Good morning, afternoon, and/or night, folks.

Many of you might know me, some of you might not. For those who don't, I'm Capricorpus, completionist and proud officer of Clan Battlehammer.

The problem:

As someone who browses the forums daily, and posts somewhat less frequently, I've been noticing (as I'm sure everyone on here has) a very large amount of discontent. This issue is, of course, not exclusive to the forums; anyone playing the game has undoubtedly seen more than his/her fair share of disgruntled individuals. Of course, the things that are being complained about are, more often than not, entirely legitimate! Unfortunately, there's a dearth of constructive criticism, and anybody saying that Turbine developers don't listen to their player base just because they generally don't feel a need to respond a dozen times to a dozen similar threads is being silly.

As a Turbine developer, it's undoubtedly overwhelming to see a massive amount of posts on any given subject. Furthermore, since most of the forumites can't seem to agree on anything other than "things are broken and something should probably be done", as a developer and/or producer, I'm sure it's difficult to determine what exactly the player base DOES want. This is, of course, made even more complicated by the fact that the majority of players aren't even active on the forums!

So, what's the point of my long-winded wall of text?


My proposed solution:

As stated in the previous paragraph, one of the problems Turbine undoubtedly encounters is a lack of unity among their player base. How can they "fix" something when nobody can agree on how it should be fixed, or even on whether or not anything is broken? Complaining on the forums is unproductive, and undoubtedly depressing for the developers to look at - who wants to read a 30 page long thread where 50 different people spend time bashing the product you worked hard on without offering any realistic solutions? So, here's what we can do.

We, the players of Cannith, can form a group that I've tentatively termed the "Cannith Guild Union", which would work as follows:

- Every Cannith guild that's interested can choose someone to represent them. Each representative gets one vote.
- These guild representatives will meet and discuss things, laying their opinions out for discussion with others
- After discussion, there will be a vote. Based on the result of that vote, someone (a representative of the representatives - I'd be more than happy to fill that role, but I'd also be more than happy to have a vote about who should do it) attempts to contact Turbine with an opinion that, presumably, should reflect that of a large portion of the Cannith server. Assuming Turbine is interested in hearing about it, and I don't know why they wouldn't be, they would be able to know the general feelings of a lot of people, phrased eloquently and in a non confrontational manner, by speaking to one person.

So, what are the advantages of this?

Instead of a whole bunch of people posting things on the forums, much of which isn't constructive in the slightest, our goal would be to be able to approach Turbine with a clear opinion that's been discussed and agreed upon. Additionally, we want to attempt to offer solutions when possible. As it says earlier in this post, one of the key advantages could be the ability to have a mature, non-confrontational discussion with realistic expectations and goals.

Another advantage would be the larger sample size for opinions - as I also mentioned earlier, most players aren't active forumites, and with this solution, their opinions would be given equal weight. Obviously, the people who don't go on the forums would have a harder time finding out about this, but if we can actually get this started, broadcasting in /advice or something would be a way we could potentially overcome that obstacle.





At this point, I've been writing this for more than an hour, and I'm getting antsy. I'm aware that I haven't fully explored every facet of how this would work, but I think I've mostly outline my basic proposal. I genuinely believe that, should people choose to do this, Turbine will choose to give us the time of day, and I really hope people don't respond in a typically sarcastic and/or pessimistic way.

If you've got any questions and/or comments, please post and I'll do my best to respond. If you've read my entire wall of text, I salute you.

Cheers.

~ Cap