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How do you want to communicate with the devs?
rinkster
Member Posts: 3,549 Arc User
There have been some recent news apparently regarding how Cryptic/PWE are going to communicate with us in the future.
Some of us are less impressed than others with whats been proposed.
Rather than pick apart what we're hearing, I'd like to propose a question in this thread.
In an ideal world, what would be your preferred way of communicating with the devs?
All the media at our fingers has advantages and disadvantages.
Twitter is fast and immediate, but it lacks the capacity to covey complex things as well and its feedback function is pretty much an echo chamber.
The fora are capable of conveying very complex ideas, but that very facility also allows a very large range of positions to be voiced. Not all of them coherent or friendly. Thus seperating the wheat from the chaff is necessary.
Podcasts can convey pretty complex ideas, but they are far from universally accessible and, unless declared as such by cryptic, have to be considered soft sources. Also feedback is delayed, by virtue of the form, and can not directly address any guests.
Using ARC as a platform for other ways of communicating with players has its own issues.
Point is, what combination or otherwise of communication modes works best, in your opinion?
Both for your own purposes and, if you're feeling generous, to give Cryptic the best possible feedback.
Some of us are less impressed than others with whats been proposed.
Rather than pick apart what we're hearing, I'd like to propose a question in this thread.
In an ideal world, what would be your preferred way of communicating with the devs?
All the media at our fingers has advantages and disadvantages.
Twitter is fast and immediate, but it lacks the capacity to covey complex things as well and its feedback function is pretty much an echo chamber.
The fora are capable of conveying very complex ideas, but that very facility also allows a very large range of positions to be voiced. Not all of them coherent or friendly. Thus seperating the wheat from the chaff is necessary.
Podcasts can convey pretty complex ideas, but they are far from universally accessible and, unless declared as such by cryptic, have to be considered soft sources. Also feedback is delayed, by virtue of the form, and can not directly address any guests.
Using ARC as a platform for other ways of communicating with players has its own issues.
Point is, what combination or otherwise of communication modes works best, in your opinion?
Both for your own purposes and, if you're feeling generous, to give Cryptic the best possible feedback.
Post edited by rinkster on
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I would suggest using forums, these are best IMO, however if they had ONE account for announcements, or ONE feed bringing in all twitter announcements, that could serve for stuff such as release dates.
The engineering reports suffered from DStahls tendency to be over enthusiastic about what he wanted in the game, and inability to emphasize what was coming and what was just really a figment of his imagination...
For me, I sometimes don't have the time to listen to an entire podcast. It sucks but there is a LOT of them out there so hearing each and every one can be time consuming when I got my own work to handle, family to deal with, and obviously help out around here.
Twitter is a good way to get very short, quick ideas out there. "Hey folks launch date of season is Tomorrow!" Kind of thing is to me okay to be posted. As long as we get an official thread about it before it happens I'm fine (especially with downtime about season releases).
Blogs are a pain sometimes to write, I know that for a solid fact and so does any journalist :P, but to me it's the best way to get information out there. It can be easily and quickly translated to all the supported languages that a company covers, it's in read format that way people that are hard of hearing or deaf can handle, and it can even be read for those that are blind or hard of seeing.
The forums should be used for feedback and discussion about things posted or in game.
So to some it all up, blogs should be for major things that need a long informative post about, discussion on the forums and light announcements can be done via podcasts, livestreams etc or on twitter.
Former Community Moderator, Former SSR DJ, Now Full time father to two kids, Husband, Retail Worker.
Tiktok: @Askray Facebook: Askray113
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We still have viable methods available here, they're just not being used as much from my point of view.
It'd get their attention, at least.
it all went into the crapper over the past half a year, i dont mean any disrespect to trevor on the issue, but sometime you have to be brutally tough on an opinion to get the other person to see the flaws in what is there so they can improve it, that sometimes this type of opinion gets blurred between slams and trolling for example. what im about state is honest so take it for what it is, the feedback from the devs and higher up has been appalling beyond wretched over the last few months as far as interacting with the forum community is concerned, i mean really, really bad. when was the last time morigan or trevor actually accessed this forum and posted in it, interacted with the community on any official and social level the past few months? i know they got a lot of work on their plate, but if brandon could find the time so could both trendy and smirk to just let the community know they are looking out for them and having those people around also gives us the impression they care for their game enough they come on and give a face to the people running the stuff in the back.
