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Reflections on Cryptic/Community Interactions
leviathan99
Member Posts: 7,747 Arc User
First of all, I want to say that Taco, Hawk, and CrypticCat do a lot of good work with the community on the forums and Reddit and while I'm sure we drive Zero crazy, she's a class act through and through in her interactions here.
However, in addition to silence (which is funny in particular in testing), I see a lot of what I consider to be unprofessional animosity, such as implying that forum negativity is hurting Cryptic's ability to work with a children's charity, insisting that features such as the customizable BOff were "obviously" bugged, and, in general, what I see as an immature inability to accept responsibility, blame deflection, and unjustified hostility.
I'd like to open up the floor to discuss how we work through this as a community.
However, in addition to silence (which is funny in particular in testing), I see a lot of what I consider to be unprofessional animosity, such as implying that forum negativity is hurting Cryptic's ability to work with a children's charity, insisting that features such as the customizable BOff were "obviously" bugged, and, in general, what I see as an immature inability to accept responsibility, blame deflection, and unjustified hostility.
I'd like to open up the floor to discuss how we work through this as a community.
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Most western publishers have games like this on a "red" list. As in, warning this game is designed to milk you. There are TONS of F2P games that do it right, where each purchase is FUN and REWARDING, not NECESARY and endless.
The community has become even more divided by Cryptics handling of recent changes, to the point where everyone is attacking each other. Basically this game is on its way out.
WHICH WE SHOULD BE REJOICING. It makes way for a competant game company (of which there are many) to get a hold of this IP and do it RIGHT.
As long the playerbase here keeps accepting the conversion to korean grinder, and even paying for it, the worse it will get until its finally shut down, wasting months or even years that a good version could have been in development.
Sometimes you just gotta know when the horse has been broken, and need to be put down.
Testing on Tribble is largely ignored, as patches are most often pushed live only a day after they've been to Tribble (leaving very little time for actual testing), which results in an overall buggy game, that has become ever more bugged since Delta Rising launched.
Also like to make a shout-out to CaptainGeko, whom I also believe should be replaced. Calling your entire player base "morons" for providing the occasional negative feedback, should be grounds for dismissal from the company. He has also been personally responsible for some of the worst design decisions since Season 8, possibly even longer back.
Animosity becomes prevalent, when your developers continually make changes to the game that hinder, or slow down the progress of the players, and where little to no feedback is given regarding said changes. The term "stealth change" comes to mind here, as it is more frequent to change things without notification, than there is to say "We're planning on doing this, what do you think?" forum posts.
- An insult is NOT a valid argument or useful contribution.
- Nobody has a secret ability to define what a person REALLY means, beyond our ability to actually read what they have written.
- Arguing semantics doesn't get anybody anywhere.
- People have different opinions, this does not make them morons, white knights or any other term you may chose to use to insult them. It just makes them people with different opinions.
- 100 threads by a small number of people saying the same thing over and over do not form a majority.
If the community can manage these simple things, THEN the devs might actually chose to spend time conversing with the community. If you phone a call center and hurl abuse at them, they hang up on you. If you hurl abuse on a forum, you get ignored.
Luckily, the STO community is NOT just those who post on these forums, as if it was it would truly be poisonous.
...nah, that's too easy. Cryptic needs to do the work for us.
Setting aside the very likely fact, for a moment, that had Smirk or Trendy opened up a livestream devoted to supporting the charity, it would have likely been hijacked by upset players...
You're seriously putting BOFF customization on the same level as supporting a children's charity?
I'm saying that I found it distasteful for the children's charity to be used as a scapegoat for forum negativity.
Imagine I'm a waiter who's representing a restaurant in a charity marathon against Ebola this weekend and that, tonight, at my job, I don't have time to work out because two guests are camped at a table drinking coffee refills. It's unfortunate, sure, but I think it would be irresponsible to boot those guests out or accuse them even tacitly of making Ebola worse.
Those guests bear no responsibility for Ebola.
