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New forums are slick (feedback thread)
carmenara
Member Posts: 0 Arc User
A while ago @spektre12 posted his suggestion for a LCARS themed forum.
While this new forum still uses conventional forum code (as all standard, functional forums today do) I do like the new "viewscreen" banner. The perspective in the viewscreen style banner is scaled just right that it's something I'd imagine like the panoramic view out of the front window of an Odyssey class if you were to stand on the bridge.
I know, the perspective in-game doesn't give the same feeling, but that's because we're viewing the game world through a flat screen and a 'flat' perspective. RL depth of field would give a much more spectacular view out of such a panoramic viewport than presented in static POV (in game).
While this new forum still uses conventional forum code (as all standard, functional forums today do) I do like the new "viewscreen" banner. The perspective in the viewscreen style banner is scaled just right that it's something I'd imagine like the panoramic view out of the front window of an Odyssey class if you were to stand on the bridge.
I know, the perspective in-game doesn't give the same feeling, but that's because we're viewing the game world through a flat screen and a 'flat' perspective. RL depth of field would give a much more spectacular view out of such a panoramic viewport than presented in static POV (in game).
STF Flight Instructor since Early 2012. Newbies are the reason why STO lives and breathes today. Do not discriminate.
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Post edited by carmenara on
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This whole new site, while shiny and new, is designed horribly. It relies too much on PWEs infrastructure and systems (i.e.: Zen where C-points would have been just fine, or requireing a PW account to post when it worked just fine before.). Its cluttered and the forums take up MORE vertical space than they used to. Its like the PWE/Cryptic web designers decided to throw everything that was un needed into a website redesign... and then proceded to get rid of the in-game mail system, and didnt bother bringing back the in-game friends list (and then decided to add in facebook... for no good reason)
Its a mishmash of stuff, and I dont think anybody who designed this should be proud of it... its horrible.
Not only that... but it seems that whoever was tending the forum database of users doesnt know how to transfer them... theres no reason we should have to restart our post counts because of this... and its a step back with no avatar customization and other such stuff.
its old look we can earn Zen by doing stuff and not spending money and for that i am all for it
And the forum's style is set to a fixed width, so nothing scales as you change your browser window size. Booo to fixed width here.
I don't recall -- were these forums using vBulletin before, or something else? If it was vBulletin, it's a shame we don't have the previous theme as an option.
edit: Additionally, no matter how "slick" it may end up being, it's really difficult to win the membership over with a surprise update and change. Sure, it'll calm down eventually, but I foresee some rough waters ahead for a little bit.
equal parts cynical and helpful
This +1
Apparently using a quote doesn't count and since the forum won't let me post a message under 10 characters in length I'll just randomly ramble on about nothing for a moment just so I can agree with something someone else already said. :frown:
_____________________________________________________________
If it ain't broke don't fix it :frown:
1. Functionality. I didn't go very far yet, but replying to a thread is more cumbersome (even if it's just one mouseclick) than in the previous version.
2. Official presentation. The visual part might be allright, but why do i need to log in before being able to browse the forum?
From a marketing point of view, this is an extremely bad move for STO. You have to consider why forums usually are set up for registered members only. The usual reasons are:
1. The forums belong to a small group of people, who prefer to stay with themselves.
2. The forum has serious issues with the behaviour of its members, so they want to hide the "bile" from the public.
Neither of those two points is true for the STO forum, though. Big portions of the forum are dedicated for helping other players and most of the players in the forum are kind and helpful. Thus the STO forum up to now was a nice advetisement for the game.
This is even more emphasized by the fact that the developers regularily use the forum to make announcements and even to get feedback from other players. Such clearly visible interaction between the dev-team and the players is rare and again adds to the games appeal.
Indeed, in theory the forum had only an advertising character to a small part of the games potential playerbase, but considering that the Nerd-factor in STO is higher than in many games (and that we are proud to be Nerds!), a well run forum is more of an advertisement for this game than for many others, while at the same time being rather cost efficient.
Thus locking the forum and hereby limiting access to players who already are registered seems a bad move to me. If new (potential) players want to inform themselves about the game, they now run into a wall at the official forums and if they have any questions before starting the game, they'll find their "information" at other places, which quite likely hold wrong or outdated information. To keep up the good public presentation of the game, it makes sense to switch the forum to public access again.
At the moment i'm fumbling about trying to find out how to navigate the new layout, i've also gotta work out how to link my character to my PW account . . Woo Hoo ! :cool:
I will also say that archiving everything is a 'very bad thing', there is alot of psycology at play when creating and running a forum, one of the main things you want to achieve is to get users to have a sence of ownership and standing, to archive peoples posts and reset thier join dates completely smashes down all that has been built up by longstanding forum users (like myself who has been here for 4 years). I'm quite shocked that these changes were not advertised more clearly, more so what was going to happen to everyones posts, to just dump these changes on a forum community like this was very badly thought out.
