there are feasible file hosting alternatives around (maybe link a few here). We are aware that this is an inconvenience for our community and we would like to make it clear that this change is simply a technical necessity and does not in any way diminish the fact that we are proud to have such a passionate and creative fanbase, bllablabla…
We apologize to our project creators and we will dedicate a new thread to discuss viable alternatives (link)."

Would that change any of the facts? No but it would be clear and might just make people understand. I want to add here that I don't know anything of what goes on behind the scenes and maybe there is a completely different reason for all of this but this example is just meant to illustrate how communication with the community should work in my opinion. It should be clear and it should be honest, not trying to candy-coat the heck out of every bad piece of news. To quote Wrex: "Don't p**s in my ear and tell me it's raining" (although in this case it should be changed to "don't p**s in my ear and tell me it's therapeutic").

Sorry BW, to some extent, I can understand what you are doing (although I don't like it) but the way you are doing it is simply unacceptable. I do appreciate the amount of communication that is going on in this thread but please, try to learn from your PR mistakes at some point. It'll make life easier for everyone.

[Ottemis]

Jessica Merizan wrote...

Jesse Reid wrote...

I don't think BioWare wants to get into the practice of charging for user generated content. I'm sure there would be numerous legal hurdles to overcome if we did.

I'll get together with Jessica next week and we'll see what we can do about delaying the read only changes for projects.

No no. We do not want to charge for fan art (cosplay, modding, fiction, art, etc). It's just not ethically right. 

Jesse and I have been keeping an eye on the thread and we will look into any ways we can keep projects active based on your concerns about lack of viable alternatives. Thanks for voicing your feedback in a constructive manner guys. I know it's frustrating, but we appreciate it. 

And for those asking, no - we don’t have any plans to remove the DA Toolset Wiki..

Quoting for convenience. That's the end of a discussion about projects two pages ago.
Aside from that, both Polls and Groups are planned to return stronger, as I understand it.

Modifié par Ottemis, 17 novembre 2013 - 01:15 .

[spirosz]

Ottemis wrote...

Groups are planned to return stronger, as I understand it.

I'll wait till I actually see this, ha. 

[TheRealJayDee]

MrFob wrote...

Why can't BW just post an honest message? Apparently their PR department thinks by putting out crap like this, they can fool people into happiness. Well, I think they might find that if they would just make a clear and honest argument, people might actually understand. 

[...]

Sorry BW, to some extent, I can understand what you are doing (although I don't like it) but the way you are doing it is simply unacceptable. I do appreciate the amount of communication that is going on in this thread but please, try to learn from your PR mistakes at some point. It'll make life easier for everyone.

No ****. 

[spirosz]

TheRealJayDee wrote...

MrFob wrote...

Why can't BW just post an honest message? Apparently their PR department thinks by putting out crap like this, they can fool people into happiness. Well, I think they might find that if they would just make a clear and honest argument, people might actually understand. 

[...]

Sorry BW, to some extent, I can understand what you are doing (although I don't like it) but the way you are doing it is simply unacceptable. I do appreciate the amount of communication that is going on in this thread but please, try to learn from your PR mistakes at some point. It'll make life easier for everyone.

No ****. 

[DarkDragon777]

billy the squid wrote...

The Evil Chris wrote...

I hope they do remove the OT board. It was a recommendation of mine to do so years ago.

This is a video game website to promote video games made by BioWare. To have lengthy discussions about ponys or what is your favorite album or whatever serves no purpose and has become a breeding ground of nastiness (just look at the name calling and comments in teh posts at the top of this page alone).

I know that when I left BioWare they were planning some major changes to the BSN. I hope they follow through with the, The changes Jessica mentions seem like the first step.

Lol, what did you call us (OT) before? A hive of scum and villany? Flatterer.

Yeah, the hive of scum and villainy that can actually converse about relevant things as opposed to the repeated droning that he sees as fundamentally "better".
  

[Ravensword]

DarkDragon777 wrote...

billy the squid wrote...

The Evil Chris wrote...

I hope they do remove the OT board. It was a recommendation of mine to do so years ago.

This is a video game website to promote video games made by BioWare. To have lengthy discussions about ponys or what is your favorite album or whatever serves no purpose and has become a breeding ground of nastiness (just look at the name calling and comments in teh posts at the top of this page alone).

I know that when I left BioWare they were planning some major changes to the BSN. I hope they follow through with the, The changes Jessica mentions seem like the first step.

Lol, what did you call us (OT) before? A hive of scum and villany? Flatterer.

Yeah, the hive of scum and villainy that can actually converse about relevant things as opposed to the repeated droning that he sees as fundamentally "better".
  

Irony abounds.

[TEWR]

I hope they do remove the OT board. It was a recommendation of mine to do so years ago.