Doesn't matter if we kiss the ring or not...Tau Dewa was brought to their attention before the expansion went live and they did nothing about it until it impacted dilitium. The majority of the player base would have understood a patch to stop that but no one should have been punished by it by losing spec points because they were negligent.
Funny thing is is that SWG was the same way. They got a lot better but by then it was too late and the damage was done.
Few players do mean well, such as the OP and a few others, but the majority have been so badly scarred by their gaming experience, that the root of bitterness has seeped deep within their soul. Cryptic hasn't helped matters either and have made the situation worst, they simply do not care about their fan base, thus making it about the bottom dollar.
One key thing I wish to mention, whoever is using the Charity event to rant about game mechanics & express their rage against the changes to the game etc... are just plain wrong and have lost focus of "REALITY" & "LIFE."
I am saying that the devs should not be using a charity to shame players. And I would WELCOME a two way conversation, on or off the record, on here, on Facebook, on the phone, or in this thread. I'm not being unreasonable or getting in the way of a dialogue.
No, I don't, but you can't expect players, that have just called out for cheaters by the EP, to support full heartly a charity by that same company. It would be the same that you are insulting me and 10 minutes later, without any apologies, ask for a loan. The EP forgot one thing, beside being players here and their cash cows, we are humans too.
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Uh... Okay. I think you may be proving me wrong if that's your stance.
Boy, this is a tough subject.
I don't know that we CAN 'work through this as a community'.
Admittedly, over the years and in my own opinion, Cryptic has struggled with Public Relations where the forums are concerned. There have been lots of gaffes that have thrown gas on the flames.
But I think it would be unfair to say that it was all one-sided. There have always been people who respond way out of proportion or fail to acknowledge the reality of what a free to play MMO is and how they make their money. There has been plenty of immature behavior to go around.
Now here we are, and we've essentially allowed a few people to brand forum users as a hostile audience and perpetuate an attitude among the Dev staff that forumites are basically unreasonable people who enjoy "Forum PvP" and flaming Devs in their spare time.
There are some things that need to change.
The forum software needs to change, to make it more difficult for trolls to evade accountability. I'm told that a software change coming, but I don't know when or how effective it's going to be to shut down the trolls.
In relation to that, we all need to simply stop responding to posts from people who aren't just voicing a complaint or frustration but are using incendiary language to stir things up and lash out at people. Why do rant threads go 40+ pages? Because people can't seem to understand that trolls need the silent treatment and sometimes you just have to let a bad conversation go.
I think we all need to acknowledge that Tribble is not fulfilling the function of a public test server very well. Issues get reported, but because there is no real time lag between when Tribble gets an update and that update is pushed out to Holodeck that there's not enough time to fix anything before it goes live. I realize that MMO's live or die on their update cadence, but they really need to solicit more community feedback on the things they do before they do them while there's still time to make major adjustments.
I'm not talking about reacting to exploits here, because that's very much in-the-moment. I'm talking about updates and new systems that haven't had the benefit of a shakedown. They're left with the unpleasant option of trying to change something broken that already went live.
But, again, this is a two-way street. Sometimes the Devs have to make a decision that the player base needs to either live with or go find another game to play. Instead of choosing not to play the game and send a message via their logged in time and purchases, a few people come onto the forums and start throwing tantrums like a five-year old with a potty mouth. They make the rest of us look bad.
If this was a $50 solo PC game, gamers wouldn't have to worry about the realities of software development. Either they like it and play it, or they don't. No continuous development like an MMO gets. Bugs happen. Releases are cyclical, and change takes more time than anyone really wants, but that's reality. Unfortunately it's a reality that some people stubbornly ignore.
Don't like bugs? Can't accept changes you don't like? Probably shouldn't be playing an MMO, then.
Or let me put it a slightly different way. Let's say you bought a carton of buttermilk. You try it and you don't like it. Do you call your congressman and rant at him or her to do something about the carton in your fridge? No, that would be unrealistic. Do you keep buying the buttermilk anyway? That would be foolhardy. Maybe you should switch to 2% instead.
