Introducing the Planetary Vanguards

Ghost, the flow chart looks more like this:

Forums ------------v
Vanguards ----> Uber <----- Rest of community (reddit, facebook, twitter, coffee shop)
Steam -------------^

At the end of the day, this is one more channel of information. However, we are a fairly small company, and we have limited bandwidth. And more than anything, we don't want to miss a very important issue just because we happened to miss the one thread that discussed it.

Yes I agree with ghostflux that was my point in my post. Definitely no envy as I have neither the time, of the want to essentially have a third job.

I was simply stating its a very thin line they must walk, and I've seen several of these members support, or not support things very....... strongly ??..... just worried that things strongly supported will see more time of day regardless of the rest of the communities feel. Hopefully I'm wrong and this won't be the case best of luck to them...... probably would have been more effective as a secret society though instead of this useless hub bub.....

Im sorry but i have to agree, a couple members in this group are 80% negitive to almost ever idea that doesnt meet there own vision of how this game should be, and there replys are boarder line "trolling". I dont want a 3rd party representing my ideas, concerns, suggestions etc. And whats stopping these same people from cherry picking through things or adding alittle of there own agenda to it. Still dont like this idea, the community wasnt broke in the first place, why fix it?

In the flowchart you made are Vanguards being counted seperate from the rest of the forum. I don't get how this can be the case when the information Vanguards provide with obviously overlap with what's been posted on the forum. Basically topics that the Vanguard deem important, are counted with more weight than anything else on the forum as they are effectively counted as two information sources if the flow chart is correct.

It feels like politics, and that's not a good thing.

I can understand the fear of a group of VIP (very important players) "ruining" the game by promoting their one-sided views. The internet provides more than one example of such events (I once played a game were discussing balance issues was not allowed in the official forums and could result in a ban - unless you were are VIP).

I am assuming the Vanguards have good intentions. But if the Vanguards would become power hungry maniacs - then we still have people like garat, brad or neutrino which have admin-access to the forum, and already have proven to be capable of handling a community.

Hence I believe the Vanguards will either be a nice tool running smoothly, or if they cause trouble will simply be shut down by Uber. At the very least we should try the experiment for a few weeks before throwing around too much negativity.

This is all I wanted to see. Thanks for the insight Cwarner.

I never was against the vanguard Idea, just waiting for a detailed explanation like this one.

Didn't realize this thread would snowball 3-4 more pages of text. But getting everything clarified now is good for the vanguards in the end.


Also, I think it would be good idea If The vanguards do get tid bits of info from Uber regarding something in development. That they mark it with bold Uber colors to say it came directly from the dev's themselves ver batum.And Regular black text is just their opinion or clarification on what they said.

Just an idea on how to help when the tid bits start trickling down.

i am just wondering, what are the prerequisites needed for someone to be a Planetary Vanguard?

Great I'm glad to see something like this has been organised.

Hopefully it helps and provides another visible notification to new users that there are people who know something active in the forums and extended community. Give them a few weeks to see how it works then I suspect we'll see a few more added to the group. Currently as it stands though I pretty much recognise all of them by name from either IRC, Forums, the tournaments or streaming and think it's a pretty decent mix of people.

The thing is, some of the people in the vanguard aren't experienced forum members and some experienced forum members were not included in the vanguard.

The choices are very strange indeed.

Another concerning thing is forum members raising concerns and most of the responses have essentially been "trust us."

Vanguards collect and bring information/threads to the attention of Uber, as they are concerned about missing important threads and other community wishes. It's still up to Uber to read this information/thread and decide whether and how to act on it, so I don't see much room for abuse in this respect. And as has been said, the vanguards themselves do not have any permissions above a normal user, and must abide by not only the standard forum rules but their own Code of Conduct.

It's not a whole lot different to when moderates include themselves in a discussion. You can tell what's official and what's not, and if we see a good idea we bring it to Uber's attention, and they look into it. Consider the new Gameplay Videos subforum - that was a community idea in one thread that may have been easily missed, but was brought to the attention of the devs. That is one of the ideas behind the vanguards.

None of us are questioning the idea behind the Vanguards.

We're just questioning the execution.

And what's more concerning, is any concerns brought up by the community are being dismissed.

While I'm not convinced that posting to this thread actually makes a difference, I've finally decided to do it anyway, because there is something about this topic that bothers me. I'm not entirely sure myself what that is, but I'll try to channel it into words nonetheless.

