Shall Anet open GW2 to the community via democratisation?

The question asked in the title comes directly from EVE revolutionary concept of Council of Stellar Management (short version is here). For those who don't know, CCP (EVE's company) are asking EVE players to elect a body of 9 players that will represent it for 6 months, communicate with CCP via a dedicated forum and attend one or two face-to-face meetings.

In essence, this role is occupied nowdays in the GW World by GW fan forums like GWG, or GWO, or other (with various levels of fan-ness). But we're all unclear on the relationship between Anet (especially since we now loose our CR, if it's not an April's fools), as we don't know for sure that they listen. Sardelac and Riverside on GWG are full of tons of messages, ideas, proposals, complaints, bugs, etc.

I shall also mentioned the extremely usefull Community update webpage on the GW website, but I'm unsure if many people read it (?). Of course, the "community days" were brilliant event and each fanforum had loads of feedback (the occasion to thread-res the GWG ones here). I guess that the Design a Weapon contest shall also be mentioned, and the not-so-updated Scribe newsletter. I even discovered on the GW website a page to thank the fansite gifts!

But even with all this back-and-forth communication, how does Anet know what's important in the middle of all that? And how do they cope with the fact that these websites represent only a minority in the GW population? And how do we, players, know that we're heard (I know that I may have been as I suggested something in Sardelac and saw it implemented)? Gaile and Andrew did and are doing a fantastic job, even if fanforums may give the impression that they're not (look at the Peace out Gaile thread, with so many different posters acknowledging what I just said!).

There's too much scattering of the dialogue between Anet and the community, though I admit that it creates a much more vibrant and rich relationship, but one wonders if it's really effective and efficient. Some might even argue that Anet shall not listen to the community as many times they are wrong (it's true that some suggestions in Sardelac can be, how to say this without offending anyone, quite inappropriate, but they are the customers' expression), or for some that Anet will actually not listen to us because they've got our money (of course, it's a fallacy).

I'm convinced that CCP/EVE decision is the right one, but may be other MMO companies are waiting to see how this works to follow. What do you think? Do you want more democratisation? If so, how would this work in the specific context of GW? What specific shape should it take? And e-board of elected fanforum representatives in direct electronic contact with CRs? Or a global election accross the whole GW population? Shall there be representative of the most "successfull" guilds, so as to ackowledge that GW is guild-based after all?

All argumented opinion is welcome! (if a mod would like to create a poll for this discussion, I'd suggest as a question "Would you like more democratisation in the GW fans-Anet relationship and if so, what shape shall it take?" with answers like "No", "Yes as a globally-elected council", "Yes as a fansite-elected council", "Yes (other)", "May be, I don't know")

The official wiki can serve as the central link between the community and Anet. They have already shown that they can administer themselves, and it would be just as easy for them to set up a "community wiki" where users can jointly maintain a suggestion page. There are tons of MediaWiki plugins for voting, forums and whatnot.

What Gaile Gray should do in her new role is to figure out how to properly channel this player-participatory resource. They get all the energy for free. In fact, the users will fall over themselves trying to be helpful.

Traditional game forums like gwguru are dinosaurs.

Representative democracies sooner or later become corrupt.

Direct democracy is always better.

An in-game poll once in a while would be better. Like Granado Espada's.

(My perfect game would be a mix of GW and GE, XD)

Major problem: those representatives will be likely "hardcore gamers" (Who else is going to be elected, who else is going to be candidate), meaning that their perspective would be somewhat distorted and their input not really going to help make game enjoyable for majority of players

Besides, its power that corrupts. Imagine if Major ecto owners (20+ stacks people) had final word about ecto droprates.

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besides, wasn't GW supposed to have official polls? Back when gaile was still CR we heard something about such plans

The moment any game I play resorts to nonsense like this is the moment I'll quit. We're talking about frigging games, for Pete's sake. Light entertainment.

Except the only reason CCP started doing this sort of thing is because they've been caught corrupting their own game...