This is a video game website to promote video games made by BioWare. To have lengthy discussions about ponys or what is your favorite album or whatever serves no purpose and has become a breeding ground of nastiness (just look at the name calling and comments in teh posts at the top of this page alone).

I know that when I left BioWare they were planning some major changes to the BSN. I hope they follow through with the, The changes Jessica mentions seem like the first step.

Wait, did Chris Priestly actually say this?

....

.......what's the point of creating it in the first place if you only want people to talk about Bioware games? I've seen in the past Off Topic threads that discussed Bioware games and were closed precisely because the Off Topic threat was meant to be a haven AWAY from discussing Bioware stuff.

That's like... basic. Off Topic: Things that are not related to the Bioware logo.

As far as these changes go, they won't affect me personally too much but I can't say they're necessarily the right thing to do.

Modifié par The Ethereal Writer Redux, 17 novembre 2013 - 07:07 .

[DarkDragon777]

Out of curiosity,when did the community give you "feedback" "prompting you" to do this.Considering the almost unanimously negative reception in open, public discussion, it sounds more like embellished, over exaggerated and twisted statistics and consensus, and general bogus claims.Though of course, I guess sending an optimistic people pleaser who claims to REALLY care about people and REALLY care about their opinions to justify your actions is all that necessary to ignore the reality of your claims.

[Dova]

DarkDragon777 wrote...
Considering the almost unanimously negative reception in open, public discussion, it sounds more like embellished, over exaggerated and twisted statistics and consensus, and general bogus claims.

Indeed such amazement that none of the people who apparently gave feedback on this have yet to speak up about it. I have 2 assumptions though
1. With all the fire and flames in this thread; they're too spooked to speak up.
Or 2. Chris Priestly made dozens of dozen accounts and is the mastermind behind all this magical "feedback."

[DarkDragon777]

Dovaaa wrote...

DarkDragon777 wrote...
Considering the almost unanimously negative reception in open, public discussion, it sounds more like embellished, over exaggerated and twisted statistics and consensus, and general bogus claims.

Indeed such amazement that none of the people who apparently gave feedback on this have yet to speak up about it. I have 2 assumptions though
1. With all the fire and flames in this thread; they're too spooked to speak up.
Or 2. Chris Priestly made dozens of dozen accounts and is the mastermind behind all this magical "feedback."

I'd say #2 is more likely. 

[Top Shelf]

Inquisitor Recon wrote...

You know what this reminds me of? That robot in Fallout 3 that amputated the leg of that woman who broke her toe.

[Dova]

CoD Is The Best RPG wrote...

Inquisitor Recon wrote...

You know what this reminds me of? That robot in Fallout 3 that amputated the leg of that woman who broke her toe.

[Ravensword]

Dovaaa wrote...

DarkDragon777 wrote...
Considering the almost unanimously negative reception in open, public discussion, it sounds more like embellished, over exaggerated and twisted statistics and consensus, and general bogus claims.

Indeed such amazement that none of the people who apparently gave feedback on this have yet to speak up about it. I have 2 assumptions though
1. With all the fire and flames in this thread; they're too spooked to speak up.
Or 2. Chris Priestly made dozens of dozen accounts and is the mastermind behind all this magical "feedback."

Most likely #1, but it is funny to think that Chris Priestly up and decided to make a multitude sock puppet accounts to give EAware feedback. Bonus points if he did so using only the polls section.

[ElitePinecone]

DarkDragon777 wrote...

Out of curiosity,when did the community give you "feedback" "prompting you" to do this.Considering the almost unanimously negative reception in open, public discussion, it sounds more like embellished, over exaggerated and twisted statistics and consensus, and general bogus claims.Though of course, I guess sending an optimistic people pleaser who claims to REALLY care about people and REALLY care about their opinions to justify your actions is all that necessary to ignore the reality of your claims.

Oh for heaven's sake. 

The only people with access to accurate information about how many people use each area of the site are Bioware's web team. Jessica said in the first post that the features they're disabling are used by a low proportion of the total site users. If you think there's a conspiracy and that they're inventing numbers to justify shutting those features down, go right ahead.

But of course this thread is going to attract people who care deeply about the topic. The overwhelming majority of users who don't use those features aren't going to write about how much they don't care. They're not even going to read this thread. 

If lots of people cared about and valued those features, they'd use them - by all accounts, they don't, so Bioware are cutting them. It's unfortunate for the people who like them, but pretending you're part of an enormous group (at least compared to the total number of site users) is stretching things too far.

The "unanimously negative reception" you're seeing is the very small number of users who are deeply, deeply invested in those features - not the many other users who don't use them and barely know they exist. 