towards that end the best ways they can do it is by giving the community the best place to check links in one location, or live social networking feeds or whatever it takes to get that information in one place. as stated its all over the place and you cant get a straight answer on anything these days without someone like iconians picking it apart because x is this or that or whatever. thats where your fct comes into it in a way as well, by providing links to one central area on official response in the same manner.
i know what it was like being a mod and your in the position i wouldnt want to be in, carrying dead weight, either having to support the official position as a mouthpiece or defusing a situation before it gets out of hand and having to punish those for letting it boil over if it does.
as far as the podcasts are concerned, i would like to have transcripts of these chat shows (auditory learning has never translated with me ever in the past, it goes through one ear and out the other, especially when someone drones on and on) with a transcript i can read through it in addition to those who wish to hear it instead. more accessibility, better chance to catch what was missed by whom ever was chatting at the time.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
Write a blog, share it on FB, send out a tweet and have a thread in the forum about it for discussions after. The only real time drain would be writing the blog itself and getting it approved, but once that's done it's quite simple to share it out across all platforms.
Regarding the discussion, I'd like to see the community mods take a more active role in answering questions or concerns the players would have. Some of those answers could very well stem the tide for certain misunderstandings before they are blown out of proportion.
Judging from the hundreds of threads in these forums about long-standing issues, there appears to be no known technology available to achieve actual communication with the dev's, even if their corporate overlords actually allowed them to act on it...
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And guys, while I'm not going to hard line it, lets try to be serious in this thread (though the IPoAC was hillarious)
Former Community Moderator, Former SSR DJ, Now Full time father to two kids, Husband, Retail Worker.
Tiktok: @Askray Facebook: Askray113
I lol'd, I really did.
But you did remind me of something I'd forgotten.
The Captains Table was, I believe, at one point considered as a base for ingame Q and a with devs.
Ingame communication is also communication.
that would mean the voluntary mods would have to be read into the inner workings of whats going on in los gatos, that means going to the office in question to get briefed there on everything they can in order to get the answers right there and then, it would mean signing NDA's and other forms and such, they would be monitored like a hawk incase of nda breaches and being ultra careful on what to state.
frankly it would be more trouble then it is worth to both sides.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
Let's table that.
In my OP I talked of an ideal world.
Let's assume all the willingness in the world is there, what media works best?
in an imaginary world?
what would work best quite simply put is a tool where everything is in one place sort of like a dictionary to everything official, archived, everything new, all accessible to everyone, under different categories. let a seperate site ran by the devs and pwe watching over it, that means every podcast copied to this site, live social networking feeds, recent news entries.
it would be like reading a new paper on the front page, a whole host of links down the side from the forum, social networking, sto academy skil planner to anything else, all of it is there.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
What about a daily or weekly report published in the GNN section here?
Links to any twitter, FB or other posts made that day?
The destination is 'Star Trek Online'.
Whether you take the plane, helicopter, ferry, subway, train, car, bus, taxi, bicycle, or your own two legs... the destination is the same.
Somebody at PWE/Cryptic has the unenviable job of making sure all channels are clear and open for the public.
No method of communication should be preferred over the other. Audio-only podcats, reddit interviews, twitter releases, dev blogs, forum posts, you name it. All are viable. All are used. None are obsolete.
In my opinion, in an ideal (or perfect) world, the destination is the website/forums. All routes lead there. All information is stored there. All pageclicks end there.
My PvE/PvP hybrid skill tree
your asking for media speculation on the outside? why would this be added for? only official information.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
I meant things like the only announcement we've had so far for season 9.5.
Which was on twitter.
If something is announced outside the fora, then a subsection where a link is posted to that announcement within 24 hours.
Make it like the patch notes with no discussion allowed there, and let discussions be picked up or not in the relevant subforum.
I think one thing that would help would be to close the test servers off to anyone but serious people, casual or more involved, who are simply willing to discuss the new content seriously so the devs don't have to wade through a swamp of useless posts.
We could also use more regular polls so that the devs have a constant feed of player opinion, that could be done from in-game so we get as many people as possible responding to it.
Another thing would be to have some kind of live feed somewhere in the forums of dev comments so we don't have to keep hunting for them, and a single location to compile posts in other media such as twitter, facebook etc.
But I agree with a lot of people that getting issues responded to, discussed or having sensible discussions on these forums is a nightmare, anything that helps lessen that would be wonderful.
