User talk:JAlbor

Re: Namco Collaboration?
Heya! I am also an active member of the official Namco Tales Series Forum, so I am very much in touch with what the English Tales community is asking for. Since our wiki represents the TSF as its functional database arm for info on the series, you may also wish to gather input from the members there by starting a thread in the "Tales Series Discussion" subforum. Unfortunately, as the developers of the series are Japan-based and only recently merged into Namco's newly established Bandai Namco Studios after Namco Tales Studio was dissolved last year, any communication with our specific developers will be difficult at best, as the original core members of NTS are around 30 out of a group of now 1000 developers with focus spread on all of Namdai's game franchises. We have yet to see what affect this will have on the series, as the most recent games are actually remakes (or rather demakes) outsourced to JP developers such as 7th Chord. In fact, anything relating to the development and production of the series probably cannot have much interaction with the devs and higher ups in Japan due to the language barrier. But we are mostly satisfied with what Namdai JP is doing for the series, executive meddling and Tales Cycle aside.

With that said, those involved with America's branch of NBGI (formerly Namco Hometek), specifically PR personnel and marketing teams, absolutely must make an effort to reach out to us Tales fans. We may be a niche community, but we are very much upset by the kind of treatment we receive... or lack thereof. Our so-called "community manager" Rich Bantegui (FilthieRich) spends so much time hawking the latest Tekken games, and whenever Tales is brought up, he gives vague and ambiguous responses which are sometimes grossly misinformed. We even wonder if he knows what Tales is!

And our TSF community is in absolutely dire need for a forum software upgrade to the latest PHPBB version. It has not been updated since its creation in 2004, and our forum banner cannot be changed by our lead admin Lunar Eclipse, who is also a community member and has no connection to Namdai. All of his contacts to Namdai in the past have disappeared, and he has no ability to change the forum settings for even minor things like the forum banner, in spite of there having been at least two contests held by us to commemorate the recent Tales releases in English. Long gone are the times when Peter Garza (FuzzyCritter), the former localization producer of Hometek, would communicate daily with us during the lead-up to the release of Radiant Mythology... but he is no longer with Hometek. Besides that, the forums are rather unstable and prone to bot attacks, which combines with the high amount of traffic the site receives to create a potential for frequent server crashes.

And as if the current incarnation of Hometek is rubbing salt into our wounds, there was one point when Mr. Bantegui was even able to enter the forums and somehow establish himself as an admin and post his name as a moderator of -every- subforum, which is insulting since it goes over the power that Lunar has while -still- not making the basic upgrades the forum needs. And of course Mr. Bantegui promptly forgot about the forums shortly thereafter, leaving us with no explanation as to his action's purpose or how it was even allowed to happen, since it means there is some tech guy at Hometek who has top-level permissions, the kind of person that Lunar needs to be able to communicate with but cannot because Mr. Bantegui is so indifferent to our situation and does a bad job of hiding it. Granted, this situation eventually reversed itself when the forums underwent "maintenance" (it basically crashed for a few days), and when it came back, the entire forums rolled back by 20 months. That's over a year and a half worth of posts and threads instantly lost, including our megathread on Tales of Xillia which was over 700 pages long. The sheer incompetence of those Hometek people who are in charge of our forums is blatantly obvious when you take into consideration that this 20-month-old forum state is the -only- backup that has been made in that much time! And of course Mr. Bantegui said he would look into the matter when people tried to ask nicely about it, but he also said he would rather enjoy his Thanksgiving vacation before then... and of course nothing was done after that.

This is the present state of our forums, the primary base of the English community. It should be noted that not all of us have Facebook or Twitter, nor do we want such things, so the communities there are not representative of the greater body of English Tales fans. The people on those social networking sites, for the most part, are mindless drones who go on and on about wanting an English release for certain games that have no chance of being localized, and they do not match the kind of things the TSF members want and expect from the Tales series outside of Japan. We just want a greater focus on advertising the series, with emphasis on its unique aspects like the Linear Motion Battle System and not "it's like you're playing an anime game!" and silly things like that. We want greater community involvement, and we want a competent Tales-focused community manager who actually knows what the series is all about and can relate to us. We want the forums to be updated so that it can be less prone to bot spammers, and we want Hometek to care for the forums as if it's a part of their web assets, which it -is- but it goes ignored. Overall, we want to feel like Namco Hometek actually cares for us by supporting our forums and interacting with us in an inclusive way.

Regarding the wiki's role in this, well, I'm satisfied with our autonomy, but any collaboration that can be managed with Hometek would be much appreciated. I am open to ideas as to how this would be done. I honestly have no expectations from Hometek, but I do support a combination of efforts as long as it does not lead to a violent takeover that supercedes my authority, which was what Lunar experienced, even though he is just a steward of a community officially owned by NBGI America but lacks any kind of oversight from Hometek itself.

Byakuren Hijiri (talk) 00:14, March 19, 2013 (UTC)