I have a forum set up for my work that has about regular 3000 users. The system was purchased for about 200 bucks, and it was set up after a couple days. Does Wizards of the Coast have no one on staff capable of doing this?
Anyways I have a feeling that wherever I submit a complaint it would be attended to...never. An example would be the dungeon adventures forum thread has hundreds of posters begging for the adventure levels to be posted on the website. It is again embarrassing to see a company unable to fulfill a reasonable and trivial request by many of its customers over 1 year after they were posted on the companies web site.
As a side note, it is a far cry from the days when Paizo hosted dungeon. My posts at paizo were often answered by Erik Mona (the editor), James Jacobs, and Chris West ( a cartographer), this was made me feel good about spending my money on that company. I am slowly getting the opposite feeling with wizards.
The log in method is horrendous. The seperation between the wizards site and the gleemax site is painful. The forums are down half the time, things work, sometimes, other times they don't work at all. The forum system here is frankly embarrassing.
Gleemax is being shut-down. Hopefully, this will allow them to fix the log-in system and may even allow them to reduce or eliminate the down time.
I have a forum set up for my work that has about regular 3000 users. The system was purchased for about 200 bucks, and it was set up after a couple days. Does Wizards of the Coast have no one on staff capable of doing this?
I'm sure they do, but why would they want to set up a forum system capable of handling 3000 users? These forums have 366,296 members and 51,101 active members. Your $200-system wouldn't last ten seconds under that level of volume.
I'm sure they do, but why would they want to set up a forum system capable of handling 3000 users? These forums have 366,296 members and 51,101 active members. Your $200-system wouldn't last ten seconds under that level of volume.
That was for a purchase of Invision Power Board for a year (software only). I am quite confident that IPB is scalable to those sizes (just look at most of the forums on the web, they are usually IPB).
In the end the scalability would be more dependent on the database and the webserver anyways (industry level software for databases and webservers are... free). I guess the point of what I am saying here is that a working forum should be well within the capabilities of WOTC.
I am fine with voicing it here. I expect competent companies to monitor their forum boards.
Anyways I have a feeling that wherever I submit a complaint it would be attended to...never.
If you think submitting a complaint would be useless, then how do you feel writing a complaint on the forums will be any more effective?
I guess the point of what I am saying here is that a working forum should be well within the capabilities of WOTC.
And it has been. There has been an influx of people since the new edition arrived, and the IT group has been splitting its time amongst a lot of projects.
Patience, grasshopper.
I am fine with voicing it here. I expect competent companies to monitor their forum boards.
Then you have made an assumption, and you know what they say about assumptions. The companies who's customer service people scour their forums looking for complaints to fix are the exception, not the norm. Customer service personnel are payed workers and are already inundated with grievances and complaints. They don't have the time to accidentially stumble across your post and address it.
Anyways I have a feeling that wherever I submit a complaint it would be attended to...never. An example would be the dungeon adventures forum thread has hundreds of posters begging for the adventure levels to be posted on the website. It is again embarrassing to see a company unable to fulfill a reasonable and trivial request by many of its customers over 1 year after they were posted on the companies web site.
Bollocks. The customer service personnel are not the forum moderators. If some of you people actually sent that complaint to CS they might actually do something about it. Then again, if they are not posting the adventure level because they don't want to, then you're sol.
As a side note, it is a far cry from the days when Paizo hosted dungeon. My posts at paizo were often answered by Erik Mona (the editor), James Jacobs, and Chris West ( a cartographer), this was made me feel good about spending my money on that company. I am slowly getting the opposite feeling with wizards.
Well, thats your problem, you seem to not understand the difference between a small business and a big business. WotC is a big business, they have a whole hell of a lot more concerns than Paizo does. WotC's editors, Cartographers and Artists have other work they have to do. Babysitting complaints is just something they don't have the time for. However, all the time the people who run Paizo spend on their forums and not refining their product just goes to show why their products have been... well crunk.
I am fine with voicing it here. I expect competent companies to monitor their forum boards.
:: Shrug ::
-This isn't the proper place, so...Where I used to work (A National Park), people would sometimes complain to the janitor about things on the sports fields we had. He had nothing to do with any of that, so any valid complaints that they may have had, ignored, unless brought to the proper people.
Community Business
Discuss what's happening on the forums and other community business.
So, my post about, how these forums are slow, often down, and generally unintuitive seems to be in the right place. In short, whats happening in these forums is that they are being botched
As a I side note I find it laughable that you would insult Paizo's products compared to Wizards.
Compare:
-the Dungeon issues, (actually that's unfair they are in a totally different league, Wizards Dungeon Product is amateur when compared to paizo's, enough said)
-the forums (paizo's has little to no down time) and the employees of the organization would respond to your issues
-the adventures paths (paizo's "pathfinder" has a guide to tell the DM where the product is going, they have a backstory, they have reoccurring NPC's basically the average stuff you would expect in a product. now look at Shadowfell, no town, no reason other then a paragraph on Hooks, or look at "Rescue of Rivenroar" the DM has no idea where the campaign is going, he doesn't even have an idea what the next adventure synopsis is going to be. The maps are VERY low quality... I could go on but I am just babbling now.
The forum instability is just another example of a big company not taking responsibility for their products, and I don't see why you defend them.
I mean really, there are people in 2nd year university who could get a forum working, what is the problem? This isn't the biggest forum on the Internet, its not a "mystery" how to get this working. Is it that they are waiting for me to submit my complaint to the right place, was that the problem all along? Or is it an incompetent company destroying a great game?
That was for a purchase of Invision Power Board for a year (software only). I am quite confident that IPB is scalable to those sizes (just look at most of the forums on the web, they are usually IPB).
Umm... I don't know where you got that particular set of facts... but the db structure used by Invision isn't readily scalable to those sizes. There's a reason most of the big forums (100,000+ members) are either PHPBB, vBulletin, or custom built. Also, these forums have been around long before Invision (and similar message boards) were even an option. To "upgrade" now would mean losing a lot of the posting history that has been built up for years.
Yes, there are upgrades needed... I am the first to admit that. Now that Gleemax isn't leeching resources and they're going back to a unified WotC site, there's a chance that we'll see some improvement.
Karsus, that reminds me of when I was in the navy. I was an electrician on the F18 radar system. Pilots would complain to me all the time about cockpit electronics problems and there was nothing I could do about them except pass along the complaints to the cockpit specialists. And even when I did pass them along I would get yelled at for wasting time and that I should have jsut told the pilot to complain to someone who could actually do something about it.
-Heh, the government's the government.
I am pretty sure that the description of this forum is:
Community Business
Discuss what's happening on the forums and other community business.
So, my post about, how these forums are slow, often down, and generally unintuitive seems to be in the right place. In short, whats happening in these forums is that they are being botched
-Right. The part about someone listening, or someone doing anything about it isn't necessarily going to be met. That's what Customer Service is for.