One of the features I really liked on the old.old.forums (henceforth referred to as Mk.1 forums) were the graphic 12k or whatever signatures players had. It really gave the threads some splash and gave you a little insight into the personality of the players you were talking to. It also let players inject a little color into the forums.
(new users cannot post images… so much for some examples, eh?)
I really think you guys at CCP should consider this. Very few players used the Mk.2 forums. The joke, as you are well aware, was that the EvE forums were on reddit. The Mk.2 design was pretty slick. These forums are bland bland bland. I didn’t use the Mk.2 forums nearly as much as I did the Mk.1. I’ll tell you straight up I’m going to be abandoning the Mk.3. Talk about a missed opportunity in design.
You guys know EvE is a game, right? The people who play this game are “gamers”. EvE is fun. That’s why gamers play EvE. I don’t see how it makes any design sense to extract the fun from the forums. If your objective is to draw people to the forums, you are thinking in the opposite direction required to achieve that.
I’ll approach this another way: Why would you come to the EvE forums rather than reddit? How are these forums providing your players a unique or interesting experience? You need to think about what you are offering your audience when you are building a new site. Let’s go through a few bullet points and look at it from the player perspective.
CCP offers forum users unique/exclusive news and devblogs
No. you don’t. Every devblog, news article, or significant dev responce is simulcast to reddit. Your devs and community managers do this themselves, because they understand their audience (specifically, where they are getting EvE updates from).
CCP has integrated the forums into the game
Yes, you have. Pretty impressive technical work there imho. I can check my EvE mail, and… well… that’s about it. However, I can also do that in-game. So if I want to visit a forum that has by far the most users I can go to reddit and just check my mail in game. This is what your players are doing now.
The Mk.1, 2, & 3 forums are less anonymous
This is it. This is really the only draw. You can come on these forums which have the by-design feature that lets a capsuleer speak for their alliance or corporation. We, for the most part, know who’s who on reddit too, but here you know who everybody who wants to be identified actually is in-game. This is about communication. Here you can communicate officially as your player. This is all you have here, CCP.
…and what else? Somebody post another bullet point. I’m all out of bullet points. Do you have any?
If you want to draw users, you need to focus on how players can uniquely communicate. You are offering very little here. Did I mention these forums are bland af? Let players express themselves a little bit. You’ve relaxed the forum rules in an effort to draw in more players. They are still not as relaxed as the rules on reddit. You need to actually compare the two if you want to provide a superior user experience in some way. This “upgrade” is simply not going to be enough to change user behavior. Not even close.
You can’t remove features and call it an upgrade. Your players are asking for this… I know I’m not alone. I can’t wrap my head around your decision here. I guess whoever is in charge is just too much of a design expert to consider input, and is obviously far too good to change their mind.
I too would rather not have signatures front and center–too much visual clutter. If someone wants to view my packaging and nutritional information the info is discretely available when you click on my name.
That’s pretty over the top. The old forum sigs were something like 400px wide x 120px tall. What you posted there far exceeds that. It’s disingenuous af. The Mk.3 forums are going to be filled with images by the 20 or so players that even use them. In that light, you really can’t make a case against graphic sigs based on “visual clutter”.
That’s apples to spice packs…
You’re comparing a repeated forum sig to new pictures people post. I don’t like picture signature repetition that make the page even longer to scroll (in addition to posted images). Text sigs are bearable but no thank you to sig pics.
While I disagree with you, this is actually the first reasonable response in the thread up to this point. I would appreciate it if future posters did what you just did: state and explain your objection.
Considering the atmosphere on reddit it is very obvious why official eve communication should be kept to eve forums where CCP can control the crazies.
Especially now that they will work even when TQ is down so that TQ status updates can also be handled here instead of forcing players to go to third party services. Most of which are as pleasant as getting pancreatic cancer.
This is in-line with the first bullet point in my OP. This is not content unique to the Mk.3 forums. TQ status is just as well addressed on reddit.
With regards to controlling the crazies, it seems to me that excessive “control” has been identified by CCP as a reason people would rather use reddit, thus the greatly relaxed forum rules. It remains to be seen if the relaxed rules, despite being less relaxed than reddit, will draw users to the Mk.3 forums. I personally don’t think it will be.
People would rather use reddit because they have driven off everyone that disagrees and they can circlejerk 24/7/365 there. Hardly a good environment for dev communication as it might be positive to get opinions from all kinds of players and not just the reddit echo chamber.
Edit: If you add sigs please give us option to disable them. While they generally are fun and good looking I seriously don’t need to see the same thing over and over and over again. Also it wastes space and reduces even more the already low information density.
Nope,would rather not ever see useless signatures. There are posters who are (ahem) prolific, having the same damn graphic every 10 lines on a page gets real old, real fast.
Well, I’m here just because of the “Mk.3” as you named it.
And since this one actually works on mobile, you might have to deal with me more often now.
P.S.: Personally I agree with @Quince_Ozuwara. I had and loved them myself in the forums of old. Still they would occur to me like some kind of dinosaurs in this environment.
I don’t make anything. Chill…
I just staded my opinion. Turning it off is nice and all, but CCP never delivered a feature in its full extend. So it will likely be: signatures on for everyone… Disable feature soon™
Because I often access the forums on mobile, I’d much rather not have graphic signatures. They are eye cancer on small screens and really interrupt your ability to read.
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