Edit:- Another alteration, the 'lists' feature doesn't work on these forums... *sighs*
Formerly Suricata - Join Date July 2008
oh i dont care but lot of others will. i just see my forum post count being 1. well, i dont care much but i can already see the masses complaining.. give me the popcorn.
edit: I just discovered we can;t have personal avatars. Lovely. Since the username is too small to read, there's really no way I can tell who is posting what.
....
-checks his private message box to find it empty-
I had a redemption code for 1000 c-points in there. That's nice. :frown:
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
-Lily
It's now a different PM system.
Your old mails are still accessible ingame.
Yeps! Someone suggested that to me, all there. Whew!
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Oh and candy.
As well, the entire layout takes up too much vertical space when it wasn't needed. I'm very tempted to find some other site now to use their forums, which wouldn't help PWE because I'm one of the rare users who actually say good things about the game.
The main page of the website looks pretty nice now, but the forums are now bland, uninteresting and I liked the red that it used to have, the colours were nice before witht he red and blue. Now it's boring.
Not happy with this, especially with all my subscriptions gone.
EDIT: Ohh, and look at that. No clear seperation to show where the signiture starts.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Yeah... Not the best signiture, but it's my first time using an advanced image editing program, so... woo!
The forums are clunky and horrid. As I've said previously I support most of Cryptic decisions from a financial point, to keep the game running, but seriously. These forums are horrid and clunky.
On a smaller screen they are even worst!
You're making this huge deal about Fleets and fleet bases for season 6, yet you just took away our option to have our fleet logo as our avatar like most of us did......BAD MOVE!!!
<EDIT> WTF WTF WTF!!!! NOW WE ALL HAVE A JOIN DATE OF JUN 2012!!!! THAT'S BS!! MOST PEOPLE DEPENDED ON THAT TO BE ABLE TO JUDGE HOW ACCURATE CERTAIN INFORMATION FROM OTHER FORUM MEMBERS IS!!!
The only plus side is I get to have a name similar to my original @MGDawson handle.
Previously known as MGDawson.
Lifer since April 2010, and open beta tester.
Say "NO" to the Tier 5 Constitution!
Even if the look and feel were great (they're nothing to write home about, IMPO), the new forums have so much broken and missing that I will hardly be using them at this rate, unless some serious work is done.
I don't care how long you've been playing. I only care about how you play.
And remember to follow the rules.
Like the hair on a tent-revival snake-handling preacher.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC] "I weary of the chase. Wait for me. I shall be merciful and quick."
There are of course a lot of negative things to be remarked but I don't see the point joining the bandwagon. After all, if you were PWE product management, you'll eventually have to undertake such a massive ordeal as shifting a forum database over from another company for the sake of centralization (long term effective management) and streamlining asset deployment (pile everything on PW customer support instead of 2 ticket systems, as in the past.)
The easy thing to do for forum administrators is put up a notice in advance and create a permanent archive site so that all posts earlier than say, 19 June will be accessible from a locked down Cryptic forum (the old site.) Everything else starts afresh on a new forum. It is inevitable forum to forum data transfer will have its quirks especially where past threads have been deleted, moved, users deleted, etc and such creating a share of errors in the DB, or at least, that could happen from what I've seen during my few years spent in experimental indie game dev't. Website shifts are no joking matter.
While the loss of 'personal identity' is a sad thing, I consider it good that all the threads appear to be intact and can be replied to.
What matters at the end of the day is that a forum still exists. Us, the community, simply have to adapt to the changes and make full use of it, or find someplace else to call a virtual home. We have no power over PWE's decisions which for better or for worse, ensures that STO's long term future is kept separate from the issues of day to day operations, which is good from the corporate perspective. When working with any large corporate entity, for sure there will be little leeway for such as 'personal expression', but you notice such entities too are very stable and can easily withstand the test of time.
After all, forum participation is not mandatory for enjoyment in STO. Large fleets and guilds have their own independent communities and outside of public recruitment, do not actually have to make a presence on the official STO site.
In conclusion, lets consider that every change to STO since F2P was generally hotly debated. What are regarded as bad moves are blown all out of proportion, but when good features and surprise releases occur, it seems they too are twisted into some negative discussion even if said feature releases occur more than two months ahead of schedule.
Some of the best and most innovative things that have happened to STO F2P have arisen out of the most negative discussions, because someone at Cryptic did their share of time sifting through zillions of customer posts on the issue and created a winning strategy to making something sci fi cool and yet somehow functional from the Star Trek perspective.
If PWE wants to experiment, I say let them. After all, if someone up top got the idea that anything they and Cryptic do will be regarded as hostile and negative, they have the option of putting an end to freedom of expression on their forums and game servers, just like many private guilds and indie games have resorted to in order to protect their development interests.
I've gone through the new forum functions and have found some features that I find were missing and sorely needed from Crpytic's version. The new system may not be fully finished, but it has potential, and prospect for superior functionality in the near future. But of course, everyone does appear to be still stuck on the banner issue.
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You guys know what this means?! Free-for-all!
-starts trolling-
Actually, maybe I'll troll some other time. I'm sleepy. You guys go ahead.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]