But when the individuals conveying a different message are insulted, abused, bullied into silence, or into leaving the forums altogether, then it is not a consensus, it is an echo-chamber.
More to the point - @CodeMage wasn’t talking about a message - he stated that when Funcom did attempt more communication, they were met with hostility. That’s not a message, that’s people demanding more communication, then insulting them for doing what was asked. It’s the same as the current claim that keeps coming up that ‘consoles will have to wait 6 months for another hotfix’ despite the fact that Funcom have openly stated they are trying to ensure all platforms receive updates at the same time in future. That certainly happened around Siptah, and you can understand why people might fear it happening again, but if a change has been stated (and it has) you need to see that change fail before you start screaming that it has failed. The past may be a good indication of the future (sometimes), but it does not preclude people learning from that past in order to build a better future. What does preclude a possible better future is people insisting on tearing everything down, because things were bad in the past.
There needs to be an actual message for it to be a consensus. “You suck and you will never stop sucking” is not a message, it’s abuse. “You did something but didn’t do exactly what I wanted” is not a message, it’s entitlement.
That’s true. For example, I predict that someone will soon move the goal posts of this discussion yet again to talk about some reason Funcom sucks other than communication and then reframe what I said about Funcom’s communication in that new context and then, for bonus points, call me names because what I said is “obviously wrong” and therefore I’m a fanboy
Try indica next time. You’re all pumped up brother. I was just defining it. Not condoning or validating any point(s).
Regardless of your position, if you arrived there from reasonable thought and consideration, then your position is a legit stance. Pro, Con, Neutral, if you think it due to logic and reason, it has value. It should not be dismissed by others that do not share it. But this is where alot of productive conversations start.
Prehaps it is not so much the announcement of dlc that has some posters nostrils flaring. Prehaps it is the lack of communication regarding things we are waiting for, patiently enough. Like progress on bugs and hotfixes players are awaiting so they can switch to play mode from refresh only mode.
Statements like,
“Hey everybody, the bug team has had some success with bugs 1, 2 and 3 caused by patch # w/e. They are having some difficulty with bug 4 and could use more player submitted reports providing details. We expect to have bugs 1, 2 ,3 , 4, 5 ,6 ready for hotfix on schedule, we may need a few additional days if the bug team is close to including a fix for bug 7 in the nextbpatch”
, would take so little time to convey, but it would show progress, give an opportunity to request specific information, give players some hope, and show a projected date of completion. It dosent have to be hard info, but accurate to a degree. It would go far for alot of people, remove a topic of repetitive arguments prevalence. I dont think people have a problem with hearing about a new dlc, it looked nice in the video. I dont think players have any objection with contests or community events. I do think players may have a problem with the bug silence. It may be more specific than you think.
You are not wrong. Fanboy, critic, cynic, optimist, you have an opinion. You feel it has value, so you defend its value. We all behave identically in that same scenario.
I only hope to add perspective, not to change context or narration of the topic or thread, just to offer another pov. I hope i did not offend, Sir.
I think you maybe need to stick with the Indica if this is the result Reasonable argument is appreciated.
I’d agree with you on the communication - and I’m pretty sure CodeMage would as well - but there are a couple of points to consider. Firstly, while you are not asking for hard info, just an approximate ‘roadmap’ for bug-fixes - Funcom has historically been very unwilling to go that route, because so many people will then take it as set in stone - no matter how clear they are that it’s a progress report. It’s why so often all they really can say is ‘it’s being looked into’ (and I suspect the community team often doesn’t have that information either, not least because the devs doing the bug-fixes themselves probably don’t know how long it’s going to take). Estimates might be good for goodwill - but estimates that don’t work out could just make things worse.
Secondly, and I rather suspect this may actually be the bigger issue - the community team winds up dealing with so much flak here that it’s not really surprising they’ve dropped to pretty much minimal communication. A member of the team briefly answered a post I had addressed to them earlier today, and before I had a chance to reply they already received a ‘fix your game’ (nothing more, nothing useful about what needs fixing, no acknowledgment that this is a person being spoken to, and not even a person who has any control over whatever it was that was wanted fixed, just ‘fix your game’). So I can understand why they’ve ‘turtled up’ a bit - I’d love them to communicate more, but I don’t think they will, at least until they see a bit more evidence that they won’t just get it in the neck every time they do. Communications like yours help - the more reasonable, non-insulting, actual debates and honest criticism is able to flourish, and the fewer pointless spam, insults without details rubbish posts we see, the better I think our chances are.
Agreed - I just think that at the moment the forums need to also show Funcom that we’re worth communicating with. Yes, we are the customers - but they still communicate the essential information - what we are asking for is actually more contact and more info than a lot of companies would even consider giving customers - and I think we really need to improve the signal to noise ratio around here. Let Funcom know that they can communicate with us and get civilised responses - fair criticism should always be welcomed (if not necessarily agreed with), but right now it’s often hard to spot amongst the screaming and poop-flinging (I’ve got a few things I’d like to give some feedback on myself, but it just doesn’t seem worth it right now until there’s more of this, and less of that…).
