When is the last time you or anybody else mentioning this …
ever took a tour of those servers to see for yourselves what’s really going on?
I don’t know, man. I’ve seen you post a lot of constructive feedback and I haven’t seen people call you toxic for that. When people call out toxicity in negative feedback, they’re usually pointing to name-calling, conspiracy theories, dishonest rhetoric, and gratuitous Funcom-bashing.
And when I say “gratuitous Funcom-bashing”, I mean gratuitous. Not things like “given their track record, I’d say Funcom doesn’t know how to balance PVP”, but rather “the devs only care about the money” or “they should fire the lead game designer”. I’ve seen both of those and they’re ridiculous and inappropriate.
So yeah, there’s plenty of toxicity in negative feedback in general. And while I can think of at least two people on these forums who defend Funcom in an extremely toxic ways, the toxicity does tend to come more from critics.
I mean, here:
That’s dishonesty at its finest. First he attacks Multigun simply because he saw “Chosen of Asura” in his title. Then he nitpicks and “strawmans” (yes, I know that’s not a word) the two replies he got. And then he misrepresents people who argue with you as “hardcore FC fans” and reduces those arguments to “if you disagree with me, you’re wrong”.
And that’s pretty mild for these forums. There are much worse examples:
Do I even need to say anything about this?
To be fair, it’s not like you couldn’t make that same point without using that naughty word 
I mean, I’ve used a bunch of naughty words myself. It depends on how you use them, and where you put them, and how prevalent they are, etc. If you start your feedback with a curse-ladden rant, it’ll put off a lot of people, and it won’t matter if the rest of your feedback is brilliant and amazing. And if you think that’s unfair, maybe it is, but that’s how things are in life in general. If I reply to my co-worker’s idea by saying “that’s f**king stupid” and then spend the next 15 minutes on a rational explanation of why it’s not a good idea and how it could be better, I’m still gonna get in trouble for that. Even Linus Ranting Torvalds was forced to tone it down, despite the fact that every one of his rants was “justified” (in a loose sense of that word).
Here’s the thing: these aren’t reviews. These are forum discussions. People who leave reviews on sites (like Yelp or Amazon) tend to do so when they’re very satisfied or when they’re very unsatisfied. That’s because people normally have better things to do than leave reviews, so something needs to overcome that inertia.
Forums are different. First, people who come here are already predisposed to give their opinions. Second, playing a video game is a much more complex experience than shopping for a whistling kettle on Amazon or eating a sandwich in a cafe. Third, it gets even more complicated when it’s a game that constantly evolves and keeps getting changed. You might love one change, but hate another. And fourth, people tend to hate things that upset the way they’re playing
Long story short, if 100 people say that a Conan Exiles change sucks and they hate it (and nothing more), that’s certainly something to keep in mind, but it’s not nearly as valuable as a 100 people leaving a review about the sandwich they ate in a cafe. It might not even be an indication that there’s a problem, because you don’t know if they’re complaining for valid reasons or not. If you get 100 people saying “this change sucks because of this and that”, that’s much more valuable.
It’s because the game isn’t in a good state. While I agree with Multigun that the game is getting better in many ways and that Funcom does listen to feedback, it’s also true that they messed up many critical things and left them messed up for too long.
For starters, the situation with cheating is awful. I don’t even have to play on a PVP server myself to know that. Funcom simply doesn’t do enough about it.
Second, the introduction of Funcom Live Services was a major screwup. It started with people being unable to connect or losing their characters. For most people, this turned out to be a temporary problem, but there are still people affected by it. That would be bad enough by itself, but it’s not where the problems stop. The new server browser will flood your network, doesn’t allow you to refresh the server list, doesn’t have a button report a server anymore, etc. It’s freaking awful.
Third, even if PVP servers weren’t full of cheaters, the state of PVP itself is rather sad. I play on a PVE-C server, so I know what the combat is like, and this whole horse+lance+cat meta sucks donkey balls. And while I don’t have a proper opinion about raiding, I know that whatever problems with it are, they aren’t being addressed. Whenever Funcom talks about “PVP”, they’re talking about combat, not raiding.
