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- Exalted Mythic Member
For the most part, this is one of the better threads I've read on Bnet in quite some time... actual intelligent conversation around a single on-topic post. There are some great points here and as always everyone is entitled to their opinions.
Suffice it to say that in many ways we feel your pain and agree with much of what is being said regarding the current state of our site and our forums. The experience is obviously not at the level we'd like it to be. We are currently working on development specs for future updates that are primarily designed to improve and enchance the existing community aspects of our site. We aren't going to abandon this - we are going to embrace it even more.
We will not turn into a sterile customer support website for that is not who we are. In that case, we'd probably be more apt to just shut down the site altogether. How many other MGS 1st party developers have their own website? (for "community" or for "support"?) We choose to operate this site because we want to, we could easily shut it down tomorrow. We don't generate any revenue from it, in fact, just the opposite. And yes, most of the time we just subject ourselves to infinite amount of hate and complete stupidity. We do it because we always have and even through all the spammers and haters and jerks there are some people who do enjoy meeting new people and sharing common experiences and learning more about our studio. Admittedly, this is becoming less common now as the sheer volume of negativity has officially far outweighed the positives.
We are working on several ways to hopefully improve the situation here and make it more enjoyable for the people who want to be here. The rumored "karma system" is being spec'd out and if it comes to fruition will bring a system that rewards positive contributors and shields you from people you'd rather not be exposed to. Elitist? Perhaps a bit, but for the people who care it will become the norm, not the exception.
We are also bringing on more moderators though despite their best efforts, that alone isn't going to be the savior for our forums. We are also going to be implementing stricter restrictions for forum use, as we see it as a privelege, not a right. There may very well end up being a new forum that can't even be accessed by some people and perhaps even the ability to only see posts by people you want to. We are discussing a variety of options, all aimed at ultimatley improving the user experience here.
For now we mostly enjoy Bungie.net, despite it's usual negative outpooring. True, it's not always fun to hang out in the forums, but when meaningful posts like this one appear it makes it worthwhile. We know we've grown, and to some extent it's happened faster than we were prepared to handle. Ultimately our priority is always going to be making great games and telling great stories but we'll continue to offer a portal into our world as long as there are people interested in stopping by. Unfortunately since we don't have a huge team of dedicated people working on Bungie.net it takes us longer than we'd like to implement these new features and react to fan suggestions. We are working though and we are listening.. heck, maybe by the time we get things really cleaned up most of the jerks will be bored and will have moved on... we can only hope. Well, until we announce our next game, then everyone can come back and tell us how terrible every aspect of it is. : )