The company does not communicate sufficiently with regards to bugs, especially ones that either render the game unplayable or lock one out of features. Especially when an inquiry is made regarding whether something is a bug or a feature. A running list of known bugs and their status would be very utile.
The customer is worth interacting with because of their money.
Full Stop.
Let us never pretend anything other than a business is the foundation of interaction here. People feel (rightly in many cases) that they have been defrauded. They paid for a product, expecting it to work and it’s features to function, or at least not cause the product as a whole to cease functioning. Rather than demanding refund for the product, which we all agree (on at least some level) is worthwhile when it works, they have come to the official forums to report the failure of the product to perform. When those reports meet radio silence, or other issues which are not as crippling to functionality of the product are fixed first, it’s going to incite anger.
I think most of the people here like the game and want it to succeed, but more importantly actually work. If update after update didn’t have a habit of breaking the game as often as it fixes something the few trolls would have far less food and would be much easier to point out.
Let’s not forget the cactus enema our comrades on XBOX were experiencing last year for how many months…
The community may have toxicity in it, but a beaten dog learns to bite every hand.
It is unfortunate that many people do post like petulant children. It’s equally unfortunate that the response is a game of hide and seek.
Perhaps it’s just a microcosm for the modern world. Tantrums and Ghosting being some of the defining social interactions of the Zeitgeist while the hotfix and post release patches meaning many games never leave an early access state, even when they are no longer officially in early access.
I do agree - and communication on the most important bugs should be considered important - I just feel it’s understandable why communication drops to the minimum. For (relatively) minor bugs, I think we all may have to accept that’s the way the games industry works at least right now - and the only real way to change it would be if we all stopped buying games until they were proved bug-free. But the game-breaking stuff should get a response - and, as I’ve argued many times in the past, simply putting out some sort of statement would probably forestall at least some of the anger - but it wouldn’t stop the poop-flinging.
It’s also worth noting a point that I think many people missed in the general anger over the hotfix for legendary chests (that notably failed to address several other major issues) - it came out when it did for several reasons: as many have pointed out, it was a simpler quicker fix than the major bugs, it was also reported a good week earlier at least (with quite a lot of outcry at the time of its own), and Funcom was actively responding to the player base by trying to get a hotfix out to consoles as soon as possible after PC. But the forgotten point is that bundled in with that hotfix was a hotfix for Conan Outcasts (which I believe is a Japanese version of the game, possibly console only), fixing a fully game-breaking issue for that playerbase - which is a pretty good reason to get that hotfix out without waiting for other fixes as well. (The subsequent hotfixes, fixing the original hotfix, were not such a good idea - that was pretty tone deaf…)
I’ve used the ‘beaten dog’ analogy to describe us myself in the past - so I don’t deny it’s relevance. But I feel the same, to at least some extent, applies to the community team as well - if their hand is bitten every time they stretch it out, it’s understandable they don’t want to keep doing it. Sadly, I question whether there is truly a way out of this - but if there isn’t, then in the end these forums will die off, and I don’t want that. Which is why I feel the best we can do is keep trying, keep the reasoned arguments (and quality criticism) going, and try to keep the poop-flinging to a minimum, and hope that Funcom sees the effort and is able to meet us halfway. Because it’s what I see as the best chance for some sort of positive dialogue.
Yes. An unfortunate situation that feeds off itself and risks getting ever worse. I wish it wasn’t.
Without question, in my opinion. And I worry that I see no greater chances of solutions there either. I don’t know where we’re headed, but I’m pretty sure right now that any light ahead is likely to be an oncoming train… The best I can come up with there is the same as here - just keep trying, because what’s the alternative?
If I say “teach your grandmother to suck eggs”, will you take it as insult?
Unfortunately, I can’t partake all the time if I want to do my job or be a family man
Trying being called names on a daily bases for the several days, see if you’ll avoid getting pumped up
My favorite was “condescending piece of ■■■■■”. That one had some special oomph to it.
You’re preaching to the choir here. When I get dismissive, it’s usually because I already tried reasoning with someone and they weren’t reasonable in return. Although I do admit that I sometimes get dismissive right away, if it’s the start of a new thread right next to several others about the same thing, rehashing the same fallacies already seen in those other threads.
I’ve lost track where and when I’ve said what, but one of the things I commonly say in these discussions is that I really wish they would give us a decent bug tracker instead of doing it on the forums.
As long as they use forums to communicate about bugs, it’s never going to be enough, because forum topics get buried and new ones don’t get linked to the old ones and … well, it’s a mess, and it’s a mess that bug tracking software is designed to tame.
People don’t understand the lifecycle of a bug, nor the difficulties that can arise in diagnosing or fixing one. And that will probably never change in the lifetime of Conan Exiles as a game. A bug tracker wouldn’t help fill that void in education, but it would allow them to point the people to the status and history of the bug. It would allow them to mark the bug as “blocked - cannot repro” or “waiting for prioritization” or whatever.
