Dragon Age Forum News (Sep. 19, 04)

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Here are today's Dragon Age forum highlights, collected by NWVault. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

If Jesus came down to Bioware, things still wouldn't change!

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I just came from a Dragon Age thread that was Locked Click Here

And it NEVER ceases to amaze me how no matter how much people ask for something, no matter how hard the community pleads with the developer, No matter how many potential PAYING customers ...

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Whoho

a) About 32M people are potential buying customers

b) Without paying it's hard to become a customer, so no need to put PAYING into capital letters.

c) Listening is passive. People can listen, discuss pros and cons and decide against a certain thing and they still listened. Thus saying we don't listen is not correct.

d) You didn't pay for Dragon age yet, so you are not in a business relationship with us that would entitle you to put your favourite pet feature into our game. And even for older game you payed a game vendor or publisher, not us directly. (But even a publisher usually doesn't have the power to buy new features in our games)

e) Since we didn't release any significant information on DA, it's hardly possible to say that we don't change "things" at this point. Making rants with nothing to found them on is pointless.

f) There are like ~2M people who bought NWN. If we listened to all of them, we would never finish a game. However the beauty of selling a lot of games is that for every feature we put into a game, we can say "see, someone suggested that on the boards, so we can say 'we listen to the people'" - so don't ever say "we don't listen". If you mean by "don't listen" that we don't put every single feature a couple of loud advocates from our forums want to see into our games - yes then you are correct.

g) While we are listening to what people have to suggest (and for that matter, we don't really care how loud/often they suggest it) we are not running a community game building project here and we are not in the business of fulfilling people's secret wishes in game.

Our business its to create kick *** video games that sell really well and the best way to ensure this is to remember that from the vast customerbase out there, only a tiny fraction posts on our boards and some of them very loud - so we need to rely on our means of gathering data what our potential customerbase wants so they buy our games.

h) We have a history of listening to the needs of the market and potential customers, otherwise we would not be in the position we are today. We will continue to listen to the needs of the market and potential customers to make sure we stay in that position. I know there are a lot of armchair game developers out there that claim oh so often that BioWare has no clue what we are doing, but thankfully the success of our games and our community tells a different story.

We also have a history of listening to our fans on the boards to find out what their favourite pet features are and putting them into our games (i.e. the robes in HotU).

And since you mentioned the "how many" question ("regardless how many potential paying customers ask for a feature")
the maybe 100 people who right post now about 70% of all posts on the dragon age forum don't represent any critical mass that would force a feature into the game - the are "how few", not "how many". However, they represent a hardcore and valuable part of our audience and we *listen* to them, we *discuss* with them and about their ideas in dev meetings and through that way, some of their suggestions end up in the game - but since we don't talk about a lot regarding DA right now , you couldn't possibly know how much we listen anyway, so your whole rant is pretty baseless at this point.

The people on this board represent a part of our community we value and that's the reason why this board launched already for a game that's not out for quite a while.

We also know that, with the boards, we need to keep the big picture in mind. Imagine the typical generic MMORPG board after 1 year - hundreds of people telling the developer what to do and why they "don't get it". If the developers would listen all of this, I'm sure the game would be really great for the hardcore people populating the board - but it would likely suck a lot for everyone else, especially the people who just got started with the game or are not engaged in the hardcore community.

Short: We listen, we discuss, and we agree or disagree and at the point where we actually start talking about stuff, you can start judging how much impact the hardcore community on the boards has. Just don't bring with that "paying customer" thing here.

More:

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Wheeeeeeewwwwwww! Looks like you touched a raw nerve with Mr. Z.!

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Nerve? If I had those, would I hang out around here?

More: And since my last post was so negative (didn't I read something about developers coming over too friendly on some webpage lately?), I decided to add some constructive material here:

People ask a lot *if* we listen and who do we listen to - I can't talk for everyone in this office, but I can tell you what *I* read on this boards, what I take serious and who I *listen* to.

