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+--- Forum: General Discussion (https://forums.vzfit.com/forumdisplay.php?fid=6)
+--- Thread: Important Forums Update (/showthread.php?tid=600)
Important Forums Update - Snowpelt - 04-05-2021
Hey Everyone,
I am making this post first off as an apology for our lack of activity on these forums, and secondly to explain why we are making a change and where we are going.
First, the apology.
Over the last few weeks we have been bad at checking these forums. The reasons are varied and many but at the end of the day it doesn't matter. We set the expectation that you could come here for help and to discuss the game and then did not live up to our end of the bargain. I personally checked in several times, but assumed someone else would post in reply and that was a bad choice on my part. I know how frustrating it can be to post and never hear anything or even know if it was seen. I wholeheartedly apologize for that and we will do better in the future.
As to the future of the forums.
When we started these forums it was a place for our Dev team and the community to interact and share information. When we had a very small community this was where the few vocal folks were providing feedback and it was incredibly helpful in the development process. As we have grown two things have happened. First, maintaining the forums, keeping them running and functional, has been a developmental drain. Many people are still unhappy with the functionality of them despite the fact that we have devoted many developmental hours to improving them. With a team our size it often means working on the forums means we are not working on the games which turns into a bit of resource battle.
Second, the forums have proven to be the minority choice for our users to interact with us. We have tried to drive interest in them with ride reviews, moving our beta process here and various other techniques, but the majority of our users have chosen to interact with us using Facebook. Between Facebook and our support system we are fielding thousands of messages a month from users and it’s been difficult to keep up with. We even added a full time support person last month in an effort to help.
For both the tech and support reasons we have decided to retire the forums and move to other platforms. The majority of our community can be found on the Facebook group HERE. This group is very active in providing support to users as well as feedback and our team is on their daily. For those of you who don’t use Facebook we also have a Discord that has sections for development, bugs and just social chatter. You can find that HERE.
The Forums will be retired for new posts on Friday April 9th.
RE: Forums Update - Stain2319 - 04-05-2021
I think that's a bummer. Facebook is a nice way for you to communicate with your users and for them to communicate with you, I guess. But it's not (in my opinion) a great way for us users to communicate with each other. I, for one, will not be participating there as I generally just don't post on Facebook.
As I mentioned in another thread I was hoping to use this forum to post updates on the various games I am working on with the Unity SDK. Now I'm not really sure how I will communicate that to other users. I guess I shouldn't be surprised since you guys consistently seem to always stop supporting the parts of this product I care about most (the original bike, then the sdk, now the forum...). I guess I'm lucky I didn't buy an Oculus Go and went with the Quest 1, but the way you dropped the Go, you guys sometimes make me worried that if I don't upgrade to Quest 2 you will soon stop supporting my Quest too...
On and off I guess I was probably one of the more active forum users, I find this very disappointing. I know several people had mentioned they hoped I would do more SDK videos. Now that the SDK is dead it probably doesn't even matter but I guess without this forum no one will know if I make them anyway since there's no way I am putting it on Facebook. I'm just not interested in tying my real world identity to this stuff.
RE: Forums Update - spyder17 - 04-05-2021
I agree with Stain2319 with regard to Facebook. I try to avoid it as much as possible and if not for the requirement to have a Facebook account to use a Quest, I probably wouldn't be on there at all or have an account any longer. Don't care much for their practices and policies. As for the lack of support for the GO, I understand that wasn't your decision but Oculus. You can't support something that the developer isn't supporting. I would much rather see you stop supporting Discord and keep the forums. Just some more feedback from a long, long time user. Might try putting a pole up on Facebook and see how many folks prefer forums or Facebook as means to get support.
RE: Forums Update - emalafeew - 04-05-2021
The idea is that we need to focus where we communicate with players, like we focused on Quest in order to keep the dev team sane.
Note even though we no longer develop for Go and our old VirZOOM Arcade, we've kept their servers running and still answer support questions so people can still play them.
Maybe in that vein we could also keep this forum open read-only. I could keep "our next update" thread going until there's a better place for that, and would also like to keep Ride Reviews open until we add comments to our Manage Rides page, where they will be much more findable.
RE: Forums Update - Stain2319 - 04-05-2021
I totally understand the decision but again I think what is lacking with Facebook isn't about you communicating with your users.... I most enjoyed the posts here from fellow users. Facebook doesn't really offer the same opportunity for we users to connect with each other.
I won't protest the decision or anything, I totally get it, but this is a sad day for me and dampens my enthusiasm for the product just a tiny bit. I know I'm in the minority here so it's ok.
And I fully realize the irony of suggesting that Facebook isn't good for people to connect with each other because that's their whole thing... It's just not really my thing.
RE: Forums Update - Snowpelt - 04-05-2021
(04-05-2021, 11:46 PM)Stain2319 Wrote: I totally understand the decision but again I think what is lacking with Facebook isn't about you communicating with your users.... I most enjoyed the posts here from fellow users. Facebook doesn't really offer the same opportunity for we users to connect with each other.
I won't protest the decision or anything, I totally get it, but this is a sad day for me and dampens my enthusiasm for the product just a tiny bit. I know I'm in the minority here so it's ok.
And I fully realize the irony of suggesting that Facebook isn't good for people to connect with each other because that's their whole thing... It's just not really my thing.
I totally understand people's aversion to facebook. However I would like to clarify that it is not just us broadcasting information. I would say that 75% of the content on our facebook group is users sharing stuff with each other and sharing rides and information though. Several people post every day what rides they do and the challenges they are working on, and we even have people forming teams to do virtual rides together for events. It has proven to be a great place for a sense of community to grow that seemed to not happen much in our forums.
Discord offers that same opportunity without the need for interacting with facebook, we have some people posting dev and SDK stuff on their regularly as well as general unity futzing around.
RE: Forums Update - Stain2319 - 04-05-2021
I'll take another look at your discord. Last time I was there, nobody else was
