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Do developers interact with the players on the forums?
thorak257
Member Posts: 125 Arc User
As stated in the Dev IRC chat it appears community managers relay information about the most popular topics.
But do developers directly interact with the players on the forums? If not, this is disconcerting. Up until now, every MMO I have played had developers talk to the players on the forums.
If I ran my own game company I would make sure my developers would take a least half a day from their regular schedule at least once a week to respond to questions on the forums and interact with the players.
I believe it's important for the players to develop a relationship with the developers.
I don't want to have to wait every 3 months for a Dev IRC chat for my questions to MAYBE be answered.
The players have genuine questions that should be answered and so far the only answers I have seen have been from community managers and the answers have not been forthcoming.
This is no way to run a business.
But do developers directly interact with the players on the forums? If not, this is disconcerting. Up until now, every MMO I have played had developers talk to the players on the forums.
If I ran my own game company I would make sure my developers would take a least half a day from their regular schedule at least once a week to respond to questions on the forums and interact with the players.
I believe it's important for the players to develop a relationship with the developers.
Question from Vanaya
A good number of players have come up with ideas that the Community Manager said were great ones. Do you think that a forum devoted to suggestions would be a good idea to incorporate or not?
---
TheSquez: hey vanaya
Vanaya: Heyas
TheSquez: we actually already hear a TON of your feedback pretty regularly from our community managers
TheSquez: they do a great job of scouring all of the different forum categories and then pulling up the oft requested issues to me
Vanaya: That's fantastic.
TheSquez: i actually have a recurring meeting
TheSquez: every monday
TheSquez: where the community managers have my undivided attention to tell me what you guys are talking about
Vanaya: Awesome. Glad to hear it.
TheSquez: from there i often create tasks for my team
Dragostini: Side note: REALLY Glad to hear that TheSquez that's awesome you guys do that
Dragostini: Thanks Vanaya for your question!
TheSquez: its one of my favorite meetings of the week actualy
I don't want to have to wait every 3 months for a Dev IRC chat for my questions to MAYBE be answered.
The players have genuine questions that should be answered and so far the only answers I have seen have been from community managers and the answers have not been forthcoming.
This is no way to run a business.
Post edited by thorak257 on
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If you check the Dev Tracker you can find the developer posts and see they are quite interactive.
Badbotlimit and Crypticmapolis frequent the Foundry Forums quite a bit.
Panderus gives us a lot of great information on upcoming changes every now and again and quite actively discusses issues with players.
As dardove said though, they do this because they want to. Sometimes it's on their own time and sometimes it's on company time but all of the developers who post on the forums do so on their own accord so give them a big thank you.
And while the devs might not actually post that doesn't mean they don't read. They actively read the forums and only take the CM's information as a recommended reading and by no means 'this is all you have to read.'
In MMO's developers tend to not reply very often because every reply, for some reason, becomes a promise. An individual developer just saying they like an idea suddenly makes it that the suggestion is going to be implemented and that's just not the case. In other MMO's some players literally clung on to developer comments from ten years previous and complained that things never got added. The sad truth is the MMO Players don't understand that plans sometimes have to change and things aren't always possible or feasible. This unfortunately leads developers to be far, far more quiet than even they prefer.
However, I think answering some of the more commonly asked questions would go a long ways, even if the answer is 'we are looking into it but we have no ETA when it will be resolved.'
What if, on a weekly, bi-weekly, or even monthly basis, the community managers collected the top 10 most commonly asked questions and asked the developers those questions?
Maybe even create a forum topic where people can ask questions proper. Then the developers would answer any 10 questions. Every week the forum topic would be wiped clean. Rinse and repeat. Any questions that were not answered the week prior can be asked again. Another game I play does this and it works very well.
Currently the forums are mainly just a place for the players to talk amongst themselves. For now, I have given up on the forums for getting any kind of answers.
I realize that every reply can sound like promise, but personally, I would rather be let down than have no answers at all.
It's worth a try. STO, after all, does have the "Ask Cryptic" monthly thread/blog.
Great Weapon Fighter: Because when is today not a good day to die?