• First of, being not a native speaker, I actually had to look up the word "Vanguard" in a dictionary, because I didn't ring a bell for me at all. And it paraphrases it as "group of people with innovative ideas". So.. everyone else is, uh.. a bit.. bland? Now, reading through this thread, this clearly isn't the intention behind the title, but it's more supposed to be an.. hm, information hub? Communication slave? Community representative? (Recognized) Contributor? I don't know, but to me vanguard feels too loaded in terms of "he's a good guy" (and everyone else isn't..? ).
• To all the vanguards saying that you don't inherit any more power by belonging to the group: Yes. Yes, it does. And it would make you much more believable to me if you would just acknowledge it finally. Sure, it might not feel like it to you, being in the group. Yes, you don't get mod rights, you don't get to ban or silence people. So I get why you might say you have no more power than "us". But look at the group from the outside. None of the forums I have been in so far had a concept comparable to the PVs. So a very natural assumption for a newcomer to make, when seeing the tag, is that it is some sort of moderation or otherwise elevated role. And this automatically changes the dynamic between that newcomer and you. And it has been said before, a lot of people don't even read the stickies. Let alone (so far) 7 pages of a thread about a group of people. And it's still not 100% clear to us or that group, how it's going to operate. Then in the other direction, uber will likely have an open ear towards what you have to say - otherwise why create that group if you can't reach them. And that's completely ignoring the fact, that this group apparently will have privileged information given to them. If that alone isn't reason enough to want to be part of the vanguards, I don't know what is. Sign me up!
• If uber will continue to read the forums actively, then why instead of a "no rights" group not nominate more mods who will more actively consolidate duplicate threads? That way everyone profits from the less cluttered forum. Maybe then even more sub-forums could be afforded, too.
• Nobody at uber imagined that a thread like neutrino's brain dump would be welcomed by the community? I doubt that. And it wasn't even focused on any specific topic (that would have taken any degree of elaborate filter work by any group whatsoever), but it was a roundhouse kick of "who does what". Personally I have always been content with the amount of information uber decided to share with us. But if this sort of "work update" were to become a regular (every fortnight) thing, possibly paired with a live stream (similar to the last one, with one topic highlighted in the beginning, then some gameplay / Q&A segment) every (other) month, I would probably even add it to my calender, so I remember to preemptively empty my bladder instead of wetting myself from joy. And it wouldn't matter to me at all what that topic was. Be it a new camera, orbital changes, new units, new hires to the team, nitty gritty in-engine tech details or a change of the office carpet. I challenge you to find a PA related topic I wouldn't enjoy watching.

Now then, since this whole vanguard thing is going to happen (for now) anyway, there are two things that I feel extremely strongly about:

1. Be transparent! You claim you're there to improve communication between the community and uber? Then prove it. Don't become a black box that all of us unprivileged people have no idea about what's going on inside, but instead show us which nuggets of information you forward to uber. And I don't mean some of it. I mean all of it! Keep us in the loop and be accountable for what you're forwarding and what not, and I am convinced there is no better way to earn the community's trust in that the vanguards are a good idea.
2. A very clear marking of the role in which is spoken. In my opinion this can only be achieved by using colors. An "I think" is nowhere near enough to make this distinction, especially in more complex answers. Forcing to use color, should also for the person who writes make it easier, because it then becomes a conscious decision to switch from one role to another, instead of involuntarily switching back and forth and forgetting an "I think" (or overlooking it on the reader's side). This also makes it much easier to skim threads for "official" responses, when you aren't interested in everyone's 2 cents.

Thank you.

That's absolutely not true. We're 7 pages in and we've posted several large walls of text trying to answer questions and concerns in the fullest and most transparent manner possible.

Yet many questions being asked have been mostly ignored or dismissed.

Example, thekiller brought up accountability concerns and specifically said "trust us we'll be good" isn't a viable answer, yet that's pretty much been the answer.

And we're now into day two of the Vanguards and discussion is already being stifled because the Vanguards are pushing for something different: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/catapults.54721/#post-837804

I should be clear. I've been pushing for more mods to help out on the forums for months – long before this Vanguard thing got started. I am all for community members helping out Uber on the forums and amongst the Community – I've even volunteered to do so and stepped up and did what I can to help out on the forums when I wasn't taken up on the offer (made the FAQ, patrolling the forums, patrolling the tracker, patrolling reddit, patrolling the IRC, and writing the largest and most accurate PA wiki out there). So I am all for some sort of system to help be a channel between Uber and the community. Again, I've been pushing for such a system for some time.

But this execution seems to be falling short and concerns aren't being addressed.

Sorry your english is failing you.

Vanguard refers to the most forward part of an advancing part of a military formation, particularly medieval.

I.e. The van. Scouts and outriders.

So in this case it's the group of people who go through the forums, ahead of Uber, and find the innovative ideas, the good ideas that are hidden in threads that haven't been noticed. Its Ubers advance troops. That's not to say that Uber won't notice it. Because Uber are still going through the forums.

The Van aren't there to innovate the ideas and present those to Uber. The Van are there to find the ideas, and present them to Uber.

That's Beer4Bloods issue. Members of the Van think that's a good idea, and he's using it to support his argument.

We have addressed them a lot in my eyes. We didn't say "trust us we'll be good" at all I think.
What are we supposed to do? How are we supposed to answer those questions? Do you have any ideas of how to improve this? I'd be glad to read them.

EDIT:

I dont know what beer4blood is going on about.

Thank you. I believe this is the most concise description of what this group is about that I have seen in this whole thread.

Maybe others have the same language problem I do.

No one has language problems at all..
Misinterpretation is easy, and writing something so it can't be misinterpreted is extremely difficult.

what one person may consider easy to understand may be completely incomprehensible to some.
It's not a thing of intellect or reading ability, but just general communication failure that is common and quite apparent in the would around us..

I think thread lists and suggestions that are being forwarded by the vanguard to uber should be registered and published for the community to check up on and scrutinize.