There’s a thread over on the TOR forums at present (click here if you’re interested), called Request for More Developer Interaction and I think it’s making a truly excellent point.

Since the TOR forums began, interaction with developers has been minimal. I can count on one hand (and, if the truth be told, one finger on one hand), the number of times a developer has said something in response to one of my forum postings. And, besides my own material, I read a lot of other threads, and I don’t believe I’ve seen a developer EVER respond to someone else. And no, before you respond, I’m not saying it’s NEVER happened, but I AM saying that it’s been pretty rare and I seem to have been one of the few people to ever get a response.

Now… why is this?

In past MMO communities, it has been very common… extremely common… for developers to be on their official forums, making comments and engaging with their community. In Star Wars Galaxies (SWG), lead developer Raph Koster seemed to be on the forums non-stop. You ended up talking to Raph as often as you talked to your own guildmates, to the point where the first 100 of us got into beta testing and Raph was standing there on Tatooine and we just walked right up to him and had a conversation with him like he was an old mate, such was our familiarity.

Could I see that ever happening with a TOR developer? Nope.

And do you want to know some huge irony here? Bioware also makes a game called Dragon Age where the lead writer is a bloke by the name of David Gaider. My wife is quite the Dragon Age fanatic and she is constantly telling me funny things that Gaider is saying on the Bioware Social Network. It seems that a day hardly goes by where I don’t hear her giggling at his comments or shouting, “Gaider just quoted me again!” and, when you look at the thrill it is for her to interact with a developer, you see what the TOR guys could be doing, but are failing really badly at.

This is a great shame, to my mind, given that I think online communities genuinely respect developers more — even if they’re saying totally crazy stuff that the community doesn’t want to agree with — if they are turning up on the forums and at least being part of “the conversation” that’s happening. It’s when developers give the impression of, “We’ll speak to you when we’re ready…” and, “Yes, there are certainly things we could tell you about the game right now but {yawn} why should we?” that I think communities unnecessarily lose a bit of respect for developers.

You only have to look at how the community takes some of the more, ahem, “famous” quotes from certain TOR developers and puts its own sarcastic spin on them to see a real lack of respect that I think, quite honestly, would be lessened with more real contact between the devs and the community. Oh sure, there will still be haters — there are sadly ALWAYS haters in every online community — but I really don’t think the sarcasm and the hating and the general ill-will that the developers cop at present would be as bad if they interacted with their community.

Because there’s the whole point in one short, simple sentence– it’s THEIR community.