Forum negativity. Can't blame all that on the Devs not communicating because I see more of an effort to engage than I've ever seen before, in spite of a lot of hostility. There are some forum users I will not name whom I can count on to be negative and hostile no matter what the Devs do.
On the other hand, I don't believe they (Cryptic) consistently think of these forums as social media. This is not just a glorified customer support forum or a developer-oriented dev forum. This is also very much public relations and needs to be seen as such. Like it or not, it's also a fan service forum and it's going to attract fans with their fervor. A certain amount of venting is going to happen. Venting is an opportunity to show customers that a company is able to be responsive to concerns and communicate a desire to solve the problem. Cryptic doesn't do that very consistently.
But don't think that excuses bad behavior. As someone who has been customer support in the past, the example of hanging up on an abusive customer resonates very strongly with me. You try to be courteous and professional, but some people just will not take no for an answer or make any effort to compromise toward a solution. They treat you like servant-slaves put on this Earth to be abused until they're happy. They're the customers who give every other customer a bad name and make CS a miserable job workers can't wait to get away from.
Can't blame anybody for "hanging up" on people like that.
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Your last point(s) are spot on. And the forum software too. It's frustrating seeing certain topics/threads closed because a few people use it as an excuse to insult each other in an endless forum war. I admit at nearly losing it myself a few times in my own thread(s) when people don't know when to shut up.
I've worked as a store assistant, handling customers was a massive pain a lot of the time. I can imagine what anonymity does alongside of that.
I'd welcome some forum software updates. As a customer and forum user I would LOVE an ignore feature for example. Some people are sometimes too infuriating to ignore. It's hard to see them post so much at times.
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It is a peculiar phenomenon that we can imagine events that defy the laws of the universe.
Trying to balance this out, I will say that a source of frustration for me, without naming and shaming, is that some posters get outright nuts. I get angry but I think I'm towards the middle of the road for these forums.
I can be intensely critical but I've never deliberately threatened a developer either. I do have hot button triggers, generally if I feel vulnerable people are being provoked or taken advantage of, whether that's by Cryptic or other players.
But it is frustrating to me because if one person makes crazy threats or rants for pages in a feedback thread, the whole forums get dismissed over it and any criticism of Cryptic becomes "those people on the forums".
The behavior I see both by other posters and by devs brings to mind the issues surrounding gamergate. Which is too big a topic for these forums at any kind of length, I imagine. But BOTH extreme forum posters and Cryptic employees remind me of some of the more extreme people from gamergate. It may surprise some people I suppose that I'd read a game DEVELOPER as behaving like members of a group that is known for hostility TO game developers but I guess what I see is an inflexible notion of fairness and an overall similar disposition there.
It's disheartening more than anything. I feel like dialogue is a prime part of why Cryptic games have had forums, going back ten years or so? But without that dialogue, there is a vacuum and that vacuum becomes problematic when the lack of dialogue is apparent not just here but in game as well.
like any good mob...pitchforks, tar, feathers, torches and flight tickets to somewhere on the US west coast.
It's really over the line, don't you think bluegeek ?
Awoken Dead
Now shaddup about the queues, it's a BUG
and use condoms, kids.
( clap clap clap clap clap, standing ovations from the audience)
You what? 5 minute time-gate?! This is the first I've heard of this! :eek:
EDIT
Yowza! It IS true!!! :O
How DO we fix the quagmire of mistrust and downright hostility between forumgoers and devs? Frankly, I feel we are missing a few frontline troops to help fight a few brush-fires before they become full-on forest-fires. By that I mean community moderation. I don't mean that the volunteer moderators we have are bad at what they do (far from it, Blue and Askray and the others do a great job). I mean we need more. Volunteers are, by their very nature, not full-time. We need the community management team (trendy and smirk and any others) to take a more active role, maybe even hire some full-time, in-house moderators.
An in-house moderator/community comms officer would actually have access to info about why something is the way it is which could be disseminated quickly to calm forumites down before they "imagine" worse.