Fourth, the game’s buggy. Really, really buggy. Yeah, they’re mostly annoyances and not game-breaking bugs, but that’s not an excuse. I started playing No Man’s Sky recently (yes, I know it’s a very different game, I’m not going to compare gameplay here), and after a couple of days I realized that I was feeling happy that I didn’t have to do a bunch of weird things to work around persistent bugs. It’s really, really refreshing. Not that it doesn’t have any bugs, but the difference is drastic.
And last, but not least, the game design decisions are … weird. I can’t find a better word, so I’ll try to explain it with some examples:
- They introduced the follower cap and then never enabled it on official server, which actually need it.
- The economy update failed to accomplish most of its stated goals, and hasn’t really done a lot for the economy either.
- The idea to remove the Karmic effect still makes me wonder why anyone on the dev team thought that was something that needed to be addressed.
I confess I haven’t watched your whole video, but I did take a peek at the “TL;DR Final Summary” part, and it looks like we agree on a lot.
So why did I even bother to write this whole wall of text if I essentially agree? Mainly because some of the actually toxic people on the forums are using your video and this thread as a banner to rally behind. And honestly, their toxicity doesn’t need more encouragement.
Bull. Demanding people be fired (a normal around here), and calling them “the most greedy developers out there” (your words), is not “valuable” what so ever. It’s just toxic. Customer’s are “always right” mentality is nothing but a cancer.
Last thing I’ll respond to as you’ve proven my point. I can counter everything you have posted, but as I said, pointless. I know I won’t gain an ounce of valuable feedback from you (neither will Funcom), and I know you aren’t going to listen to anything I said.
Just imagine how these people are around servers who get their order wrong at a restaurant.
You know its really hard to take inputs seriously, when stuff like this is said. If you knew Funcom was like this for 20 years minus the years you’ve been playing Conan Exiles, why did you buy Conan Exiles?
Either you’re exaggerating heavily and the issues aren’t that bad.
There’s something wrong with you.
Or you’re making stuff up.
You don’t do business with a company for decades that you don’t trust, that you don’t have faith in, and don’t meet your expectations.
This is the point we’ve been making for several weeks. You’re not being listened to by Devs because you all are too dramatic, abusive, exaggerating, inconclusive, inconsistent, self-contradict yourselves, incomplete with your responses, and virtual signal with each other way too much.
And then you all cry foul when called out on it. Saying you have some sort of right to be critical while you all simply abuse anyone who disagrees with you. And then play the victim when someone gets abusive right back. Not all of this applies to you personally, but the community as a whole.
Multigun is very much correct here.
I don’t understand what the problem is. With bugs, they literally give you something you copy and paste to fill out. Apparently that is way too hard for this community.
What about FUNdamentaly inCOMplete???
That’s kinda part of my point. Most of the people who complain here are those who still haven’t quit completely and still care about the game enough to bother.
There’s definitely a silent majority that doesn’t post here. Some of that silent majority is playing without ever visiting forums or even having a forum account. Some of that silent majority has quit the game without bothering to post anything. There’s no guarantee that what gets posted on the forums is representative of that silent majority.
For that matter, we don’t even have the proper statistics. Sure, there are Steam charts and whatnot, but the only way to get proper data is to: 1) have mechanisms in place to collect it, and 2) have access to what those mechanisms collected. I don’t know if Funcom have those mechanisms (but I doubt it), but I know that we don’t have access to the really useful data, so anything we extrapolate from the data we can see is only slightly better than guessing.
So when you get 100 people who complain that a change sucks for such-and-such reasons, that’s at least data Funcom can look into and try to do something with it. When you get 100 people screaming that the change sucks, it’s regrettable but not very useful.
Mind, we’ve probably all been guilty of the latter at some point. I know I did it with the Karmic change. I got so pissed off that I just ranted about how they overreacted (nice irony there) and didn’t bother to explain why I thought it was a bad change and what could make it better. 
Again, kinda part of my point. If you go to a cafe and eat a sandwich and it’s bland, you might just never order that sandwich again or maybe never come back to that cafe. If it gives you diarrhea, then you’ll probably be pissed off enough to leave a Yelp review. So tell me, if this game doesn’t have 42k negative reviews, is it really so awful as you seem to imply?
I’m not saying Conan Exiles is perfect. I already wrote what I think about it’s state. I’m just saying that there’s a reason people say non-constructive complaints aren’t useful. That shouldn’t be controversial.
