Feedback on Feedback Thread Comments

nitocris83 · October 2018

Adventurers,

Instead of replying to individual threads, we wanted to issue a reminder to please keep your feedback civil and constructive. Feedback that devolves into attacks towards other players or Developers will not be tolerated. Feedback that is mostly profanity will be immediately discounted.

There is a lot of feedback coming in, especially regarding class changes, and we are reading the comments. Due to time constraints, we aren't able to reply to every comment or question. The game team is actively working on polishing M15 to get it ready for the November 6th release date. This does not mean that all issues (bugs and feedback/opinions) brought up during the preview time-frame will be addressed prior to release date, but we continue making notes based on the comments we are reading for post-launch considerations and needs.

percemer · October 2018

noworries#8859 said:
There has certainly be plenty of posts about the lack of feedback across the class threads. I wanted to post a response to that.

Changes over Time:

In the past we would hold off on big changes, like class balance, until we had time to fully invest in doing all the changes we wanted to a class in one go. Players pointed out how they didn't like that approach as it meant long periods of time went by without changes to a specific feature/part of the game.

Due to this, we discussed doing partial changes more frequently so that progress can be seen and we can step our way towards the end goals over multiple modules. The response to that was generally positive and it seemed players would prefer that method going forward.

M15 is one of the first big tests of that. We did a chunk of class balancing and are already doing more of it for M16 (and undoubtedly M17 although that is a bit too far away to have specific plans yet).

On one hand, there has been some positive feedback from this and understanding that it is a multi-part process. On the other hand, there is a lot of feedback of many other changes being required right now and waiting wouldn't be acceptable for those players.

And that is the ever ongoing balancing act. Do we hold off longer to get bigger changes all at once, or do we do smaller incremental changes to dial everything in and make continual process? No matter how we split that up, someone is going to be unhappy, especially if the issue they find most important isn't addressed yet, or isn't addressed the way they want it to. And that brings me to feedback.

Feedback:

There is no question that gamers on forums, of all types of games, would always prefer more feedback/more back and forth with the developers. I'm a gamer as much as I am a dev and I also enjoy getting to see feedback from developers on games I play. And it is also easy to say that we don't get to post feedback as much as we'd like ourselves, let alone how much players would like us to.

For this preview in particular, it just happened that the developer who did the majority of the class balance work moved onto other adventures. While this is normal in this industry, and most others, the timing did make it a bit trickier. (Thanks for all the work you did for Neverwinter, Balanced. I wish you all the luck in your certain to be successful career). He had actually left just before preview but we wanted him to be able to write up his thoughts and information on his changes which is why all the initial posts were written by him.

There was almost two weeks where all I did was read/fix bugs/adjust powers from the class threads, and that didn't leave much time for posting responses (I even had help in parsing through all those threads and compiling the bugs/ complaints/ feedback). And during this time I had other work already scheduled which I had to get caught back up on once those fixes were addressed.

Undoubtedly that all sounds like a lot of excuses, and to a certain extent it is. But it is also laying out the reality of the situation. The important part is that we read a lot more than we post.

Just remember to keep the feedback civil. There are times that developers will give answers that you don't like. Feedback isn't simply developers agreeing to a player idea or suggestion, it is both agreeing and disagreeing depending on the topic, just as players will agree or disagree with any given change/addition we make. If we post a response and players who don't like it then flood other threads with attacking posts to try to get further responses from us, we can't respond to that. Responding to those types of posts would encourage more of that behavior.

To be clear, that is not the norm and a lot of players give civil and valuable feedback even when being critical of our decisions, and we do appreciate that.

I know people would prefer an answer as simple as "We will post more responses going forward", but it is never that simple or easy and I don't want to mislead anyone.

TL:DR

We know you would like more feedback from us on the forums, especially during preview times. We'd also like to provide more feedback and do so more often. It is a tough balance between getting the work done and responding on the forums and there is room for improvement on our end. But we do read the forums and your feedback even if we don't respond. Keep it civil.