The simplest explanation may be right: Forum feedback and engagement doesn’t get reflected in the decision to develop or release features because it isn’t considered important.
I have read a lot of opinions and feedback about this upcoming patch and prior patches. Often it seems it’s not just that the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing, but that each hand is trying to cut the other off. It doesn’t make any kind of sense as an existing player, but maybe if we already play and like the game, we are the people that matter least?
After purchase, there’s a brief window when we’re valuable: we can recommend it to our friends, it’s important that we don’t pan it in reviews, and maybe we buy some DLC. After that? Sure, a few diehard fans do key work keeping the forums, wiki, and YouTube rolling, but at best I fear we are considered noise, and at worst, competition for those lucrative new players.
If we get driven off by losing fond followers or weapon nerfs or bugs or dodge changes, I’m not sure it matters to the institution. It’s not about shipping a release that will lose a player with 900 hours played, it’s if it can gain 9 players for 1 hour.
I’m not sure where else to put that feeling. I’d hope for different, but I’m not convinced I should ever expect it.
“Crom gives a man courage at birth, and the will and might to kill his enemies. It is useless to call upon him, as he is a gloomy, savage god who hates weaklings.”
I can’t speak for Funcom; during this time I’ve attempted to retain a professional working relationship with them, while remaining a player’s advocate with a suitable amount of objectivity intact. It is of great interest to me that few, if not zero, obstacles to playing are allowed to be in this amazing game.
When you put both of those together, I might have a great will or propensity to feel cynical about Funcom’s actions, but over time I have learned to trust them. When they say they need to implement a thrall cap, I believe them. When their terminology comes out again and again which states unequivocally that we players will respect their cap, they are assiduously assuring us of their resolve.
Penultimately, when Alex, our Lead Developer said that allowing us to keep our deployed followers would be onerous to their process and not a productive use of their combined resources, I believe him.
As a US businessman and entrepreneur for a little more than 20 years now, I will assert one retained customer is worth 10 prospective ones. Customer retention is absolutely essential in the software business – and as one tiny little nod to cynicism appears I hark back to their last Financial Report – “gaming as a service” inherently requires a solid base, and quarter-on-quarter retention versus loss.
This leads me to believe they want this thing to keep going. And for you and me, and all of us to stick around until we’re bored of each other’s conquests.
Then you know that being an entrepreneur and being a cog in a large corporate machine are very different.
That’s a sweeping generalization that turns out to be true most of the time, but I don’t think it is in this case. Look at the business model of Conan Exiles: it’s not subscription based and they claim to make no money whatsoever from private server rentals, so the only two sources of revenue are the sales of the game itself and the DLCs. Once a customer has bought all the DLCs, their value is greatly diminished. The residual value of such a customer comes from the future DLCs they might buy and from keeping the servers from being empty.
I’d say that, in this business model, any event that can attract a bunch of new customers is worth losing an equal number of old customers. A new customer won’t have the experience and the perspective of the old one and is more likely to engage with the game positively, without comparing it to what it used to be. And a new customer might buy all the old DLCs, too.
Which brings me to my main point: we need to stop thinking that Funcom, as a company, is just the Conan Exiles dev team.
What @Abomineer is describing is the result of a clash between three groups of people:
The players are the most passionate of all three groups. We spend our free time on this game, which makes it incredibly valuable to us.
The devs (and other ancillary roles, such as community outreach) are a group tasked with making Conan Exiles and keeping it ticking. No matter how much they might love it, it’s still their job. I’m willing to bet very few of them will choose to spend their free time on the game.
The suits are in charge of directing the business side of the things. They’re producers, managers, VPs and all the other roles that care primarily about the bottom line. Of the three groups, they’re the least passionate and the most powerful.
We keep saying “the devs this” and “the devs that” in the forums, but that’s only seeing one part of the big picture. The truth is that the suits are in charge. They’re the ones who set the business strategy and make binding decisions. The devs can push back, but when push comes to shove, it’s “my way or the highway”.
The latest example of this power dynamic is this rush to release a half-assed, half-baked update, because the company can’t meet its obligation to release the season pass DLCs without the update on which the latest DLC is based.