- I prefer to read posts with paragraphs, mixed case topic titles and full english words. So posting "BioWare read this", "U MUST READ THIS" and "TEH AW3S0m3 IdeaZ" will ensure I don't read them. Ending every second word with "z" is another excellent way of making me think of the poster as a underage kiddy in need of attention and ignore his posts completely.

- By default I am more likely to click on posts made by certain people in the community that have been around for a while and from who I know their post are interesting and worth reading and I value their opinion. If you are new to the boards, your best bet to grab my attention is by making a topic title that is interesting and reflects the contents of the thread.
Example:
Bad: "Why flying doesn't suxxx"
Good: "What flying can offer for DA"

- By default, I'm less likely to click on posts made from people that:

• always agree with us/me - no real need to read them.
• always disagree/post the same crap - unless I feel the urge to spark a flame war (like when working at sunday
  night or so) , I tend to ignore those.
• usually post in a demanding or flamebaiting tone.
• ask us to make DA a persistent world toolkit or officially support persistent worlds. We already said this won't happen and continually demanding it just shows that you are unable to accept that decision, which give us no common ground to discuss on.

- I usually give up on threads that reach a certain length as people just start to tell the same stuff over and over again at this point. On this matter, I find this is a good read Click Here ,through I don't agree with it completely.

- I love technical posts from people who know what they are talking about. An example would be mr_bumpkin's post about how the use of item properties that were going to be added to NWN could be used for HotU shifter class. It caused us, after short discussion, to add the item merging feature to the HotU shifter even through we were very close to lockdown already. Same goes for posts from people that I know released NWN modules, or are member of a community group such as CODI or DLA. These people know what they are talking about so I'm much more likely to listen what they have to say.

From what I've seen here so far, the needs and wants of the forum community are discussed frequently through all kinds of projects.

I also noticed that people who post to the point and with good language have a much better chance of being taken seriously. If there is a loud (which means often, all caps, close to spam, etc) minority trying to champion a certain feature, they usually get dismissed as "fanatics".

I'm not objective nor do I claim to be, after all I'm human.

- If someone posts demands for something, especially coupled with bad language, I usually go - "don't care about this, it's background noise" or "why should I bother to listen to you?". I'm much less likely to use arguments supplied by someone I can't stand in a discussion for or against a feature.

- I usually skip through posts once they reach a certain level of ignorance - so starting your posts with "BioWare hates us" or "BioWare is lying to us" is about the best thing to make sure I don't read the rest of the post, regardless how good the contents are.

The community can serve an important purpose - it can "ground" you on certain issues and deliver you a lot of good arguments to discuss - but it can also deceive you on what is really important in your game:

Just from reading these boards you can get the impression that a game without feature a, feature b, feature c can not be a commerical success, which is as far as it gets from the point. Take HotU - adding horses would have given some great response from the forum community, I'm sure, but the features that would have to be cut in their place would have hurt the overall project *a lot* and the majority of people who bought the game (which is "for the singleplayer story") would have gone "horses? underdark? what".

I've been involved in gaming communities, creating custom content, fan ficition, mods or writing FAQs for the last 15 years, first BBSs later on the internet and I have to say that from all those communities, the BioWare community the most resourceful and one of the most civilized communities I've seen so far - many people here know what they are talking about and they share their knowlege and ideas with us and all the other people here - there is a lot of good reason to listen closely what these people say - but the decision always will be with us, we have to do it and we will get flamed or praised depending on how things work out.

In the end you will have to trust us to do the "right thing", after all it is our best interest - through the "right thing" can mean that we may not implement your favourite pet feature because we used the zots otherwise where we think it is more important.

Hope that helps

Stanley Woo, Quality Assurance

Dragon Age official post??
New information about Dragon Age will be posted when we have something that we can and want to release. Since the release date is still measured in years, there probably won't be a whole lot of information for a while yet. In the meantime, developers will continue to read and sometimes comment or get involved in discussions of their own choosing.