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Read-Only Forums - Stop It


DunsparrowSolo

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I suspect they are trying to minimise the bad press. The game is riddled with bugs, and even though they are currently pulling the game down twice a week for extended periods of time, the bugs are not being fixed.....or at the very best, being fixed at glacial pace.

 

I'm beginning to think that this game was too ambitious for Bioware.

Edited by jayssen
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Every other MMO continues to allow forum posts while servers are under maintenance, unless the forums themselves are under maintenance. You always shut down forum posts shortly before the server announcements that the servers will be coming down in 15 minutes.

 

The only logical explanation for this is that they want to stifle speech and complaints on their forums. This is certainly within their rights. Its certainly within my rights to complain about it, talk about why it sucks and get them to change this absurd policy.

Understandable conclusion, but incorrect.

 

No conspiracy here - and we're not trying to stifle anything. If anyone has complaints, they'll just wait a little longer to complain.

 

The truth is that the Forums put quite a lot of strain on our servers, and when a downtime starts, many people hit the Forums at once. (Many of whom may not have seen the Forums, Community Blog or tweets previously to know about the downtime in advance.) In the past, we've seen excessive strain on the web servers as a result, and we've had performance issues.

 

To alleviate that, the decision was made to temporarily put the Forums into a 'read only' mode at the beginning of maintenance periods, to ensure they stay up and can be read (so those folk coming to the Forums who may not have known about the downtime get that information).

 

Is this acceptable? No, not in the long term. We have teams working on improving things to ensure this doesn't continue to occur; ultimately we want the Forums to remain online and to allow you to post during maintenance periods.

 

Regarding maintenance periods themselves, we'll be giving some more details on those a little more in the coming week, I hope.

Edited by Paralassa
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Understandable conclusion, but incorrect.

 

No conspiracy here - and we're not trying to stifle anything. If anyone has complaints, they'll just wait a little longer to complain.

 

The truth is that the Forums put quite a lot of strain on our servers, and when a downtime starts, many people hit the Forums at once. (Many of whom may not have seen the Forums, Community Blog or tweets previously to know about the downtime in advance.) In the past, we've seen excessive strain on the web servers as a result, and we've had performance issues.

 

To alleviate that, the decision was made to temporarily put the Forums into a 'read only' mode at the beginning of maintenance periods, to ensure they stay up and can be read (so those folk coming to the Forums who may not have known about the downtime get that information).

 

Is this acceptable? No, not in the long term. We have teams working on improving things to ensure this doesn't continue to occur; ultimately we want the Forums to remain online and to allow you to post during maintenance periods.

 

Regarding maintenance periods themselves, we'll be giving some more details on those a little more in the coming week, I hope.

 

Woohoo!!! A non-canned response, those are my favorite kind! Nice to see some humans patrolling the forums. I tip my hat to you, sir.

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I don't know who you're trying to kid with this read-only forum garbage. There is absolutely no reason why you should need to turn off all posting on the forums every time you take the servers down for an unnecessarily-long maintenance, which is starting to happen with alarming frequency and decreasing lead-time.

 

I know fanboys are going to come in here and post their made-up reasons why its somehow necessary. Don't bother.

 

Every other MMO continues to allow forum posts while servers are under maintenance, unless the forums themselves are under maintenance. You always shut down forum posts shortly before the server announcements that the servers will be coming down in 15 minutes.

 

The only logical explanation for this is that they want to stifle speech and complaints on their forums. This is certainly within their rights. Its certainly within my rights to complain about it, talk about why it sucks and get them to change this absurd policy.

 

BioWare's excessive downtime is made worse by the fact that a good chunk of the time, they don't even tell us why the servers are being taken down or why the maintenance is extended. They don't even tell us after the fact. This shows that the community staff is either kept completely in the dark about the reasons, or they have a blatant disrespect for the players who pay to keep the lights on in their corporate megaplex.

 

BioWare Community Staff:

 

Stop spewing out processed corporate triple like "we're working on a response to these issues." We don't need a mess of corporate bureaucrats sitting in meetings deciding what to tell us. Act like human beings.

 

Stop shutting down the forums every time you foresee a problem. If you can't handle criticism, you're in the wrong damn business. All you're doing is giving us more things to be critical of. Not only the horrid maintenance "schedule" but also the way you try to keep us from talking about it.

 

Give real interactions. With as many community managers as you have swarming these forums, surely someone could give us the slightest glimpse of humanity without some talking head bureaucrat that no one has ever heard of coming out of his isolated corporate sanctum once a month to tell us how much he gives a crap.