The closure of Tau Dewa. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few? Not there. A whole section of the playerbase (ie new players rolling their first romulan toons) were clobbered because of the exploits (pun intended) of less than 300. Mission maps they needed to progress were closed to stop unintended reaping of rewards by the players.
Could this have been handled better? You bet your fur.
A simple series of messages would have explained what they were looking at and why, and what likely actions would be taken and when. Explaining this, instead of leaving it cryptic (more puns) or REDACTED, would have calmed the fears of the many.
As for tribble testing, frankly I feel the devs need to take some of the players caught and punished for exploiting and bring them into closed testing before anyone else and to be told "Break this and tell us how, please, so we can make it unbreakable before opening it up for further testing and bringing live". Security agencies all over the world employ ex-cons to help improve their systems, this is not as extreme but the playerbase (taken as a whole) is quite capable of throwing a few curveballs and maybe they could use some help preparing for those wild pitches.
I second an "ignore" button on the forums. Just being able to skip those posts would make it much easier to navigate threadnaughts.
From the community side of things I think we can all learn from the old saying "If you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all". Complain, if you must, but be nice.
Jo Cox 22.6.1974 - 16.6.2016
Only a special kind of stupid Cryptic. A special kind. Congratulations on excelling your own demise as a game developer.
While bluegeek hit some nails on the head as far as players are concerned , I'll point to something else :
Many of our Devs are ... gamers .
Does that immediately associate them with the umbrella term "nerd" , and it's many connotations (including "socially inapt") ?
On one hand ... , not by a long shot , as it's unfair to assume .
On the other ... -- well what makes a nerd into a Dev ?
Simple .
A job interview .
But said job interview will not remove any of the applicants previous issues , persona or tendencies , and frankly I would be curious to hear that any extensive PR training is given to a programmer , or a graphic artist , apart from perhaps a list of do's and don'ts .
Now why would I do ahead and make the worst assumptions ever about gamer-nerd-dev ?
Well first , as I said , it's a case by case issue , not a generalization .
However ... -- well let's just say that in another lifetime , while I was waiting at a reception area of a multi million dollar company , and I overheard a snippet of conversation between the receptionist and a cleaning lady .
While I can't recite it verbatim , the humanity ... or should I say the gross humanity of it lingered , as did the lesson it represents :
The cleaning lady was complaining about a horrible day , and when the receptionist asked her what happened , she just briefly mentioned the toilets in the management levels .
Now this to me meant one thing that was worth remembering :
No matter if a person makes a six or even a seven figure salary .
That alone does not guarantee that he won't leave a mess in the toilet .
Same applies to all "professionals" , and the mess need not be restricted to the toilets .
Bluegeek speaks of experience in CS .
That alone has ingrained in him do's and dont's + a "thicker hide" that nothing that you do as a Dev will give you experience in .
Which is why in the end , it may be that we expect too much from Devs .
Sometimes ... -- and with Cryptic I suspect many times it's just like this :
Except that just like being a gamer does not prep you to act cool while RL bullets are crossing over your head , despite having played CoD , it does not prep you to be "the face of the company" either .
First, yes it's a community (or it could be), but from Cryptic's point of view, it is also an insight into their customer base. Or in other words: the hand that feeds them. Star Trek is a brand which is to be blunt, a cash cow. It makes a lot of money, not only because of the fans of the franchise, but also because those fans tend to be willing to overlook problems, forgive poor stories, and generally try to see past everything. All while being willing to spend rather generous sums on "Star Trek" branded goods and services, at least as a group. We do this to a fault. People might 'complain' a lot, but often these complaints are either nitpicks that also betray how closely they watch things or is essentially a form of engagement where they show how actively they're involved by finding other ways to tell the story. That's the nature of the Star Trek fanbase and anyone who can't cope with that fact, should consider avoiding working within a business that provides goods and services to this fanbase.
Cryptic isn't doing this out of kindness or as a community service. It's a business. We're its customers. They are getting profits from it as a result of us opening our wallets. So let's not pretend that as its customers, we owe them anything more than any group of customers owe a service provider.
