Ian Frazier speaks to IBTimes UK (April 15, 2017)

If anything, it's a sign of the opposite. Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, are really not effective platforms to gather feedback.

But now they opened up to the "EA Answers HQ" for bug-reporting and "feedback". I sometimes suspect closing BSN was as much an EA move as it was BioWare's but that said we all know that BioWare employees started disliking their boards after David Gaider spoke out about how much toxicity there was. "BSN" is also notorious on other sites like Reddit and NeoGAF for being a shithole and people always talk about the user activity here as if we're a bunch of lunatics. Sometimes we are but I don't always get if the SP-boards, the MP-boards or the fandom-boards are the ones they're specifically thinking of. There's probably the most amount of toxicity going on in the story/writing-critiques thread and there was also the blunder on the old BSN where people photoshopped Dorian and Josephine to be white over "SJW-backlash" which offended everyone at NeoGAF and elsewhere.

When it comes to the "we wanted feedback from better sources so we closed our forums" argument that's where I suspect EA meddling because I remember a few months ago Mike Laidlaw and Patrick wrote adamantly on Twitter that fans had to stop posting story-pitches and ideas for DA4 as they "could not look at it". I think there's an increased amount of politics there, probably as part of some type of damage control. Granted BioWare relied too heavily on fan feedback in the past. I would even say half of the initial concept for Andromeda was based loosely off of the "ark-theory" that was rampant on the old BSN. Perhaps EA saw that connection and thought it undermined their professionals as... well, professionals to blatantly take a fan-made idea off of their own boards.

I'm not so sure I buy that argument about shutting down a forum in order to get varied feedback. There's nothing about having a forum that prevents devs from actually going to other websites and reading what people are saying about it during launch week.

More like they knew the game was going to be divisive, and they shut down their forums so fans didn't have a as centralized hub to congregate if the reaction to the game all blew up in their face like ME3.

I imagine this is the case too. They thought "Another Mass Effect, another brand-damaging controversy" and furthermore they may have been wary over forum-reactions to the new IP not being an RPG title.

I get that it must have been tough to read.

I think the reviewers gave MEA more of a kicking that it deserved.
Sure there were some issues (some now addressed, others to come I hope), but it wasn't No Man's Sky...

To me, it remains an enjoyable Mass Effect game.

Other EA studios still operate their own forums so its not an EA thing.

Look, everyone knows internet forums can be hard places to deal with.  You won't find a fan site or forum on the internet that doesn't have some level of toxicity.  I wasn't there at the end of the official BSN, hadn't visited it since ME2 days so I can't say how good or bad it was.   That said this isn't even just a internet or video game thing. 

People in all walks of life have to deal with irate and often irrational customers.  Ask anyone that has ever answered phones in a Customer Service department, or even someone working a cash register at a retail store.  I'm sure you'll hear all kinds of stories of customers yelling at them right in their faces ( I know, I worked a retail job when I was in college).  Everyone from those retail cashiers to Mega Corporation CEO's end up dealing with those kind of people in some form or another.  I never understood why video game dev's feel like they a right to be exempt from that.   Dealing with stupid people is just part of life.  At least on the internet you can just ignore them.

Getting off track there though.  My point is if you are interested in feedback you NEED a forum where players can discuss topics and issues.  I could go through the BSN here and find tons of great feedback even if some Reddit thinks its toxic (I never really browse Reddit much always had the impression it was a lot higher concentration of the toxicity we are speaking of).

You can't get that kind of indepth feedback from a twitter feed or facebook group.  All you are going to do there is get a general 'like this' or 'don't like that' feel.  If that is all BW is interested in, well so be it.  If that is the case though making statements about "gathering better feedback" should draw a few snickers and outright laughter.

This is a post-Starchild BioWare. Makes perfect sense to me 

. But that's what I'm saying. It was no longer a "lucrative" feedback avenue. It was a EA/Bioware sponsored hate site. Anyone with an actual critique or valid feedback besides "Duuurrrr mah endings!" was buried by all the vitriol and hate. There was no purpose in keeping the forum around. They weren't getting any better feedback there than on Reddit or Facebook or Neogaf or Twitter. The difference was that they were paying to give voice to the overblown negative views of those who, besides a total rewrite of the endings and a signed apology letter from the whole dev team, would never be satisfied with anything Bioware did after that.

Well, I think they obviously failed on that one, on number of levels. 'Ryder represents the least agency BioWare has ever given players in shaping a protagonist’s personality' as the game critics review said and the CC is very limited as well. The profile system I guess is pretty good, so that's something right?

Mass Effect Andromeda was once a 'giant procedural game' reveals BioWare

www.ibtimes.co.uk/mass-effect-andromeda-was-once-giant-procedural-game-reveals-bioware-1616714

Didn't know!

"For example, we used to rely heavily on our forums, but now we've got several channels of information coming in. You just get a much larger pool, because when you're limiting it to one channel or two, it self-selects to an extent. You're only going to get feedback from people who'll take the time to become a member of that forum, or what have you. It's been nice having a broad assortment of people give us feedback – good and bad – through channels like Twitter and Facebook."

Wow.

Hope that's working out for ya. Instead of listening to the fans that have been around for years and who love your games, and love talking about them to other fans, and debating ideas, and making videos, and writing fan-fiction, and creating beautiful art and mods, and arguing about what we love and hate about the games (to the point of creating our own FAN-run forums when you locked the official one down), you get Twitter and Facebook users.

Congratulations. Enjoy the bottom of the barrel. I guess all that's left is you-tube.


Edited - sorry for repeating previous posts...I just read the article, got pissed, and posted.

Still pissed....and wishing there was a middle finger emoticon...

Edited again because, thanks to the helpful folks on this community (i.e., decafhigh), I can now express my disdain properly.    

Well, Geralt does die in the books and the games are set after those novels. So CDPR did have to create an original story and keep (re-)inventing stuff. It's not like making a movie based on a book.

Not undermining your argument, because they of course had to do this while making TW1, but just for the record.