Did I miss something?

[EightBitz]

Originally Posted by ShadowChemosh

The thread may not have been as toxic and hostile as many gaming sites have had. No one directly threatened to kill Rob or his family but it still served no useful purpose.

Everyone knows the CM is late including LW and having yet another thread filled with a echo chamber of complaints does nothing. Plenty of sites exist for this purpose already like Facebook or Twitter.

Its pretty clear that the only valid date is "when its done". Pretty much everyone has a simple choice. They walk away from RW and its products or you accept what the software does "today" is helpful for you. The software as is with import/export is just about perfect for myself. I still run into some bugs but so far I can fix them all myself.

The deletion of the thread should also clearly show the level of frustration on the LW side. At my own job customer service reps that deal with the "end" customer is in a totally different building. I personally never have to deal with the "hate" that is spewed at customer service. Good or bad my company keeps this separate for a reason as it prevents the drag down of all employees. In addition my work place has a huge HR staff dedicated to making the work environment safe, happy, professional and a "positive" place. This is because few people actually enjoy a day filled with negative emotions. The impact to performance is staggering when people are not happy. Hmmm anyone remember Rob being sick for many months now?

LW has no such protection. Every employee has to engage the community directly on TOP of doing their normal jobs. I am pretty sure few of us would stay at our own jobs if we had to deal with the general public all the time. I would totally want to drill a hole in my head if I had to deal with it for my day job!

I am not even free of adding to the problem myself. I have had to face the truth that a few things I posted where not really helpful but just empty complaints. Its something I plan to correct and maybe its not a bad idea for everyone to take a moment to reflect on what they write BEFORE they hit the "submit" key. Its really easy on forums/internet to forget that another human with feelings is reading what you wrote. Not an empty emotionless company.

The way it was handled is what I took issue with. No explanation and no comment. The thread just disappeared as if someone just swept it under the rug and wanted to pretend it never happened. Event the user account temporarily disappeared.

Without explanation or comment, where does that leave us? Is "no useful purpose" the new benchmark for deleting threads now? Will this thread get deleted? Will my account disappear for daring to ask what happened?

There are human beings on both sides of the wire. Purging that whole thread in complete silence, with no warning, comment or explanation, was a bad decision. And I know I wasn't seeing things in regards to meek's user account not being found, because someone else confirmed seeing the same thing.

[kbs666]

Originally Posted by ShadowChemosh

The thread may not have been as toxic and hostile as many gaming sites have had. No one directly threatened to kill Rob or his family but it still served no useful purpose.

Everyone knows the CM is late including LW and having yet another thread filled with a echo chamber of complaints does nothing. Plenty of sites exist for this purpose already like Facebook or Twitter.

Its pretty clear that the only valid date is "when its done". Pretty much everyone has a simple choice. They walk away from RW and its products or you accept what the software does "today" is helpful for you. The software as is with import/export is just about perfect for myself. I still run into some bugs but so far I can fix them all myself.

The deletion of the thread should also clearly show the level of frustration on the LW side. At my own job customer service reps that deal with the "end" customer is in a totally different building. I personally never have to deal with the "hate" that is spewed at customer service. Good or bad my company keeps this separate for a reason as it prevents the drag down of all employees. In addition my work place has a huge HR staff dedicated to making the work environment safe, happy, professional and a "positive" place. This is because few people actually enjoy a day filled with negative emotions. The impact to performance is staggering when people are not happy. Hmmm anyone remember Rob being sick for many months now?

LW has no such protection. Every employee has to engage the community directly on TOP of doing their normal jobs. I am pretty sure few of us would stay at our own jobs if we had to deal with the general public all the time. I would totally want to drill a hole in my head if I had to deal with it for my day job!

I am not even free of adding to the problem myself. I have had to face the truth that a few things I posted where not really helpful but just empty complaints. Its something I plan to correct and maybe its not a bad idea for everyone to take a moment to reflect on what they write BEFORE they hit the "submit" key. Its really easy on forums/internet to forget that another human with feelings is reading what you wrote. Not an empty emotionless company.

That is really mind boggling.

For years when I was lead coder on a smallish software project the final level of CS for the program were the various coders under me and for problems they couldn't resolve me. We had people to catch the stuff that wasn't software bugs or misconfiguration issues but for stuff that needed an actual engineer the users got one who both knew the program and could confirm whether something was a bug that could only be solved by pushing out an update or was something that could be fixed by changing a setting or something else locally.

We consistently ranked at the top of our industry in customer satisfaction. There was a reason for that. It certainly didn't involve insulating the coders from the end users.

[Acenoid]

Maybe the topic's name of the other thread was just poorly chosen?

[BJ]

I have had enough. Nothing was ever done with Meek75's account. As far as I can tell, his account is fine. The thread was deleted because it served no positive purpose and I have no issue deleting this one, or the next one, as well. I can and will start handing out timeouts for the entire lot of you if need be. I'm already about one more of these threads away from calling it quits on the forums entirely beyond tech help purposes and having a searchable archive for past technical issues.

