by Saintsaens » Wed May 23, 2007 9:05 pm
Sigh... I feel like I've failed everyone here, because I was one of the ones involved in the switch off of ezboards to our wayward wanderings on random hosting sites until we found this board... I wasn't one of the major players, but I was involved, and we did try our best as admins to provide a home for the community that we could use to try and come together and at least air some of our grievences to Sony. I'm sorry if it didn't turn out the way everyone who wanted to move hoped, but we had to do something... Staying on ezboards just wasn't going to happen unless something drastic changed in how the community was structured.
All your points are understandable, but blaming the lack of more voices coming out on the paladin's issues towards Sony 100% on the changeover from ezboards to the different hosting sites is not seeing the bigger picture. I also happen to agree with those that posted that said that the paladin class is doing well at this time, and while there are some problems that need to be fixed, overall we aren't doing too badly.
1) Sony has a history of very poor player relations. I've been playing for almost 7 years now, and it's not any different than what it was like when we started. Same complaints about devs not listening, about player concerns not getting heard, etc, just different people making the complaints.
2) Other games such as WoW and DAoC came out during this time, and many paladins (not to mention other classes) left EQ to go play something else. Paladins may have been hit harder than other classes because we've *always* felt that Sony didn't listen to our side of the story.
3) As a class, we've never really had a strong voice who could argue forcefully for things to change our way, a la Frodiin or something. I'm not that type of person, and I can't really think of someone who could be considered that sort of a voice. This would be someone who posts a lot, and more importantly, who posts a well reasoned and thought out argument, instead of something that's easy for the devs to either ignore or other people to take out of context and turn the argument around to something completely different. The reason Frodiin appears to get the devs eating out of his hand is because his arguments are well supported, even if they are somewhat bombastic and overblown...
4) Also, as a class, we tend to have widely different points of view on what we want to see the class become, which is fine. The problem in this lies that if we can't even agree on what we want as a class, how are we supposed to present a united front to Sony that says, this is how we want things to be, instead of arguing amongst ourselves over the best way to have this occur? The arguing amongst ourselves on Sony's board just makes the arguments look weaker, and no one pays attention to the content of the arguments even if they bring up valid points.
Now, going back to the original point of this post, which was to suggest ways of getting a better way for the paladin correspondant's voice to be heard by the devs, so that there would be tangible changes in the game... We can't really force Sony to change their PR strategy, given that it seems entrenched in stone, nor can we force people to come back to the game. What we can do as a class is present a better argument to the rest of the people that do play the game.
My suggestion is this: move all the arguing about what the paladin class should be from Sony's site to this board, so we can come to some sort of a consensus amongst ourselves before presenting it to the public on Sony's boards. After that, have ONE person (the class correspondant, perhaps?) present the general consensus of the paladin community to Sony's site, and not have any differing viewpoints from other paladins on that post.
Saintsaens Sacre`Coeur
Lvl 100 Holy Defender
Officer/Assistant RL, Sol Invictus, The Tribunal
Formerly
Saintsaens Sacre`Coeur
Lvl 65 Paladin
Officer, Splintered Essence
Vulak`Aerr
Formerly
Lvl 52 Crusader
Archaic Arbitrators, Tallon Zek