PC and PS4 player. Proud Guildmaster for PS4 Team Fencebane. Rank 5 Officer for PC Team Fencebane. Visit us at http://fencebane.shivtr.com
the problem with your "honesty is the best policy" theory is most of the time, there isn't an answer that is ready for the public and like most companies, a news release is usually created and presented to the public once those answers are ready. expecting anything else is simply unrealistic... internal information that has not been released to the public is proprietary and employees usually sign some kind of document that is intended to prevent information leaks.
Exactly.
No MMO Company releases information which isn't actually ready for release because explosions can and often do happen all the way through until it's actually in public hands. I have heard of and seen projects which had been worked on for years simply get scrapped because limitations of the game/software made the project impossible.
Whenever an MMO gives you information know that they consider it ready for release. There's no such thing as an ETA before that point.
Some other MMO's have smaller weekly updates and will do articles stating which updates are being released every month. Those releases are in truth a month behind. Anything put into a "Coming this month" article is ready for release or in the utmost final stages of polishing and is simply withheld to build hype or space out updates.
Cryptic doesn't hold many things back. When a fix is ready it is put out ASAP.
When the details regarding Module 2 are ready to be discussed you all will be notified. No amount of asking will speed it up. The smaller things which aren't going to be released with Module 2 are put out as soon as they are ready so there's no ETA because they aren't intentionally delaying the release.
Ask any software designer. Any computer programmer. **** happens.
They learned long ago to keep their mouth shut and those that appear to give ETA's are simply conning the inexperienced by giving them the 'coming soons' and 'this is our plans' that they want by delaying the release long after it is completed because plans in software development have about as much merit as monopoly money.
Certainly it could be nice if they clued the community into what type of topics they are discussing internally. That might be doable and if you check out the IRC interview that's all the information Andy gave (Thanks all, we are looking into this)
Yeah, that's right, you may give Som flack for that stand-by line but that's all he can give you until it's ready to be handed to you all.
The specific solutions and ETA's are just beyond unlikely to ever be public information because those are subject to change within 3 seconds of expected completion and consumers don't quite understand that is simply the nature of software design.
This is the harsh truth of the matter. I know it sounds condescending but it's not intended to be. This is the facts of the industry laid bare. If you know the developers plans beyond the vaguest hint then it's because it's already ready for release.
But as I previously stated they won't often respond.
Ultra Brief Synopsis:
(The Lead Producer, AKA the guy in charge of what projects are worked on and when) in order to discuss what the community concerns are.
Trust me, all of you guys are being heard load and clear. It may take time for your concern to be addressed but at no point is Cryptic or PWE not hearing your feedback.
where do you think you are? a charity?
and you're wrong. cryptic news releases are pretty regular. you and others like you have unrealistic expectations, calling them out for not answering YOUR specific questions when you want them answered.
i give you a quote from the IRC chat with lead designer Andy Velasquez:
this is a perfect example of how the internal process works. someone sends in a bug report and it goes into a list of items for consideration. there is no ETR here... they will get to it when they get to it. there's no need to criticize the dev team for this or assume that they're all sitting around twiddling their thumbs. cryptic is a business just like any other. making up scenarios based on conjecture and unrealistic expectations is unwarranted.
This is almost a perfect example of how the internal process works.
With the exception that 99.9% of the time we get NO feedback that "it's in the system."
"jira or devtrack?" - Exactly. WHAT system. It's totally invisible to the CLIENT base.
Bugtracking systems easily handle ETRs and LACK of ETRs as well as provide VISIBILITY that an issue actually is "in the system."
Cryptic may know it's in the system, or even been SEEN by a Cryptic employee, but on this side we are almost entirely blind and deaf.
I would just like to see a simple 1-line summary report of "acknowledged" bugs. I don't care if they are low priority and scheduled for "when we're bored, sitting around, and looking for things to do." Just KNOWING a bug report (do we really have to submit a support ticket AND post them in a couple of forums?) was received.
Successful two-way communication requires acknowledgement.
Encounter Matrix | Advanced Foundry Topics
It is completely unrealistic, given the volume of bug reports, to personally acknowledge every single request.
Great Weapon Fighter: Because when is today not a good day to die?
PC and PS4 player. Proud Guildmaster for PS4 Team Fencebane. Rank 5 Officer for PC Team Fencebane. Visit us at http://fencebane.shivtr.com
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And don't tell me that if they talked it would be less. You can't make everyone happy. Hell, you really and truly can't make half of everyone happy at any one time. If it's not you being angry, it'll be someone else being angry.