 

I don't give a crap that the Vice Director of Corporate Toilet Paper gives a crap. So he really really feels bad about Ilum. I'd much rather know that someone with a voice inside the company is communicating on our behalf to people in the company who can actually enact change.

 

The stupid thing sucks. We'll do it live.

 

LOL agree so much...

 

Basic rules of these forums.....

 

#1. Never say anything negative about Bioware/Game(will be flagged off topic lol)

#2. Never point out game breaking bugs(This is not TOR conversation or something)

#3. Pretend game is perfect when it's broken and dieing

#4. Don't talk negatively about devs(LOL are they holy or something)

#5. Love Bioware for Failing(This should actually be #1 prolly)

#6. To be a good community member call anyone who badmouths TOR a WoW kiddie

#7. Refuse to believe that there are problems with this game

#8. Do all this you might get fanboi of the year award, and get another broken Bioware game in a year

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Understandable conclusion, but incorrect.

 

No conspiracy here - and we're not trying to stifle anything. If anyone has complaints, they'll just wait a little longer to complain.

 

The truth is that the Forums put quite a lot of strain on our servers, and when a downtime starts, many people hit the Forums at once. (Many of whom may not have seen the Forums, Community Blog or tweets previously to know about the downtime in advance.) In the past, we've seen excessive strain on the web servers as a result, and we've had performance issues.

 

To alleviate that, the decision was made to temporarily put the Forums into a 'read only' mode at the beginning of maintenance periods, to ensure they stay up and can be read (so those folk coming to the Forums who may not have known about the downtime get that information).

 

Is this acceptable? No, not in the long term. We have teams working on improving things to ensure this doesn't continue to occur; ultimately we want the Forums to remain online and to allow you to post during maintenance periods.

 

Regarding maintenance periods themselves, we'll be giving some more details on those a little more in the coming week, I hope.

Question when will you stop mods from closing threads relative to game breaking and performance issues with you game by calling them off topic, seems like an issue that causes people's systems to literally melt and become unusable is pretty on topic to me?

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Actually thats not true.

 

Like if McDonalds started refusing to serve people who talked about politics. They would get sued. Because theres this other thing, called discrimination.

 

Gamers just put up with it because they've been trained since childhood by the industry to accept it.

 

EULA means very little since you can't legally sign something thats in violation of the law. IE I can't sign a EULA that says EA is allowed to kill me if I post something they don't like.

 

You are 100% wrong.

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My problem with maintenance time threads is primarily that they're really boring and predictable.

 

You know, there is this saying about where there is smoke...

 

Or in other words, some of these issues are actually very valid concerns, sure, people could (and should) be more constructive about it. But still valid concerns.

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Understandable conclusion, but incorrect.

 

No conspiracy here - and we're not trying to stifle anything. If anyone has complaints, they'll just wait a little longer to complain.

 

The truth is that the Forums put quite a lot of strain on our servers, and when a downtime starts, many people hit the Forums at once. (Many of whom may not have seen the Forums, Community Blog or tweets previously to know about the downtime in advance.) In the past, we've seen excessive strain on the web servers as a result, and we've had performance issues.

 

To alleviate that, the decision was made to temporarily put the Forums into a 'read only' mode at the beginning of maintenance periods, to ensure they stay up and can be read (so those folk coming to the Forums who may not have known about the downtime get that information).

 

Is this acceptable? No, not in the long term. We have teams working on improving things to ensure this doesn't continue to occur; ultimately we want the Forums to remain online and to allow you to post during maintenance periods.

 

Regarding maintenance periods themselves, we'll be giving some more details on those a little more in the coming week, I hope.

 

 

 

while this might have been an adequate response 10 years ago, it just strikes me as a bit lame considering the large scale budget this project has and the companies that are supporting it.

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I don't know who you're trying to kid with this read-only forum garbage. There is absolutely no reason why you should need to turn off all posting on the forums every time you take the servers down for an unnecessarily-long maintenance, which is starting to happen with alarming frequency and decreasing lead-time.

 

I know fanboys are going to come in here and post their made-up reasons why its somehow necessary. Don't bother.

 

Every other MMO continues to allow forum posts while servers are under maintenance, unless the forums themselves are under maintenance. You always shut down forum posts shortly before the server announcements that the servers will be coming down in 15 minutes.

 

The only logical explanation for this is that they want to stifle speech and complaints on their forums. This is certainly within their rights. Its certainly within my rights to complain about it, talk about why it sucks and get them to change this absurd policy.