Also, I’m not saying people shouldn’t be allowed to post those complaints. I’m not that much of a hypocrite
And there have been a lot of folks who go through the trouble of leaving really decent feedback and wind up staying even though it isn’t listened to. And there have been some folks who go through the trouble of leaving feedback and then getting delusions of grandeur when it’s listened to. Again, none of that has anything to do with the usefulness of “cathartic complaints” or with the toxicity in the forums. If you think I’m arguing that Funcom shouldn’t improve the way they handle things, you misunderstood my arguments 
Let’s be fair here, he didn’t call you toxic at any point in this discussion. I’ll be honest in my opinion about him: I think he’s burned out from forums and bitter. And I think he has very, very good cause to be like that. It would be too easy for me to say “he shouldn’t be like that”, but just like you’re frustrated with Funcom after 3 years, he’s frustrated with how people on the forums treat him.
Is he right about it not being worth trying to change your mind? Sort of, but not in the way you think. In a better world (i.e. on “better” forums), it would be worth for him to have a nice, reasonable discussion with you, regardless of whether it ended up changing your mind or not. But it’s not worth for him to try to have one, only to have a bunch of toxic people gang up on him again. I can’t speak for him, but that’s how I view his words and that’s what I think of this whole situation.
Yeah, that’s why I said:
As soon as we started the discussion about constructive feedback and toxicity, I knew it wasn’t going to be long before Mr. “If You Still Play A Game You Complain About You Are Either Stupid Or Toxic” jumped in to rehash his same old argument. 
Fortunately, you’ve met him before, you know it’s not worth engaging seriously. Now take that thought and apply it to a whole bunch of people on these forums, and you’ll see why Multigun is burned out
That wasn’t him that was me. And it was just a dumb comment, I didn’t mean any harm.
But you kind of did, and honestly its almost common sense, something that shouldn’t need to be pointed out.
Simply removing an effect of an item (while that effect is pretty much what makes it unique) without doing anything else with it, doesn’t sound right. They literally turned the item into common gear (and same goes for Yog, which was also been somewhat reverted now), and thats it.
I did, but not in my first post about it. My first post was pure, undiluted rage 
Here’s how I should have done it:
In my defense, I was really upset because I was the one who pinged the community managers in that train wreck of a thread that reported it as “cheating”. I believe in doing the right thing, and I thought Funcom would clarify the facts. Instead, they gave a very short and vague reply, closed the thread when the raving got out of hand, and then proceeded to nerf the crap out of the Nemedian in TestLive. 
Understandable, i for one felt equally annoyed xD
Looking forward to see what they will come out with as the new effect for the karmic items 
Dayz was in early access for 5years? I think it was DayZ…
Exactly. I watched most of the video and was nodding my head in agreement, but then it delved deeper into the Mafia that is Funcom and I just rolled my eyes and cut it off.
I have played since EA day one and have seen the body counts going up and down, up when there is new content, then back down. That doesn’t mean people have quit the game, it just means they play multiple games, and flock to new content.
I personally quit playing for six months and then came back for new content. When CE went live the servers were packed and they had to roll out more servers, and I don’t think they ever decommissioned them when the numbers dropped.
I just think @Ceronesthes could have used a better approach to get his point across rather than pointing at server numbers and attacking the companies history (which may have merit, but is totally useless as a way to affect change.)
Yeah, this whole post, just felt the need to say nah.
What does that have to do with the point?
No matter if it was in early access for 50 years it still feels like it’s made to be modded which you can’t do on console.
Its a public forum. So you’ve got a problem there.
I can’t really comment on your views on Norwegian culture, cos I only know a few Norwegians.
But Janteloven is a Danish thing and it has nothing to do with the Danish way being the only right way.
There’s that straw man argument posturing we know and love “some people” “others” etc… all great pivot points to positioning a falsehood.
Now comes the whole tear an argument down, throw in some more faleshoods to then pivot into echoing a position that can’t be substantiated.
Exhibit A - Seed the doubt. “Some would say”
Exhibit B - Attack the data you can see, lay more doubt. Seed more questions with no answers to give the posture that until we get concrete imperical evidence any evidence is neutral. Despite, Steam Charts being public data and giving everyone on any platform/game a healthy index as to how a games health is doing.
