Howdy all. “Evil” Chris Priestly here.
You may have noticed that there is a new link in the BioWare Social Network tech support forums. This leads to a new site that gives a great option for tech support issues. For a long time now, we’ve seen that one of the commonly used ways for people to find tech solutions has been on the forums. We’ve got a lot of clever and helpful folks playing our games, which we’re incredibly thankful for. But there are obvious drawbacks to using traditional forums for this kind of support, not the least of which is the time it takes to find that one post that may actually offer a good solution for your situation.
EA has been working to identify something that can be used for this very purpose that would address all of the needs and concerns that come along with standard forums. Quickly and easily finding solutions to issues. Recognition for individual contributions. Making sure that each game’s community is maintained. The solution EA found is working really well and as some of you may have seen already, there are sections for both Mass Effect and Dragon Age that currently live there. We’re really excited about the potential this has and are looking at how best to get our tech traffic to Answer HQ.
So, before we make any change of this magnitude, the obvious question is how do we use Answer HQ without losing the sense of our community from our own tech forums. This is a really important point to us, because the community for our games mean as much as the game itself. You’re part of our success here and we want you to feel like you’re home, even when you’re just asking a tech support question. We also know your time is valuable and we want you to get the help you need as quickly and efficiently as possible, so you can get back to playing the games you love.
We feel that the mechanics behind Answer HQ are extremely powerful, allowing people to flag a post as helpful. For example, if you’re looking for solutions on a graphics issue for example, simply do a quick search and see a thread that fits your issue which has a green check by it, you know you can look there and find an answer. If none of them have an answer, you can look at the replies on outstanding questions. If you find an answer, flag it as helpful and it will help people find a quick solution there, just like you were looking for. Now, one of the best parts is it tracks who gave the “good” answer, giving credit to the person who solved the issue. We want those folks who make it a point to help others, to understand that we all value what they contribute to our community. They’ll get “experience” on the forums which will allow us to call out the top folks. Cool stuff.
Now, where do we go from here? We don’t want to lose the accumulated knowledge our existing tech forums have, so how do we keep those while making the most of Answer HQ? Well, rest assured, we have a plan! The link I mentioned on the forums list is currently there to let those who don’t know see it. When we’re confident with moving forward, based on various factors that we won’t bore you with, we’ll lock the existing tech forums (but leave them available to be read), remove the links from the general list and include those links as stickies on the Answer HQ forum for their respective games. This way, we’ll always have access to the knowledge housed in the current tech forums while transitioning new questions to Answer HQ .
We’ve very excited about this new feature and believe you’ll appreciate the addition too!