"The need to communicate effectively with your customers will come up again and again.
Bill Gates "
Even in my world of Emergency Room Nursing the one complaint that surfaces the most ,to my surprise, has always been the lack of enough updates and communication with the families on a regular basis not just because they ask. They want to be sought out with any and all information.
So when the Dev team does, we complain about it and show contempt? They are communicating and information is a 2-way street. It must be acknowledged and nurtured .Gone are the Richard Elliot days ,but what is still here is our Ultima.
You mean Richard Garriott, right?
Communication has always been a problem going back to '97. People pretend like it's bad now, but those of us playing LS back in the days running up to UO:R and after, when the shard had a serious problem with constantly crashing from being overloaded with players and who knows what else, experienced the worst amount of communication that UO has ever seen.
It took us protesting on other shards and calling up/emailing EA executives to get some serious answers. The people moderating the official UO forums were on the ball in deleting posts containing phone numbers, addresses, etc. of EA executives, but that information was being passed around among LS players, including in-game.
Somebody I know who worked on the dev team back then tried to explain it to an EA executive when we started bugging EA executives, and their response was "what's the big deal, they should just play on another server."
The lack of communication was stunning. We weren't even able to play our own shard and when we were getting information, it was along the lines of "we're working on it". When we started protesting on other shards and lagging/crashing those shards, all of the sudden a lot of information poured forth.
A lack of communication has always been a problem with UO, and having played DAOC and Warhammer Online as well as some other EA titles, it's definitely an EA thing, because it is not unique to UO, not at all. There are other companies as bad as EA and there are other companies that are much better.
Having attended quite a few of the player/dev gatherings in Austin as well as the UO gatherings at the renaissance festival outside of Houston, I can say that in person and informal/off the record, they had no problems talking about quite a bit of stuff - where they wanted UO to go, what we should look out for over the next few months, etc.
I found that to be the case even as dev teams changed. It was unfortunate that they were moved to California because I enjoyed the interaction those of us in the area had with them. The problem is that things they could talk to us about one-on-one informally could not be talked about in a formal/official manner. It really bothered them as well, because they would catch a lot of crap from players over this or that when they knew full well that a 5-minute statement could clear up the problem.
UO maybe a small part of EA, but the things they discuss publicly in regards to the bigger picture of UO have to be vetted through various channels. Cal even complained in this very thread about the video having to be run past PR and letting them do their thing with it.
EA is a publicly traded company. The amount of bureaucracy and red tape thanks to that (and EA's size) is insane, and you can't just go making statements that could impact future financial matters without vetting it through somebody.
The communication with the UO dev team is about the same as it's been for years (maybe better, maybe worse, depends on the time of year), and the amount of players angry over that are probably similar in proportion to the DAOC and Warhammer fans. People need to go read those forums if they want their eyes opened - plenty of DAOC and Warhammer fans feel left in the dark or feel like there is a lack of communication and anytime an EA employee posts something, people jump on it.
What's bizarre is that some of you all remember the old days and so none of this should be new to you.
thanks for the cash input ... by the way ...