Exhibit C - Bait and Switch. Agree, but ensure you ram home the doubt.
Exhibit D - Appeal to Authority, bait and switch your way into building empathy but reinforce the doubt.
Exhibit E - The reinforced doubt. Lets just put aside the original case study of “Silent Majority” as to answering the very question used to seed the doubt with lol.
Exhibit F - Appeal to calmer waters, establish a foothold of trust and high ground. Sure its crap, but it couldn’t be possibly worse right
More bait and switch, “Post complaints, but do so under my conditions”
Yet, the silent majority don’t speak so…one could mount the case base on your own …whatever this was… position that only those who favour Funcoms personalities get heard. Meanwhile thousands of accounts leave each month - because i’m sure of some obsecure reason that has nothing to do with the temperature of the forums
Can anyone point to a post thats been topical for the better part of a year that Code hasn’t asserted dominance in? anyone? Multigun is burnt out …who cares? I didn’t vote the guy as “Chosen” … he’s contributed nothing towards my game play experience.
Lol The more i read of Codes posts the more I see so much of a guy fighting the fight but without a cause.
And Flag away lol.
@ Ceronesthes nailed the video so well. He did way more background research which is compelling and clearly defines a culture within Funcom that continues to this day.
Not a ‘strawman’ - as you can see, Ceronesthes brought up the ‘silent majority’ - and people that don’t care about the game (either positively or negatively) are unlikely to come to the forums, because they don’t care. It’s kinda in the definition. You, for example, announced weeks ago that you had quit the game and uninstalled - yet clearly you are still passionate enough about it to come to the forums and argue with people.
Again, you skip past what was actually said (a suggestion of what CodeMage considers to be more useful data) and straight to accusations.
Appeal to Authority is a logical fallacy based on claiming that something is true because ‘an expert’ says it is true. An admission of having previously posted something unhelpful is not an appeal to authority, nor is it any other form of logical fallacy. It is simply an admission of having also been guilty of the same thing he is criticising.
Nope - direct response to Ceronesthes previous comparison to ‘100 people saying a restaurant’s sandwiches are s**t’ - pointing out that in that example all 100 are providing a ‘review’, and pointing out that is not the case with CE.
Now there is a strawman - from you - CodeMage comments that non-constructive criticism has no value (which is the primary substance of the debate between CodeMage and Ceronesthes in this thread) - yet somehow you pretend that is saying ‘it couldn’t get worse’.
Literally taking the opposite meaning of what was said and arguing against that - another solid strawman.
Just a complete non-sequiter - CodeMage points out that Multigun’s frustration is like a three year version of what Ceronesthes is feeling, just from the other side. That has nothing to do with him ‘asserting dominance’ (which I also haven’t seen anyway - I’ve seen him spend considerable time disagreeing with you - if you feel ‘dominated’ by that perhaps you need to spend less time on the internet…)
As for claiming Multigun has contributed nothing towards your play experience - you have no idea what Multigun has contributed behind the scenes - they are not just a modder, they have provided considerable assistance to Funcom - that is why Funcom made them a ‘Chosen of Asura’. I may feel that Multigun exhibits a lack of patience in interactions, but as CodeMage points out, their frustration is understandable - in the same way as Ceronesthes’ frustration is understandable. It’s not their job to soothe your damaged feelings.
While you, of course, don’t just come to the forums to fight about a game you purport not to care about and claimed weeks ago to have uninstalled. As for repetitive posts - how about the many times you have posted steam charts over and over again making the same point - that those of us that enjoy the game are wrong to do so, because you say so and the steam numbers are your ‘proof’?
The clear debate between CodeMage and Ceronesthes in this thread has centred on the difference between ‘unhelpful criticism’ and ‘helpful criticism’ - both have agreed that criticism is warranted, one has argued that all criticism has use, the other has argued that incoherent criticism with no data is of only minimal use. Yet somehow your determination to claim CodeMage only defends Funcom blindly and never accepts anything else leads to you arguing against things that were never said.
Are you lonely? Are you missing the attention? Is that why you’ve come back to the forums of a game you claim to not even play?
Conan Exiles: Teamien’s cut when?