I’m enough of a pessimist that I don’t think that would improve the situation much. The only thing that would improve the situation substantially would be to somehow make the QA outcomes better than they currently are. I can’t presume to say why their QA doesn’t work well, but whatever the reason for it, it’s undeniable that it leaves a lot to desire.
This is the kind of stuff you might be able to see on a bug tracker, depending on how much detail it’s set up to show to outsiders. Here’s a top-notch example: https://jira.mongodb.org/issues/
I wouldn’t, in a million years, expect a video game studio to expose something like this. MongoDB is an open source database and its users and customers are people who not only understand software development, but also maintain certain civility and etiquette you expect from professionals.
But if you take this approach to bug tracking as an aspirational goal, you still might come up with something that would mollify some of the players. The reasonable ones
I hope you don’t take this wrong, but this is why I said that people don’t understand how bugfixing works. First of all, there can only be a projected date of completion once you’re sure you know how to fix the bug. Believe it or not, there’s a shіtload of work to be done before that stage, and it’s all work that you cannot estimate. You simply can’t. It’s literally impossible, I shіt you not.
Right now, I’ve got a bug assigned to me at work, and I’m in my 3rd day of trying to understand what the gibbering fuсk is going on in that part of code. True, I’ve only been at that company for a month now, so I’m fairly new there, but that’s not the only reason. It’s deep inside a huge C++ codebase, it’s multithreaded and distributed, it has async code with executors and futures – in short, it’s an insanely complicated beast and I’ve spent 3 days so far just looking at that region of code and learning what each part of it does normally.
Nobody on my team expects me to tell them when it will be done. That’s not because I’m relatively new to the company, or because I’m an inexperienced programmer (I’ve been doing this for living for 22 years now), it’s because everyone knows that you can’t know when it will be done until you’ve found out what’s wrong.
Now, I’m hoping that this explanation will make you understand just how screwed up this can be, but even if it does, you’re just one guy in the sea of people here. Two weeks from now, this thread will be buried and forgotten, and 5 other people will be demanding to know exactly when we can expect thralls to stop getting stuck on what looks like perfectly flat ground.
As for how little time that information would take to convey, you’re right, once the information is in the right hands to be conveyed, it takes little time to convey it. The effort to get it in the right hands and in the right format is something else.
Don’t get me wrong, it can be done. I’ve shown you one example above. But having that information consistently available requires a process. If the company doesn’t have that process in place – and Funcom obviously doesn’t, otherwise they would be doing it already – that means that the process needs to change, and I’ll leave it as an exercise to you to look up the complexities involved in establishing and changing software development processes. Suffice it to say that there’s a whole freaking industry specializing in just that.
And the real kicker is that establishing a process like that might have consequences people here don’t expect. I’ve worked at companies that have that level of visibility towards their customers. Guess what? The development is substantially slower due to that. It’s completely normal and expected, and the customers of those companies are happy with that tradeoff. Do you think players here would be equally happy if the development was slower than it already is?
Like I already said before, players have a problem with silence, and they also have a problem with communication.
Not all of them, true. Some of us were really happy every time Funcom tried to improve. We would express that sentiment on these forums by thanking Funcom for letting us know and communicating better.
Guess. What. Happened.
If you guessed “you were called fanboys”, congratulations! Funcom communicated better, but they didn’t communicate what people wanted to hear. Not because they chose not to, but because people’s expectations often exceed what’s actually feasible.
No, we don’t. That is the crux of the problem here. You were polite and civil and reasonable. The vast majority of forum goers aren’t. It is categorically not the same behavior when some of us do what you did and others call them names and throw temper tantrums.
If I had to blame anyone for the current state of the matters – and I don’t care whose feelings are hurt by this – I would blame Funcom for not being much stricter about forum moderation. These forums weren’t always as toxic as they are now. We are where we are because of the hands-off approach to these forums, an approach that has lead to many nice, polite, and reasonable people leaving. Those who stayed are either not as nice as they used to be, or they’re still relatively new.
I’m aware of the effect it has had on myself. I won’t pretend that I started out exceptionally nice, but I was nowhere near as acerbic and abrasive as I am now. Half the time I post here, I don’t like myself. But then I get called a “condescending piece of ■■■■■” and I decide that I might as well live up to the name.
The biggest difference in the player vs engagement team is that the former are paying for the game, while the latter are being paid to engage with the former.
Do they deserve a raise?
Most likely. I don’t know what they get paid, but most customer facing positions are criminally under compensated. Also, I doubt they have a huge wealth of information flowing to them (for any number of reasons, many of them likely very legitimate given the realities of game development, programme troubleshooting, and deployment to variable platforms). Given an ineviable task, lacking the tools to execute efficiently…
Wow, this really is a microcosm of modernality.
Also, I was unaware how bad the Outcastes problems were. Glad it’s become playable.
My point was not so much that their priorities were off, it was that the optics were very bad and the assumption that the priorities are off is not an unreasonable expectation. But that’s very quibbly.
We’ll proceed to close this thread. Thank you for the feedback provided those of you who did it in a constructive way.
If the issue still persists after this update, please feel free to send us a new report.
Reasonable argument is appreciated.