 

BioWare's excessive downtime is made worse by the fact that a good chunk of the time, they don't even tell us why the servers are being taken down or why the maintenance is extended. They don't even tell us after the fact. This shows that the community staff is either kept completely in the dark about the reasons, or they have a blatant disrespect for the players who pay to keep the lights on in their corporate megaplex.

 

BioWare Community Staff:

 

Stop spewing out processed corporate triple like "we're working on a response to these issues." We don't need a mess of corporate bureaucrats sitting in meetings deciding what to tell us. Act like human beings.

 

Stop shutting down the forums every time you foresee a problem. If you can't handle criticism, you're in the wrong damn business. All you're doing is giving us more things to be critical of. Not only the horrid maintenance "schedule" but also the way you try to keep us from talking about it.

 

Give real interactions. With as many community managers as you have swarming these forums, surely someone could give us the slightest glimpse of humanity without some talking head bureaucrat that no one has ever heard of coming out of his isolated corporate sanctum once a month to tell us how much he gives a crap.

 

I don't give a crap that the Vice Director of Corporate Toilet Paper gives a crap. So he really really feels bad about Ilum. I'd much rather know that someone with a voice inside the company is communicating on our behalf to people in the company who can actually enact change.

 

The stupid thing sucks. We'll do it live.

 

It's because too many trolls would flood the forums. They can't do anything about it.

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LMAO thanks for the laugh dude this game has had me bummed out not even wanting to play much and this thread was pretty dam funny. Next on brad melzers decoded we explore the read only forums and connect bioware with iluminati well also explain why tom hanks is banned from posting on swtor.

 

I should make a sniper called lee harvey oswald lmao..

 

thanks for the laugh though

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So better there are no threads at all right? That's your legitimate argument, living in a free society? Have you ever heard of the chilling effect? Have you ever seen a community management strategy that has ever failed this epicly?

 

"Free society" doesn't apply on privately owned websites. As a real world example - if I own the corner store and you come in and rant and rave like a street-corner preacher about how crappy you think my business is, I can ask you to leave the premises, regardless of whether you've spent money at my establishment in the past. You would have to comply or face legal repercussions. It's been that way for hundreds of years. So much for your baseless "free society" silliness and "chilling effect" slippery-slope arguments.

 

 

Good grief, it's just a forum. It's not a threat to Western Civilization if we can't post for a few hours. I'm beginning to think that MMO forums are more important than the actual MMOs to certain "gamers".

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Understandable conclusion, but incorrect.

 

No conspiracy here - and we're not trying to stifle anything. If anyone has complaints, they'll just wait a little longer to complain.

 

The truth is that the Forums put quite a lot of strain on our servers, and when a downtime starts, many people hit the Forums at once. (Many of whom may not have seen the Forums, Community Blog or tweets previously to know about the downtime in advance.) In the past, we've seen excessive strain on the web servers as a result, and we've had performance issues.

 

To alleviate that, the decision was made to temporarily put the Forums into a 'read only' mode at the beginning of maintenance periods, to ensure they stay up and can be read (so those folk coming to the Forums who may not have known about the downtime get that information).

 

Is this acceptable? No, not in the long term. We have teams working on improving things to ensure this doesn't continue to occur; ultimately we want the Forums to remain online and to allow you to post during maintenance periods.

 

Regarding maintenance periods themselves, we'll be giving some more details on those a little more in the coming week, I hope.

 

Thank you Steven for clearing that up :)

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Understandable conclusion, but incorrect.

 

No conspiracy here - and we're not trying to stifle anything. If anyone has complaints, they'll just wait a little longer to complain.

 

The truth is that the Forums put quite a lot of strain on our servers, and when a downtime starts, many people hit the Forums at once. (Many of whom may not have seen the Forums, Community Blog or tweets previously to know about the downtime in advance.) In the past, we've seen excessive strain on the web servers as a result, and we've had performance issues.

 

To alleviate that, the decision was made to temporarily put the Forums into a 'read only' mode at the beginning of maintenance periods, to ensure they stay up and can be read (so those folk coming to the Forums who may not have known about the downtime get that information).

 

Is this acceptable? No, not in the long term. We have teams working on improving things to ensure this doesn't continue to occur; ultimately we want the Forums to remain online and to allow you to post during maintenance periods.

 

Regarding maintenance periods themselves, we'll be giving some more details on those a little more in the coming week, I hope.

 

Fair enough. I'm glad we're on the same page that this is not a good solution, which gives you credibility in your claim that its necessary.

 

I really hope you and your team keep in mind that many of us are long time MMO players who consider ourselves paying customers. More than that, we are investing considerable time, thought and emotional involvement in the game and our characters.

