Here I'm talking about gaming boards that may have some kind of financial relevance (most notably one owned by the guys who made a game). That is, here or even Gamefaqs nobody makes money off from the fact the message board is good (or not) so maybe no one really cares and that's fine. But let's say you made a game and you believe that having some kind of active community is supposed to actually have value. But if that's what you believe, why are gaming message boards so cheap? For example I see a lot of them with reputation system, which is basically like Search Engine Optimization. As far as I can tell I should just find a few friends to upvote each other and then we'd all be totally reputable, at least compared to a group of guys smaller than us. Or I can post "THIS GAME SUCKS" in a slightly more eloquent way and that's sure to rack up crazy reputation. Well, there's this thing call Moderator. I remember when Torchlight 2 came out, the Blizzard moderators are busy removing all the posts like "DIABLO 3 GO BUY TORCHLIGHT 2", and you know what, that actually makes a lot of sense because you sure don't want people to find out about that even if it's true (and if it's not you definitely should remove it). I remember another time in EQ, there was a mod highlighted thread for server census where a guy came up with an ingenius way to collect server population... until the number show that almost nobody was actually playing this game, and then the thread was promptly deleted and for all I know the original creator may have been banned. I'm not saying this is right, but it seems like if you think your message board is valuable you'd pay people to do this kind of thing.
There are certainly a lot of people on a board on the average gaming board I'd consider as adding negative value to a company's bottom line (like the bitter guy who always tells you this game sucks), so why not get rid of them, and, better yet, just ban them from the game too? I actually thought Blizzard tying your posting privileges to ownership and then consequently can revoke it is a pretty good idea. After all the EULA already says they own your soul and everything else, and you can actually argue detrimental behavior on a message board is indeed going to hurt the bottom line. So in that case, why be so cheap? How hard can it be to hire a few guys whose sole job is to identify guys/posts that you couldn't possibly want to have on your board and then get rid of it and escalate if necessary? Or do companies think that gaming message boards are actually worthless? But in that case you should just have a knowledge base since if you want to say message boards are negative value (and quite a few of them certainly makes a convincing argument), then the best thing to do is just not have one in the first place, at least not any that'd be directly associated with your game.
Or maybe gaming companies just think people magically come up with insightful posts to the state of games, and help each other out on a message board so we get goodwill created for free out of perhaps some kind of automatic reputation system? Well, that's not how the Internet works.
There are certainly a lot of people on a board on the average gaming board I'd consider as adding negative value to a company's bottom line (like the bitter guy who always tells you this game sucks), so why not get rid of them, and, better yet, just ban them from the game too? I actually thought Blizzard tying your posting privileges to ownership and then consequently can revoke it is a pretty good idea. After all the EULA already says they own your soul and everything else, and you can actually argue detrimental behavior on a message board is indeed going to hurt the bottom line. So in that case, why be so cheap? How hard can it be to hire a few guys whose sole job is to identify guys/posts that you couldn't possibly want to have on your board and then get rid of it and escalate if necessary? Or do companies think that gaming message boards are actually worthless? But in that case you should just have a knowledge base since if you want to say message boards are negative value (and quite a few of them certainly makes a convincing argument), then the best thing to do is just not have one in the first place, at least not any that'd be directly associated with your game.
Or maybe gaming companies just think people magically come up with insightful posts to the state of games, and help each other out on a message board so we get goodwill created for free out of perhaps some kind of automatic reputation system? Well, that's not how the Internet works.