On the matter of D'Angelo's "statement" it is almost irrelevant: it broke unspoken rules about not punishing a whole playerbase due to the potential transgressions of a proportion of players, as well as breaking the unspoken rule that a player's achievements aren't ever reversed without a massively good (e.g. bannable) reason. And no, "statistical reversion to the mean" is not a good enough reason or analysis for this. The employee who called players "morons" should have been summarily dismissed for that, and in any professional service company would have (and no, I don't care what that position is). An even greater concern: as he wasn't, that implies that this is the attitude pervading Cryptic about us, its STO customers.
Now we come down to it: if Cryptic wants to know more about what its customer base wants, and thinks the forums aren't a good enough representation of it, then they should ask. There's "Market Research" which helps with this, and "Online Surveys", "Polls", and other such devices around which allow businesses to collect data on what people might like, not like, want more of and so on. Plus, they can open up their metrics and look at what's popular and what's not. Importantly, they need to analyze these (not just look at level one but actually dig down) and build up a picture of what different groups of players are doing. So "Starfleet" is most popular, fine... what are players who only ever play KDF toons doing? Those with Romulans only? Romulan/KDF only? What about those with all three? If they don't have this expertise in-house, then take some of that profit they're generating and hire in someone on a contract.
Finally, the hostility may be there, but I doubt that any trollish or hostile behavior on these boards are beyond the norm for an internet board is either all-of-a-sudden, or that it just magically appeared one day out of nowhere. This has been festering for some time and Cryptic can't just hide behind deciding that they're "insulted" as a way to avoid dealing with the problems of their own creation. If they need more Customer-facing staff, they need to look at hiring them. If their team is burnt out, they need to replace them. If the Executive Producer can't cope, he needs to move onto something else.
This is a business, not a charity, we're customers, not friends. I'm sorry Cryptic but you need to check your collective attitude and become more professional than this, period.
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As someone pointed out in another thread, Defiance was also running an event, and I have seen references to it in other venues as well at the same time. As best as I understand it, the situation is similar to, say, supporting March of Dimes or Race for the Cure, where the event occurs at the same time all around the country. This is where a little research helps:
http://www.extra-life.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=donorDrive.event&eventID=520
Please take a moment to read that before telling Cryptic that they should not have even attempted to support Extra Life and that they were horrible people for doing so. And you wonder why Smirk was visibly upset in both instances when he addressed it. Because there were people who made exactly that accusation. That is ALSO the reason why in the Extra Life thread I made a decision to ignore Smirk's upset and focus on what could potentially be done to to salvage the charity effort without using time on his end that at his point, he probably doesn't have.
The rest of my post will be coming soon but that was something I wanted to clear up right now before I go any further.
(Edited to add: By the way--anyone getting a 5-minute delay on their posts, I have no idea where that is coming from. This post appeared instantaneously.)
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Couldn't have said it better myself.
And off the top of my head, I know exactly which 3 individuals "insulted" the player base, and when. 2 of which are in fairly high positions within the development team, and both should either be fired, or relocated elsewhere within the company. Calling your entire player base "morons" because a few forumites might be taking things a bit too seriously should be grounds for dismissal. Likewise, blaming the player base for not having the foresight of fixing things before pushing it live, that person should also be considered for firing, or re-locating. For the dev who felt "insulted" by what we as forum-posters (and most of us, players) said, he should probably consider getting a thicker skin, or avoiding the forums entirely until he feels he can handle posts that may, or may not be insulting. We as players don't owe the devs a single thing when it comes to how our posts might read.
We are not their friends, we are not their family. We are their customers. And like all businesses, customers demand satisfaction. Customers who are not satisfied, generally go somewhere else to find that satisfaction. Sometimes (oftentimes) after voicing their dissatisfaction to the company representatives (as we so often do on the forums).
Once you lose a customer (or player in this case), it is often very hard to get them back. Each and every customer should be considered as valuable as gold pressed latinum.