Another thing to keep in mind is that a persistent multiplayer game like this is like life: it’s “dying” right from the start. Eventually Conan Exiles will die, so every decision Funcom has to make about it is oriented towards maximizing the value extracted from it. As players, we tend to think that this is only accomplished by prolonging the lifespan of the game, but that’s not necessarily true. If they have an opportunity to squeeze a few more drops, scrape the barrel a bit more, at the cost of shortening the lifespan, they’ll do their best to guess which course of action will net them more money.
You might call me bitter, jaded and cynical, but that’s how capitalism works
What codemage implied has nothing to do with the modding community … the devkit is put there for the modders and modders work there magic on what’s provided for them in the devkit that basically it
My biggest concern is what’s going to break when this new update hits … I actually get really worried after every update that my base might be gone when I log in … took me a long time to build my base and upgrade it and it’s almost finished lol
Yes, I know. Believe it or not, I did see that firsthand But at the end of the day, their job and their responsibility is to make money That’s why I said “the least passionate”, instead of “dispassionate”.
Passion is what begets a company. Let it grow enough and things change. Don’t believe me? Look at Oracle or EA.
Quibbles and pedantry. I wrote “no matter how much they might love it”. What part of that suggested to you that I meant they don’t enjoy their jobs? It’s not about enjoyment, it’s about what you do with your free time.
I’m not gonna call you a nutjob. Assuming that your post is on the non-ironic side of Poe’s Law, I’d say you’re merely attributing to premeditation what can be adequately explained by incompetence
I have to confess I missed your point too. Help a guy out?
Member’s of Funcom’s dev team, since early EA days, have spent much of their free time helping modders with their mod projects, developing tools on the side, creating documentation, etc. It’s what got me hooked onto modding Conan Exiles to begin with.
Indeed, I have worked for both sides. Building a business and seeing myself become the executive head – the drive wheel – among all those gears and cogs is quite something. I won’t bristle at the term “suits” either, because people are entitled to be angry at executives. It’s our job to absorb it.
The truth of it is customer retention is why Mr Gates is sitting on a pile of money that can stretch to Jupiter if laid end to end in $100 bills. This is why Adobe continues to make amazing software for professionals and amateurs alike, and has traded the software license for a Cloud Subscription. Back to Microsoft, this is why we see Azure in all of our current small business models for the future, because collaboration and unified software distribution is key to success. In other words, it is a bit of a dated concept to attempt to differentiate corporate structures simply based on business volume.
In Conan Exiles, specifically Conan Exiles, the Community has been an almost equal partner in this process. That is thanks to the Early Access program, Set be praised! This is why we specifically focus on Conan Exiles, and not the broader Funcom “way.” We player-participants are responsible for exactly 1/2 of the “attaboys” and 1/2 of the "ahh crap!"s.
One of the things that helped me as a solo in my early days with CE was my ability to create a Town Center and skirmish well, with even two enemies. On dozens of servers, I have moved to CRUSH (Castle Rush) a dug-in Alpha, and turned to a Turtle FLUSH when hammered by several clans at once. These terms and skills are honed to this very day on the classic RTS Age of Empires II, which has been out long enough to be just about finishing up its undergraduate degree at University.
With respect, I believe that if you look at the big picture and predict that if we get only half of that, 10 years, does it not make sense to cultivate continued play at $50 per year on DLC alone?
It’s much like the elevators, much like Mounts, much like Snowhunter’s almost single-handed save of an ailing and broken revision: a passionate team member grinds away his gaming time (free time) to make Conan Exiles better. In your list of three elements above, you conspicuously omitted “Community.” While you say community outreach, I’m meaning the overall organism. I think you may have the blinders on, just a bit, because you’re leaving out the #4 element in the Game Sphere: the connection between the gamers and the Team.
We talked previously about Take-Two Interactive and its practices. It wasn’t so much their adherence to a policy of allowing glitches to persist, as it was the Conan Exiles’ dev team’s completely opposite approach. It was through Funcom’s stellar example that the truth about another AAA game I love was exposed. This Team’s transparency – @zerog is correct, with exception to their silence on the Thrall Cull – is what has set them apart in the past, and I believe is what keeps us all playing and testing and complaining as one.
More than being just a “let’s drag” rant, I did get some comfort from the cynicism.
It would be too harsh of me to say experienced players have no value, we bring life, inspiration, and controversy that give substance to the community. More true would be to say we’re expendable.