Also, in-game news feed for blogs and such wouldn't be a bad idea either, maybe have a press release area in a canteen on each of the homeworlds and the station or something? Maybe even the captain's quarters so they have some use :P
unfortunately if you leave it to serious players the devs could be susceptible to not getting all the facts in hand, for example how a less serious player reacts because that data wasnt explored. what you consider a waste of time has more impact then your claim doesnt. sure you will get a few malcontents and im one of them from time to time, but that doesnt mean that there isnt a serious side. you shouldnt presume to know so quickly.
it depends what questions you ask and if you searched around enough. at the risk of already mentioning a subject already on fct, but there a lot of people asking for a t5 of a certain ship class and if you didnt look before you posted you will end up getting trolled simply because the answer has been there the whole time, you just needed to find it first.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
Telepathically of course
indeed :P.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
Cool. Curious to see more about that in the future.
Apologies. I tend to lump mods and managers together. For the record I was referring to the community managers, in other words captainsmirk and laughingtrendy.
But saying that, it would be great to give mods the authority to get involved as well. And I believe it could be far more straightforward than you think.
There's bound to be all sort of communication flying around Cryptic HQ regarding upcoming and planned features. All would need to happen would be for the mods to sign a general NDA and have them added to that mailing list. Or perhaps for safety's sake they receive edited updates from the managers.
It would be down to the mods to read up on all the latest developments but there wouldn't be a requirement to. I'd see it more as an optional extra of the job should they want to get more involved in official communications.
Aside from that, what we need here is the CMs to up their game. BranFlakes had his hands on top of things for the most part at all times. I'm not sure wheather the reason for this is the current CMs being spread over more PWE games (I know Smirk was a CM on another PWE title at least when he became STO's CM) or something else.
However if this is the case then PWE needs to up their game as well and hire a CM for this game exclusively like BranFlakes was. They need to realize that this is not their average PWE game and that the majority of players here don't play the other PWE titles. A portion may be playing other Cryptic titles, but I'm pretty certain that the people that play STO and other PWE titles are a very very small minority. Why I'm saying this? Expectations! Their customers in STO, being a Star Trek game, have higher expectations than what PWE is currently providing.
And we also need the communication between the devs. and the CMs to have a better flow, at least from what I can see.
For ex. Geko shouldn't be going around to podcasts and dropping pieces of information that not even Trendy or Smirk have yet and I'm under the impression that much of the suff devs. reveal in podcasts and similar interviews has not been availible or communicated to the CMs beforehand. Having those podcast interviews is cool and all, but the info they share needs to be transfered to the CMs and via them to the community at aproximately the same time when a certain podcast, interview or whatever happened.
I have the feeling that D'Angelo is making the same mistakes from his first term as EP again. It might be just a coincidence with BranFlakes leaving, but the level of communication we've been getting in 2014 seems awfully similar to the one from early 2012.
All in all, I don't need the devs. to be all-present and chat with us here on daily basis. What I'd want is the communication flow to really flow from the CMs, via official game sources, to the community. I don't care if Geko or JamJamz announce a piece of info on Tweeter or Facebook as long as Smirk or Trendy inform me here via a blog or a forum announcement/post.
blacklisted (black blocks covering redacted) information as you suggest wouldnt really help the mods because they wouldnt have an idea what some people here may know they wouldnt have a clue about one day. if they get read into with the nda, it should be about everything that is at their clearance level if you like.
as for the managers, thats a different matter, they would of already been read into the inner workings anyways, and preparing all sorts of communcations and community relations about the game and content in question.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
I'd say there's no real use in communicating with the Devs since the majority of valid player feedback is often read and discarded; UNLESS it was already something the STO had decided to do themselves, and it just happens to coincide with player feedback that they're seeing.
Case in point: The Season 9.5 update is going Live tomorrow (5/17). The redone Doff UI was pushed to Tribble, and a lot of players were upset that the new UI required more 'work' to use. The Dev response was "Hey, it's just the Alpha version that we could get out quickly for testing...give feedback." Well, a lot of good feedback was given regarding the fact it gave LESS info up front then the one we've had for the past couple of years, no longer allowed Doff sorting of filtering by the player in the Doff selection process; and required more mouse clicks in general to do what could be done previously with LESS mouse clicks.
End result? They changed a couple of the UI button names; and the rest of it remains from the 'Alpha' state.
Thuis, at this point, I'm done with feedback as they just do what they want; and I at this point believe that most of our 'feedback' (not all, but most) that one can point to as 'Cryptic having listened' was in fact things they decided to do that a majority of players just happened to have the same idea about.
Hell, I think it's interesting the Community Manager will post a Twitter about an STO game update before mentioning it on the 'official' forums. One would think that it would be on the game's official forums first (or at worst on the forums and twitter at about the same time.)
PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."