Opinion on New Forums
It may just be unpopular opinion, but I find these new forums to be painstakingly difficult to read ,(text is tiny, and colors are blinding), follow thread, my hand hurts from scrolling through hun...
Forum Discussion
The real problem, I think (based on what the EA folks over the feedback forum have said), is that most of the critical problems people have with these forums - sorting, no page numbers, nested replies, no custom avatars, etc. - are all fundamental ways the new forums work. They can't be fixed, because they aren't actually broken. They are quite literally "features not bugs."
I hope I'm wrong or misunderstanding something, because if I'm not the only real fix I can envision would be for EA to scrap these forums and start again with another new backend. I don't think that's likely.
I agree.
The thing what frustrates me most is that this new forum looks like being intentionally designed the way it is now. I think I understand why these forums are set up this way. I am sure that there was a request for proposal and a requirement specification. It's not that someone has forgotten to set an option or to activate a feature like custom avatars. I'm afraid this is exactly the result of what was planned from the beginning.We're talking about budget and margin and if you setup such a project there is no place for "try and error". These forums are designed to host multiple games and you need a smallest common denominator which fits all demands. In 2009 we had a forum only for The Sims 3, in 2014 one for all Sim games and now we have a forum for all EA games (or at least a selection, probably there will be more). With every iteration, you lose a piece of individuality.
Bonxie_MCCC, I'm guessing you've also done the "gather requirements and submit an RFP" dance, yourself.
I agree with your analysis. Someone, somewhere made a conscious decision that this forum technology was the best fit for their purposes.
However, having done these dances a few times myself, I'm willing to allow a little room for... let's call it "error over malice." Some things, like sorting and page numbers, might have been such basic assumptions that no one thought to ask. I mean, honestly, when I was thinking about my minimum requirements for a new Sims forum, I never thought to say "threads need page numbers and chronological sorting." I just assumed those features would be so basic that of course the new forums would have them. (Which just goes to show I've been out of the corporate game for long enough to forget how things really work. 😄)
luciusstormYou might be right 😉
I guess also a kind of evidence for our (if I might say so) hypothesis is that the migration of the old forum threads didn't go well. The simple reason might be, that this forum obviously isn't designed for such a purpose. And I don't want to accuse anyone of malice either. The very fact that they were considering such an incompatible move prooves their good will. In the end we don't know the overall design and what are the objectives behind the project. And of course they don't have to share those desicions with us.
The intentional design aspect is that they wanted to mimic the most popular "forum" currently arround: Reddit. Which also does not have pages or any of the other things we (and the other older forum users) remember from proper forums. Reddit is fine for what it is, but it's not suited for what a forum entails when it has to do things that teh sims community does
I always knew they'd get the last laugh!! It's a real cheap joke.
Well... I don't know how expensive setting up these forums, including transferring all the old threads, was for EA. It could be a fairly expensive joke, at least from an "ordinary person money" standpoint. Probably not too bad from a "corporate money" standpoint, but costly enough I doubt they want to do it again after less than a month... and that's really the heart of the problem.
EA could have made a slightly upgraded version of what we had at the old forums with their $billions.
this is not quality.