Eve is unique in that respect. Not only were devs caught giving paying players in their alliance uber-items by manipulating the database, they were also caught giving out extraordinarily useful information like undocumented formulas regarding movement and damage. Then they tried to lie about it and cover it up.... and then they just pretend that it didn't matter until people stopped talking about it.

You don't really have that in Guild Wars. Furthermore, I'm not particularly impressed by the Guild Wars community as a whole anyway, compared to most other online games. I think Guild Wars has, hands down, the single worst batch of players of any game I've played. I don't like interacting with them in single lines of text chat most of the time, I'll be damned if I want them helping to dictate the design of the game.

So, I guess in short, no, I don't think that would be a good idea for GW. The problem with a democracy is that you get exactly what you deserve. If you have a democracy of 5 million idiots, they're going to produce garbage when you ask them for input, and you're going to get garbage as output. It's bad enough when you ask people to investigate and intelligently pick political candidates in real life (strike up a conversation with a particularly political coworker once to see what I mean), I can't imagine asking them for input on something they have absolutely NO access to, information-wise.

I really would prefer to leave more of the development up to the professionals at ANET than allow the community to influence their decision-making much. ANET knows what it's doing. The community within Guild Wars? I'm not convinced most of them have even figured out how to set their VCR clocks yet, much less provide feedback on a complex system of database structures and decision trees.

Besides, like Gli said, it's a video game. I'm paying to be entertained, not to do ANET's work for them. It's their job to determine how to create a profitable game, not mine, and they don't need a "democracy" to do that. Soliciting opinions is fine, but giving people a say in the specific design? That's just really silly and take the entire concept of gaming right out of the game.

Interesting comment, which is confirmed by this that I read today:
http://www.massively.com/2008/03/08/...-the-wiki-way/
At 3 million unique users per month, a full half of English-speaking WoW players visit WoWWiki every month.

This may actually address the point raised here:
On different criticisms:
True, but as CCP clearly said, the CSM has absolutely no power, it's only created to pass on list of "issues and opinions" by social filtering. CCP is still the one making the decisions and I guess still listening to fansites (but not as a main channel of comm).

I guess I should have strenghtened this fact, which changes nothing to the fact that GW is a game. But, you know as much as I do that it means tons of things. A game where people are ready to buy tons of virtual gold for real money? Or where people farm like mad to get the shiny title? Of course, these are very small groups of people, but I believe (as many in the field) that the MMO genre is going beyond the simple "game" (if not, then why are people coming by millions to WoW and the traditional PC games are in trouble?). It's coming close to social networking (typoe'd "engineering" before!), which means that the company-customer relationship is slightly different.

I have to admit that I may have proposed a non-discussion, I thought of this thread as a real discussion, rather than hammering a point in this or that direction. I've got a few ideas that I'm sprinkling in this thread, but I'm not claiming any strong statement. So please, everyone, be cool .

Not neccessary with a decent community team.

We allready have that, ask Izzy and his cronies.

Which brings up one of many problems with the mechanism: in the case of CCP it won't matter anyway.

The whole problem with CCP to begin with was that they were ignoring problems and players despite strong evidence that their employees were tampering with the system. If the "oversight" has no real power to enact change, there's no point in having them. If CCP changes for the better it's because they choose to, and if they choose not to, the oversight can't force them to.

Which is why I brought up the point of a more direct role in guiding game development. Without some ability to actually enact change, there's no real point. Any democratic system is useless if the voters don't have some mechanism for forcibly backing their desires. You can talk about making changes, but if the rulers choose to ignore you, and you have no ability to muscle them, nothing will happen.

Which brings me back to my original point: I wouldn't trust the community to do something like that... or at the very least I'd trust ANET more.

Another point that comes up: if you do start allowing players more influence, who do you lash out against if they do something you don't like? In other words: if ANET does something I don't like, I can harm them financially by no longer doing business with them. If the players do something I don't like, I can still harm ANET financially, but I'm not hurting the people who are responsible for the problem. I can only pressure them indirectly by trying to get ANET to ignore them, which sort of defeats the whole purpose all over again.

It's nice for a developer to have feedback. However, getting responsible feedback may not be quite as simple as it sounds.