Next time they comment on a great idea, someone pops up to yell at them to fix bugs first.
Next time they fix a bug, someone pops up to yell that there isn't enough content.
They add new content, someone complains about a class being OP.
They fix a glitch in a class that made it op, the forums are filled with players arguing how that wasn't OP or a glitch, it was a necessary class feature and the class is now ruined.
They make the class viable, and someone complains about an exploit.
You fix the exploit and ban the exploiters, and someone complains that the game is dead ...
It's a vicious circle in every game with developer interaction I've ever seen. The lie of 'Customer Entitlement' added with 'Internet Anonymity' plus people just being selfish, and you get a really bad outlet for the worst of human character, worse than an open-world PvP game.
This, of course, could be solved if they made everyone link a credit card and post with their real name in a developer discussion only forum. Just my opinion. That includes the developers.
"D*mn wizards," said Morik the Rogue.
Learn what a GWF and GF really are: The History of Fighters
Of course it is. Who said anything about personally acknowledging anything.
I'm talking about simply generating at-the-push-of-a-few-buttons a current bug report using whatever internal system they are using.
It would be even better if we were able to search it like any of the gajillion online bug tracking systems. I don't know about anyone else, but I have NEVER found a bug by "searching" the support tickets/knowledge-base/refuse-bin whatever they call it. I've entered probably dozens and dozens of support-ticket bug reports and not a single one was seen in support search. As a matter of fact, I've never seen ANY results returned from support search.
Encounter Matrix | Advanced Foundry Topics
You sir, are spot on. I am the only one of my tight circle of NWO players that even bothers with the forums anymore. It is because of the tremendous effort to sift through the whining and vitriol that is required to get to the meaningful information. (which is often amazingly intelligent and insightful) I'm OK with that job. As the guild leader, I try to stay up on all the meaningful data and pass that on to my team.
I just wanted you to know that there are a lot of folks out there (that never post) that feel the same way as you.
Half of the times these "problems" can't even be taken seriously. I see these things all the time: "make that thing easier because I can't do it!" or "make that thing faster because I don't have enough patience and I want it now!" or "nerf those guys because I can't keep up with them", not even taking the time to inform themselves before starting a thread. It annoys me so much and I'm getting so tired to see these entitled, whiny brats acting like the whole word owes them something, when the games has real problems.
What I would like to see (and I think this is pretty fair) is a periodical (monthly maybe) list of things they are working on. Nothing about new content, just the bugs they are working to fix. Just to let us know that they are aware of these problems.
The moderator responses only confirmed what I already suspected.
It's obvious this company has chosen to limit developer interaction with the player to a minimum. Maybe because you've been burned in the past?
These forums are useless since the only information this company is willing to share is available straight from the launcher.
Communication is a two way street. Good luck getting feedback.
*Unfavorite forums*
There's another thing to consider when dealing as a developer. Post anything hypothetical or 'subject to change', and watch how two weeks from now it's used in forum wars as a misguided direct quote.
"We're looking to add more classes in the future. A ranged class would be a good addition." (not a direct quote, mind you, just an example)
Can quickly turn into players saying developers promised them a ranged class in the next expansion. They tell their friends this misguided information. The next expansion hits, no new classes, everyone loses hope and quits the game.
Can't help it that players don't like facts, or can't understand that all judgement calls don't rest in the developers hands.
"D*mn wizards," said Morik the Rogue.
Learn what a GWF and GF really are: The History of Fighters
Not this company.
I am telling you the facts of the industry as a player, not a moderator.
Anything a developer says becomes promissory so every game developer learned long ago to keep their mouth shut until what they say can actually be a promise. If you don't like that I am sorry but you're not going to find it to be different anywhere else.
Every game forum is filled with people who want more information. None of them ever get it.
And when they do the information tends to bite the developers in the rear end.
Cryptic has been burned in the past but that is nothing new. Not just for Cryptic but for game developers. Every developer gets burned and once they do they learn pretty quickly why every game development company only releases completed information.
i'm sorry you feel that way. but fortunately, for every discouraged forum poster, there is another waiting in the wings to ring in with their opinion.
that said, the focus of any forum should never be b-tchfest 2000. feedback can be given in a cordial fashion rather than an angry or disrespectful one. and your expectations should be on the same level as the rest of the industry.