On the vaguely positive side, we can see that work done to address community concerns or improve quality of life beyond what a new player would see in the first two weeks does show attentive care, and it’s appreciated.
When it’s absent, though, I have to tell myself it’s not malice, it’s the nature of the monster.
I certainly have concerns that Funcom is lying through their teeth when they state that they listen, but clearly are listening with deaf ears…
But worries me even worse is they show 0 signs of growth and learning as a development team. They keep walking face first into similar problems, any company that actually grows, would never suffer repeatedly from…
I don’t understand the need to rush the patch when not only is it unfinished, buggy, and a hot mess, but also that its incredibly questionable to a huge portion of the player base.
So not are we already walking into their tired old mistake of rushed content that breaks the game rather then adds to it…
But even if the content they were adding did work, many players are still up in arms about the ramifications…
I appreciate Barnes’s view and faith with them on this matter. However, Funcom doesn’t have the history to warrant them this faith. In fact, its pretty much the opposite. Funcom has a strident history of falling short on these patches, and this is looking to be their biggest blunder yet.
I just really wish they didn’t have to experience the blunder and take us all for the rocky ride, before gleaning anything valuable from it.
There is a reason my official server is now empty and as far as I can tell, people are dropping the game all around me.
I cannot provide a citation, but according to two good sources, PC will be getting a hotfix that is already prepared and being tuned. Because the Mounts and Follower Leveling Patch is working through certification for XB and PS4, it will roll out all at once on December 5, Set allowing Sony’s approval.
Based on history, Funcom will withhold the hotfix until they see whether there are any emergent issues under report and investigation/repeat. At the latest, flash forward to Dec. 12, one week later. Hotfix for PC rolls out. More data is gathered and hotfix is worked into Sony and MS. In my opinion, this is a tactical move that leaves room for two patches before the late December Holiday season, and their vacations.
This demonstrates, by contrast with Oct-Dec 2018, that they are learning from their past patches, launches and our (possibly) vociferous responses to them.
The truth of it is that Mr. Gates would never release something like this patch to the public , the bottom line is its broke and will not be fixed before the patch comes out, the real deal is people are worried about their game, their bases, their time they have spent and Funcom has not a moment to spare to even explain why but you can bet Mr. Gates would be responding and fixing it before it was released. As someone who has run a QA company in the past this is not how it is done, QA takes time much longer then a few days on test live servers and will in the end this will as always just cause problems like all Funcom updates, break it , that is ok. We will fix it later.
We are all frustrated that they SEEM to not have time or do not care to fix things players on test live have taken their time for FREE by the way to find for them. Why have a system for QA if you do not listen to those that test for you.
As a Microsoft Gold Partner for almost 20 years, I can give you many, many citations of KBs that required full rollbacks. Early in my IT Support career, Microsoft created a patch to Windows 3 called Windows 3.1 – because 3 was gahbage, to quote Mr Schwarzenegger.
Do please keep in mind that I am a player on officials (and private servers) with significant stake and holdings in all realms of this particular patch. I’m also an active TestLive player, but I’ll take responsibility for this: it is true that TL participation has dwindled, as has mine in recent history. I believe Funcom has chosen this path because in the past, PvP players with hard knocks in mind find the problems in time for Christmas.
Oh, I don’t use “suits” as a derogatory term. Apologies if it rubbed you the wrong way. Personally, I’m not comfortable with the business side of things and I’m perfectly content with being an individual contributor – that’s where my strengths and interests lie. I have no talent nor interest in management, business and such. For me, calling someone a “suit” is more in the style of Cryptonomicon: “I’m the beard, Avi’s the suit.”
Probably a lot. Despite the ungodly number of hours I’ve sunk into this game, I haven’t engaged much with the community until the announcement of this coming update. The picture you paint in the rest of your post is much more … idyllic … than what I currently perceive or am ready to take at face value
I’ll keep what you said in mind, but I’ll “agree to disagree” until I’m convinced. I hope neither you nor CE team will take my skepticism as a personal attack. I might be harsh-tongued when criticizing certain aspects of the game and its development, but I assure you I’m equally harsh (or harsher) with my own work.
But at the end of the day, their job and their responsibility is to make money