The player usually only cares about what he wants - more money, more power,... but rarely considers what the end effects of such decisions are. Just look at all the crying to get loot scaling removed - and many posters don't even know how prices would behave if loot scaling were removed...

Also, the player just wants more. Rarely does he realize that more also costs development effort.

As I said - responsible feedback is hard to get.

The complaints that ANet doesn't listen to us will be replaced by complaints that the CSM doesn't listen to us.

I read the OP's suggestion with interest. I think such a method as proposed in the OP would weigh the feedback heavily in the direction of hardcore players' views and preferences, as others have noted.

What I would like to see is something more like what Blizzard/WoW has done. ANet should open up its own game forum and moderate said forum itself. I think that is the best and most effective way to "stay in touch" with your customer base.

This won't work out since we need both casual and hardcore gamers making up the testing body.

Though I think ANet should give first beta to people playing GW since 2005. We are their oldest and most loyal fans, we know more about the game than others - we were the ones around when GW was at its peak, so ANet knows we're the ones to listen to to follow a formula of awesomeness.

Playing since beta doesn't necessarily mean that the player is the most loyal fan, more knowledgeable about the game over others, or that listening to them above others will be more beneficial to Guild Wars over someone who joined in later years.

I do agree though with the opinion that a broad spectrum of players would be needed for such a panel. I think that any sole specialized group wouldn't be very helpful, because they may be more inclined to focus on specific areas of the game instead of the game as a whole.

I would worry the community is too immature for that sort of thing. Wouldn't they just vote on representatives by cronyism and popularity contests, rather than who has good insight, and problem solving, and discussion skills? Or do you just mean to have a bunch more forum secretaries who take notes to them...

I think the ability to choose a good enough selection of people from different aspects of the game to represent each major demographic would be extremely difficult. The concept while sound would really be very difficult to implement in a way that helps address each set of concerns. Trying to find the casual gamer guy to elect to represent johnny come casual gamer would not be easy, while the hardcore guy PVE and PVP would be easily found.

I'll say this, at the risk of blasphemy. The "democratic" process of a wiki is slow and tedious with every single subject and topic debated and analyzed to death with any progress or change happening so slow you forget what the original subject matter was. Then once the hot debate has died down someone decides to make a decision and implement anyway. Yes I'm making sweeping generalizations but it's so frustrating one could pull their hair out. I know there are admins on the wiki but it does come with it's own set of politics and popularity contest.

EDIT: I should probably clarify and say I'm only speaking in regards to what the OP is talking about with regards to player information being passed on and decisions made from that with a wiki community. Not speaking of wiki's themselves as they are a better option to pass information to the player that has been proved many times over. I'm just not sure that it would work in the reverse with the community passing information in a valid manner to devs.

On to the original subject matter though, I do think the fact that EVE has an elected body that is only there for 6 months is a superior idea. How these people are picked is of interest but with the rotation of players you can hopefully not only generate loyalty but a wide range of ideas and opinions. If you do happen to fail with some of the elected players then there's a correction process.

In regards to the fansite model not sure that would work or be sustainable. There are so many fansites that come and go, with high burnout rates all around for admins/mods/etc. To assume they know more about the game or what's best is wrong. I do think they have a better touch with overall community opinion on subjects but even this varies from forum to forum and it's style.

And then there's the concept of hardcore players vs. the casual players. MMOG's are for the casual gamer afterall. But their knowledge and ability to forsee the changes they want and to accept those consequences are limited. Then take into account that on this small of a player board their opinions and confidence would be seriously undermined by those who are more serious players. So no real debate or ability to give an honest opinion would exist in front of devs and players such as these.

Too many variables. Do I think a player elected board may help? Yes. Is it the answer communities are looking for? Probably not.

I think it would be a bad idea.As stated people elected would represent what they wanted in the game not the community.You see it all the time on forums.People trying to change the game to what they think it should be.Someone wanted to stop a poster from running 3 hero eles.Give me a break.To many people trying to control how others play.Besides who you going to vote for?Who comes up with the list of those that should serve?

A game ruled by people who dwell in a basement. No thanks.