all of these fires should have been out weeks ago. best case they would never flare up...how? advanced notice...bombardment of the masses with positive concepts related to change and an expectation of something new coming around the bend.
While this sounds all great in theory it does just the opposite of what you expect.
Take one specific pre announcement we did concerning the perk ordinance system. All it does is create "Sky is falling post" and really makes matters even worse with rumors and speculation. End result is you are just putting out flames longer.
Take another example of when we launched the ENY plane disabling. It was talked about long in advanced. The flames on it started before the launch and continued on until this last side balancing change.
Believe me when I say been there done that got the tee shirt on pre anouncing contriverial changes. JB88, remember I have been CEO of an online flight sim company since 1995 (- 2 years of wild bill hell).
Have built 2 of them starting from scratch. And while I'm always looking for better ways of doing things.
I have learned a hell of a lot what does and does not work. And also I am constantly reavaluating that knowledge.
One of the things I have learned is that , a pure marketing type person interacting with the community is an absolute night mare . W
They typically do far more damage than you could ever imagine. There problem is that a marketing / sales type personality is very much driven by telling people what they want to hear. While this works for a short time, in the end it really breaks down the trust of gamer vs game maker. And from then on anything the marketing person saises is just viewed as pure hype, and ignored. Go look at WB as a classic example of how to destroy player relations.
When you have a product that all of your customers communicate with each other on a daily basses, it creates an entirely different beast than other type industries.
HiTech
