Meaningful communication

Early Access Archive Early Access Game Feedback
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This is what your playerbase needs and wants. The ridiculous lack of it is the thing that teeters me closest to leaving the game.

What is meaningful communication? A basic example would be: “We will do x y and z in our next update. The next update will be in 12 to 24 weeks.”

Another example would be: “We will do X in our next update, we are working on y for the following update. Z? We don’t think its an issue yet.”

What is not meaningful communication? “We are looking into something that might or might not ever get addressed.”

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I just wanted to add my two cents regarding the communication (player and support staff) and the overwhelming negative discussion within several recent posts.

First off, I find it unfortunate there is so much negativity. The other day a newer player in my guild considered quitting due to the negativity observed in-game and various discord servers – player retention is highly reliant on the community and positive player engagement.

There are a lot of good things going for the game which don’t get enough appreciation. This I would mostly attribute to there not being sufficient community interaction, development discussion, polls, or other meaningful-feeling ways to provide positive feedback or input. Personally, as I never feel my feedback on the direction of the game is desired by the developers, I am generally just quietly watching the game progress and other player discussions.

Due to these factors, nearly all of the input provided by players is negative (either complaints or bug reports).

That being said, there are several key issues which have been repeatedly raised by the community without any change and with limited acknowledgement over the past many months. As these issues have already been brought up in very concise posts from other players, I have no reason to mention them all.

Based on the timing and language used by Tresk, my assumption is that they are referring to the recent response to inventory space. Unfortunately, the way it was acknowledged did nothing but increase the negativity. From my understanding, the community support humans should have direct contact with the game developers or a spokesperson for them. Acknowledging that an issue is a “frustrating pain point” for players and simply stating that they “hope to implement” … “in a future update” does nothing to alleviate that frustrating pain. What would help?

  1. At a minimum providing specific clear statements, i.e. “We are working on a new mechanism for increasing inventory space in the future – this will be released in a future update”;
  2. One step further, temporarily increasing the inventory space provided by the Guard with the acknowledgement of item 1 and a statement that it would be reduced upon the implementation of the future update; or
  3. If nothing is under development, just simply increasing the inventory space received from the Guard; or
  4. If there are no plans (ever) to increase inventory space via any mechanisms, this should be clearly spoken so at least players understand how they need to play (i.e., only play several builds for several classes).

Option 4 is obviously the players least favorite option. But at the same time, at least players who remain following the fall-out would have more direction on how to play the game and the constant negative posts about the subject would be reduced.

I want the game to be a success – and I have no doubt about whether it can become a success, but a positive community interaction is necessary. Please consider providing more constructive communication and being more diligent at removing frustrating paint points which are strongly reducing player retention.

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I agree with most of your points @Tresk and @Wokel.

Unfortunately I believe, although I obviously don’t know, that the front end support (@OminousGMan and @Jeto) aren’t directly in contact with the developers. Their job appears to be to just to make it seem as if the developers actually care.

My partner runs the social media feeds for a large number of companies, and part of her job is to field and manage feedback on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the like. Where possible she answers the questions, and when she can’t, she passes the queries through to the clients. She has absolutely no idea what the client does with most of those queries, and she certainly has nothing to do with the running of the business.

What we need here is actual members of the development team contributing to the feed. People who do know what is happening, and who have some say in what can and can’t happen. Unfortunately, I don’t think the developers actually care what we think. I’m not saying that our feedback is ignored, but they aren’t worried if we stay or go. Like most companies nowadays, the market size is so huge, they can afford to offend a few beta testers by just ignoring them.

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If this is truly the case, which they’ll obviously never admit to, then I guess I can add 505games to the list of producers of games I’ll never waste time or money on again. Rest in Peace Puzzle Quest. I don’t have the energy to burn on greed fueled unfinished games.

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As the author of numerous feel-good and negativity free posts, I couldn’t agree more! :sunglasses:

I agree with this although I personally think that there is a lot of appreciation shown for the game in the fact that numerous players continue to play daily and provide advice to new players and contribute feedback. This is happening in the absence of any meaningful communication about how issues that impact the players will be addressed. As @Wokel has said, many of these issues have been around for a long time and there is limited acknowledgment or guidance offered. This “code of silence” around community engagement that the developer, the publisher, or both, has chosen is just that, a choice.

I agree. Despite all its frustrations, I enjoy the game. I don’t “hate play” it daily just so I can yell about things that frustrate me. However, my attitude has definitely been more sour overall because of a lack of community engagement or misrepresentation of information (relic/glyph availability, ore income “mistake”, “small chances”, “increased drop rates”, etc.). I hope that they follow through on some sort of “roadmap” or dialog about development but until they engage regularly and honestly with community feedback and issues, then I don’t see the tenor of the discussion changing.

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Why make assumptions when you can simply ask me? And no… I was referring to the vast majority of communications since I started on 4/1.

Actually, the good things have gotten appreciation. Every single positive change has been met with quite a bit of positive feedback and thank yous. If it seems like the positives are being drowned it’s probably because the changes have been slow. It’s highly likely that the slow speed of changes are at least partially because of Covid. But it’s still been slow. It is what it is.

Generally speaking, early access/soft release is where the final kinks get worked out of a game before full release. It’s the job of early release participants to communicate all of these final kinks.

This game went EA way way WAY too early imho. I didn’t even start on day one and I felt like I had joined an alpha test. But I was ok with that. Kinda fun! But it stops being fun when you realize that the communication channel is broken.

Since you brought it up, lets look at the inventory issue… It’s been a thing as long as I have played. At one point they just randomly hotfixed it to double inventory. Server side, no muss no fuss. No advanced warning. Just boom! Done. We all gave tons of positive feedback. This board was like some 60s commune it was so positive.

But… now we get “we have passed this on and people are thinking about possibly looking at maybe thinking about possibly changing it at some point.” We all know its a problem, and we have communicated the problem. It’s been proven (from the past) that its something that can be fixed very quickly and without a client update. So meaningful communication would be “We are not doing this again because, reasons.”

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