 

We are not pawns on a chessboard, to be moved as corporate executives please, and the tone and language of many CMs on these boards simply reeks of corporatism and canned responses.

 

Thanks for the direct and honest response.

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Understandable conclusion, but incorrect.

 

No conspiracy here - and we're not trying to stifle anything. If anyone has complaints, they'll just wait a little longer to complain.

 

The truth is that the Forums put quite a lot of strain on our servers, and when a downtime starts, many people hit the Forums at once. (Many of whom may not have seen the Forums, Community Blog or tweets previously to know about the downtime in advance.) In the past, we've seen excessive strain on the web servers as a result, and we've had performance issues.

 

To alleviate that, the decision was made to temporarily put the Forums into a 'read only' mode at the beginning of maintenance periods, to ensure they stay up and can be read (so those folk coming to the Forums who may not have known about the downtime get that information).

 

Is this acceptable? No, not in the long term. We have teams working on improving things to ensure this doesn't continue to occur; ultimately we want the Forums to remain online and to allow you to post during maintenance periods.

 

Regarding maintenance periods themselves, we'll be giving some more details on those a little more in the coming week, I hope.

 

 

Very cool. Good to know it's on the list of stuffs to be improved. The feedback's nice.

 

Cheers!

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while this might have been an adequate response 10 years ago, it just strikes me as a bit lame considering the large scale budget this project has and the companies that are supporting it.

 

I agree. While I appreciate they address some of the concerns, that response makes very little sense. At the very worst, they could just host the forums on an entirely separate server(s) no at all connected with the game.

 

This is Star Wars, not Jay's Indie BugCrawler Extreme.

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Understandable conclusion, but incorrect.

 

No conspiracy here - and we're not trying to stifle anything. If anyone has complaints, they'll just wait a little longer to complain.

 

The truth is that the Forums put quite a lot of strain on our servers, and when a downtime starts, many people hit the Forums at once. (Many of whom may not have seen the Forums, Community Blog or tweets previously to know about the downtime in advance.) In the past, we've seen excessive strain on the web servers as a result, and we've had performance issues.

 

To alleviate that, the decision was made to temporarily put the Forums into a 'read only' mode at the beginning of maintenance periods, to ensure they stay up and can be read (so those folk coming to the Forums who may not have known about the downtime get that information).

 

Is this acceptable? No, not in the long term. We have teams working on improving things to ensure this doesn't continue to occur; ultimately we want the Forums to remain online and to allow you to post during maintenance periods.

 

Regarding maintenance periods themselves, we'll be giving some more details on those a little more in the coming week, I hope.

 

I'm curious, why don't you let non-subscribers post on your forums?

 

If it is for this same reason, then will you eventually allow for non-subscribers to post on your forums once the servers can handle it?

 

I have many friends who are taken aback by this fact. It's hard to convince people to get the game when they feel like the developer "doesn't care about them" because they aren't currently paying for the game. I'm not accusing you guys of anything, simply relaying the feelings expressed to me by some of my friends who have not signed up for TOR (since they, of course, cannot come here and relay those feelings themselves.)

 

-Macheath.

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I'm curious, why don't you let non-subscribers post on your forums?

 

If it is for this same reason, then will you eventually allow for non-subscribers to post on your forums once the servers can handle it?

 

I have many friends who are taken aback by this fact. It's hard to convince people to get the game when they feel like the developer "doesn't care about them" because they aren't currently paying for the game. I'm not accusing you guys of anything, simply relaying the feelings expressed to me by some of my friends who have not signed up for TOR (since they, of course, cannot come here and relay those feelings themselves.)

 

-Macheath.

 

Please tell me you aren't serious.

 

I'll just pretend this is a joke post.

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if BW did stuff properly and communicated there wouldnt be no whine threads. Thats a better way to stop hem than close forums and threads

 

You're an incredibly naive person if you honestly believe that.

 

On another note and yes I am going to make this comparison. Blizzard kept their forum login offline during maintenance for quite some time before server upgrades (ie -read only). I know this because I was one of those people who would flock to it just before they were down so I was able to log in.

 

But I guess this isn't relevant as WoW wasn't made in 2012 right?

Edited by Tgpo
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*edit, dont want any more infractions..

 

Its actually best not to disagree with any of the OP's topics. He's fond of the flag button, and an automated CS droid will give you a warning without even reading your post. If that warning happens to not be the first, could lead to an infraction. While people that have valid counter-arguments to his post get infractions, he's allowed to run around name-calling and making snarky remarks maliciously, without infractions. Mostly because the adults dont find it necessary to report any and all people they disagree with.

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