Best game experience ever after so many years, finally!

[EXP88]

Hi people!

I want to post something positive for a change, ofcourse with some critism.

I’m playing this game for 6 months, I started playing this game because I wanted to search for other games which I might like.
In the past I’ve been a professional game for “Gears of War” on console, after that I played Halo3 & Call of Duty Black Ops 2.

My first experience was awesome, I started by my own in this barbaric world (official server 3228) and it pulled my feelings from left to right, excited I was and still are. Imagine going to the North, no clothes and didn’t knew anything and didn’t expect something of this game beforehand.

After becoming more used to this game genre, I started to learn the game in different ways.
First I met some random people and some invited me for the clan, that was an other chapter of learning, how PVP works etc. Besides exploring the game takes some time and the learning curve in general is widely which I like. Survival!

Because of PVP I learned how to build, which is still improving because I learn from my mistakes for example if you get raided you might had some building mistakes and learn from this and bring this experience for your next base to build it as perfect as it can be. Build!

I’m trying to get better and improving myself in several ways, hoping the balance will get better and fine tuned and every bug getting out of the game and the way of organizing this.

I have just got myself on a new level of being Alpha in a server and this latest bug has broken my dreams/game. Exited I was, learning new stuff again and building to dominate the server, failed.
What I experienced after that, horrible. Going on the website and forums to solve the latest problem as soon as possible because I farmed treaser seekers only at that time for defending my base, all thralls with World Breaker weapons and Armor and don’t forget the Sword of Crom.

I did 98% procent by my own, if this was a team effort the motivation would be different but the problem what I experience is double. I’ve been struckt hard with this update and most other teams used other named fighters too so they didn’t had the big problem I had, now 2 weeks further the base is destroyed, all thralls killed and just got whiped.

Because I like this game, I try not to look at the mistakes of the developers and just have fun gaming, but my frustration is high, even now I lost everything I’m trying to start fresh again but I just can’t get this out of my head of these update mistakes. I can start again, frustrating as it is because of this update, I think in the future the developers will make the same mistake. But the game is soooooo goood. I want to dominated, but can’t like this.

Good to involve the community, for example to let a mod maker involve in projects.
But where’s the aim to focus on the multiplayer side of this game instead making new dungeons everytime and DLC’s to make it long term playable. Especially after many bugs you need to give people time to get back on their feets and focus more to make the open world survival & gameplay better and interesting, ask for example to alpha clans what they are doing when reaching the top and how can you keep it interesting at that position and not gaining to much instead of becoming a server whiper if to bored if you have a team that wants to do that too(I don’t have experience with server whiping yet).

Overal I love this game so much, I hope it will work out and that more gamers will join/play this game.

But looking in general it doesn’t look good, the communications of the developers to the gamers aren’t the examples you want to see. If you FunCom were clear about the communication of the situation when this bug was released, you would get more understanding and less frustrations of players but the way it goes now you don’t get most understanding out of gamers.

To end my writing…

I really love this game, It gave me my fun of playing a game back, what I have lost several years ago. For me it’s a big thing and I want to have that back, please help me and yourselfs DEV’s!

Greetings Ken

[EXP88]

Suggestion:

Combine what people want of dungeons (please don’t change current dungeons dev’s) and open world survival game.

Why not creating a big place like a dungeon place with several options, focussing that people meet each other and have options to play with or against each other, for example a place you can do a 1V1 with options “best of 3”. You can also think of options that a player joins/accepting a 1v1 , both have to put 1 fragment in a chest and only the winner gets the loot.
Also a place for a dungeon itself and the hardest one which you have to do with a team with teamwork otherwise the team will die in the dungeon.

I like the Warmaker idea, if you lose the key to get into the dungeon and have no spare ones you are basically screwed if you die. In this case your team can help to get you back be opening the door for you again, but I like the layers which makes it harder.

Free suggestion, next one cost money

[Kapoteeni]

@EXP88

But looking in general it doesn’t look good, the communications of the developers to the gamers aren’t the examples you want to see. If you FunCom were clear about the communication of the situation when this bug was released, you would get more understanding and less frustrations of players but the way it goes now you don’t get most understanding out of gamers.

“Communication usually fails, except by accident.” Wiio’s First Law of Communication.

Communication is one of my favorite subjects - the quality, the quantity, and the medium. And how difficult it is. And you’re right, Funcom could do better in this regard. Everyone could.

In this particular case you describe, the bug was reported to Funcom within the first few hours after the update was released. They responded quickly that they had identified the cause and were working on a fix. Word spread on these forums, as multiple threads were started to report the problem, and people responded to those threads by linking the Funcom reply. So in this regard, both the quality and the quantity of the communication was, in my opinion, sufficient.

Now, I’m pretty bad at following other social media, so I don’t know if word was spread to e.g. Twitter or Facebook. It was probably not posted onto Funcom’s main page either. So I’m not sure whether the media used to communicate were adequate, or whether it was limited to this forum.

But all communication has two sides. The recipient also has a responsibility when it comes to successful communication. When a player encounters a bug, he is naturally upset about it. When the game developer responds with anything that isn’t an immediate fix that covers all losses the plaeyr may have suffered, it’s not a response the player wanted. So he’s even more upset. At this point it’s easy to blame the developer for not communicating well enough - but it’s not really a problem of communication at this point, but rather that the message isn’t what the player wants to hear.

Funcom social media people are active on these forums, as well as other social media. Generally speaking, their communication is excellent - among the finest I’ve ever seen from a gaming company. But it’s not possible, or practical, to communicate everything everywhere all the time. The amount of information would be such a deluge that finding the information relevant to you would become a huge hassle. So the social media people and community managers need to prioritize - decide what to post, and onto which media.

One of the real challenges in communication is that we, the players, demand information and explanations and the developers don’t have an answer. “When will this be fixed?” is a commonly asked question, and when the devs answer truthfully “We don’t know. When it’s ready” it’s not the answer we want. It’s not a problem caused by lack of communication, but lack of information - yet it’s often easier to blame the company for not telling us what we want than accept that they’re not giving us the answers because they don’t have an answer. We want to find someone to blame for our misery.

And when we find someone to blame, whether or not it’s justified, we tend to focus on blaming, rather than trying to understand. At that point, we no longer hear the answers, so communication between the company and us fails - so we blame the company for failing at communicating.