It's also of note that I am NOT the replacement community manager everyone seems inclined to assume I am. We do not currently have a community manager. We have hired Realm Works data entry people and a new programmer for our customer's benefit instead. I am a business and marketing specialist who works well over 60 hours a week many weeks on a variety of tasks, making decisions far more important than "Should I answer the hateful forum people today?". And let's be honest here, the answer is a sinkhole because as soon as I do there are 6 more hateful people lined up to attack or pick the answers apart with 16 more questions I may or may not be able to answer. By the time I've hunted those answers down to find out at least 9 of them can't be answered at all at this time, my day is gone and I have wasted the valuable time of the devs as well. I have no assistant or community manager to delegate policing these forums to and I don't have time to answer every single question individually and neither does anyone else at LWD if you actually ever want to see the items in question.

I do collect questions from here and often do my best to see they get answered in a newsletter or a lengthy post of some sort IF it's a question I can actually answer. But frankly, sometimes the answer just can't be made public because it has absolutely nothing to do with LWD failing to get things done and the small group of individuals it would appease isn't worth the wrath it could incur from other sources. Occasionally, we just don't know the answer. I fully expected to be releasing great news last week, I don't have any right now that I can release to the public. When I do, I will share it. Are we working as hard as we possibly can on the programs? Ofcourse we are. Will the items you are wanting be available as soon as we have them. Absolutely, we aren't holding them hostage over here, we want them to be out too so we can make everyone happy and hopefully hire more staff! Will constantly creating drama put those items in your hands any faster? No. That will, in fact, delay the process even longer.

If the lack of news or response infuriates you enough that you aren't interested in purchasing our products then that is your decision to make, by all means, speak with your wallet, no need to stick around and be hateful while you're doing it. We are doing everything in our power to get it all working so you can have the Content Market and other items you care about, and we fully expected to be delivering them by the end of last month. We now hope to have it this month, we believe we will have news we can share publicly at the end of the week. Will that happen? God willing, and no more last-minute disasters, yes. Will I be as confident of that by the end of the week after hearing from those working in the trenches to make it happen? I have no idea and neither does anyone else because we can't see into the future.

[BJ]

Originally Posted by ShadowChemosh

The thread may not have been as toxic and hostile as many gaming sites have had. No one directly threatened to kill Rob or his family but it still served no useful purpose.

Everyone knows the CM is late including LW and having yet another thread filled with a echo chamber of complaints does nothing. Plenty of sites exist for this purpose already like Facebook or Twitter.

Its pretty clear that the only valid date is "when its done". Pretty much everyone has a simple choice. They walk away from RW and its products or you accept what the software does "today" is helpful for you. The software as is with import/export is just about perfect for myself. I still run into some bugs but so far I can fix them all myself.

The deletion of the thread should also clearly show the level of frustration on the LW side. At my own job customer service reps that deal with the "end" customer is in a totally different building. I personally never have to deal with the "hate" that is spewed at customer service. Good or bad my company keeps this separate for a reason as it prevents the drag down of all employees. In addition my work place has a huge HR staff dedicated to making the work environment safe, happy, professional and a "positive" place. This is because few people actually enjoy a day filled with negative emotions. The impact to performance is staggering when people are not happy. Hmmm anyone remember Rob being sick for many months now?

LW has no such protection. Every employee has to engage the community directly on TOP of doing their normal jobs. I am pretty sure few of us would stay at our own jobs if we had to deal with the general public all the time. I would totally want to drill a hole in my head if I had to deal with it for my day job!

I am not even free of adding to the problem myself. I have had to face the truth that a few things I posted where not really helpful but just empty complaints. Its something I plan to correct and maybe its not a bad idea for everyone to take a moment to reflect on what they write BEFORE they hit the "submit" key. Its really easy on forums/internet to forget that another human with feelings is reading what you wrote. Not an empty emotionless company.

^ Yes. This. Thank you ShadowChemosh.

[Bidmaron]

BJ, simply making an appearance is good enough for me. Thank you. I wish you could share more, but just saying hello is enough to let us know it is still progressing....

[rob]

For those of you wondering, the closure of two threads – this one and the one referenced by it – was intentional. I certainly didn’t want to approve the action, but things have simply gotten out of hand here.

I’m going to take the time (which I absolutely don’t have) to write up something that outlines (a) how we got here, (b) why the decision was made, (c) a few of the misconceptions that some members here seem to have, and (d) how things are most likely going to be changing here on the forums in the very near future. But I can’t just drop everything to do that. So you’ll need to wait for a few days. In the meantime, this thread is now locked, and efforts to create similar threads will be short-lived until that occurs. I’ll get back to you with more info as soon as I’m able…