[Ottemis]

Plenty people use projects, they just don't have a realistic eye on what it would mean if those would all disappear whereas I do moreso, using the feature frequently and being dependent of it.
Even within my own 'userbase', aka people that have used my mods for months/years and frequent my projects when they need to redownload, the realisation doesn't nessecarily really live that it's not 'easy' for project owners to jump ship.
This is because users will always judge based on their own discomfort, so they will download the mods they use and think they salvaged things well enough, the personal impact is quite low. As a project owner and mod creator, my outlook is much broader as I try and imagine the impact on the overall modding community and the problems these things create when content is lost and spaced out. Seeing there is no ME Nexus, the projects that are salvaged have no place to go and content will be fractioned over the web and create a massive amount of broken links where people linked to both projects and blog resources.

The one thing that seems universally true is that people don't realise that the inactive owners of projects won't necessarily move their projects if they ultimately disappear.
The project section doesn't have high traffic because it is a repository and people only frequent to redownload. The people that will care the most are the modders that DO spend 95% of their time in the project section, but there's not that many of us. That doesn't mean it's value should be diminished by the amount of time users spend in those sections because it's logically very low. I would think even download counts are a better indicator than that.

As to feedback, I'm sure plenty users gave feedback saying polls/albums/projects/groups/blogs were a flaming mess, because most of them honestly are. That doesn't mean the functionality had no value and they should disappear but it does realisticly mean these features need to be rebooted. There are a lot of aspects to this site that have needed an overhaul and recode for years. Other sections that tie in together (groups/projects/albums) need an overhaul and that makes it extremely difficult to preserve existing data as you'd have to transfer it manually.

That I am personally asking to preserve Projects knowing this is true is in the full realisation how much work it would mean but I personally judge the loss to be much greater than the time it would take to recatigorize existing projects. Then again it's not my decission. All I can do is hope that enough people agree with me and removing them becomes a non-option.

Modifié par Ottemis, 17 novembre 2013 - 03:59 .

[legbamel]

DarkDragon777 wrote...
Out of curiosity,when did the community give you "feedback" "prompting you" to do this.Considering the almost unanimously negative reception in open, public discussion, it sounds more like embellished, over exaggerated and twisted statistics and consensus, and general bogus claims.Though of course, I guess sending an optimistic people pleaser who claims to REALLY care about people and REALLY care about their opinions to justify your actions is all that necessary to ignore the reality of your claims.

I suppose one could consider the usage statistics to be "feedback" of a sort.

My reason for wanting albums to stay actually revolves around what I consider the fragmentation of the BSN into this site and the SWTOR site.  While I can understand not necessarily wanting the influx of those players to a site that is apparently unable to handle that sort of traffic, there is no such thing as an album on the SWTOR site.

I can either host my screenshots where they will never be seen and attempt to celebrate my enjoyment of the game essentially privately or I can place them here where they are findable and allow for captions and notes.  Would that the two sites were in any way linked, that BioWare treated SWTOR as a part of their family of games and not a stand-alone effort!

I understand not wanting to police albums and blogs on top of moderating the various boards but wholesale deletion (eventually) freezes avenues of discussion that were often used for wholly relevant conversations.  If new profile designs allow us to include external links to our BioWare related blogs that would be an improvement (more so if it would pull an RSS feed of recent posts) as those are simple to create.  Off-site polls are the same.  But with no way for us to share our relevant content here to the BSN, putting it here is the best way to get it seen by the fan base.  Personally, I take this move to mean that they would prefer we only discuss what they deem relevant in their approved medium. 

[AresKeith]

ElitePinecone wrote...

DarkDragon777 wrote...

Out of curiosity,when did the community give you "feedback" "prompting you" to do this.Considering the almost unanimously negative reception in open, public discussion, it sounds more like embellished, over exaggerated and twisted statistics and consensus, and general bogus claims.Though of course, I guess sending an optimistic people pleaser who claims to REALLY care about people and REALLY care about their opinions to justify your actions is all that necessary to ignore the reality of your claims.

Oh for heaven's sake. 

The only people with access to accurate information about how many people use each area of the site are Bioware's web team. Jessica said in the first post that the features they're disabling are used by a low proportion of the total site users. If you think there's a conspiracy and that they're inventing numbers to justify shutting those features down, go right ahead.

But of course this thread is going to attract people who care deeply about the topic. The overwhelming majority of users who don't use those features aren't going to write about how much they don't care. They're not even going to read this thread. 

If lots of people cared about and valued those features, they'd use them - by all accounts, they don't, so Bioware are cutting them. It's unfortunate for the people who like them, but pretending you're part of an enormous group (at least compared to the total number of site users) is stretching things too far.

The "unanimously negative reception" you're seeing is the very small number of users who are deeply, deeply invested in those features - not the many other users who don't use them and barely know they exist. 

Or it's the obvious fact that are being removed as a cost cutting measure, but instead of saying that they claim it to be "feedback" from the community