This is Getting old and Tedious Funcom

Still no answer on why the Updates are released in such poor state…wonder what is so hard about coming forward and say whats going on?

Ehhh. I’m not surprised. Look at how hard a lot of posters are being on them right now. You would think that Funcom coming forward and explaining what’s up would be well received. I don’t believe that at all. If anything I think it would aggravate the haters even more and an already unpleasant forum environment would degenerate further.

I do not Think haters is the right word…more like frustrated…when you see that each update/patch breaks the game…so coming forward and being opened about it might help a lot more then seeing that Half of the things in the patch notes are not fixed, although in the patch notes are reported as fixed…

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Unfortunately, online communities often have a lynch mob mentality that feeds itself. You use the word “frustrated”, which would be an understandable emotion when a game update goes south. In isolation, each individual player would feel frustrated, and most would probably be able to have a civil discussion with a game developer who came forward with an apology and explanation.

However, when you put these individual players in the same room (in this case, social media) and let them talk about their “frustration” with each other, the collective quickly begins to fuel their anger, escalating from frustration to anger to hate to bloody-mad berserk rage, until they’re ready to grab their torches and pitchforks, and woe betide the game developer who steps into their view.

We see this happening every day in social media, and unfortunately it doesn’t always stay in social media but floods into real life when people gather on the streets to break windows and set things on fire.

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Depends on the game IMO. Recently the lead developer of Path of Exile Chris Wilson made a post on reddit that basically said “sorry for delaying the next league, we are doing this because cyberpunk was also delayed and we would be fcked otherwise." He even said "we would be fcked”.

Obviously there are still some salty people, but the reception was positive overall.

And before that, they also had a lot of issues with the most recent league, Heist. It was a s*itshow basically. What did they do? explained why it was like that, apologized and told us what is the new plan in order to make things better moving forward.

Does this bring the playerbase back? No. First because most people only care about the first week of the league, which is long gone. And second because apologies don’t fix the game. But i would bet that many people feel better and are more willing to play on the next league.

I’m not saying that FC should do exactly this and that it would work. Its a different issue and a different game. But it works sometimes, might give it a try.

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They’re actually starting to do that:

So how about we try to make sure it’s well received? I would rather encourage them, through kind words, to offer explanations of why things went wrong, instead of reacting badly to such explanations and making them say “screw improving communication, nothing’s good enough”.

People can be both. “Haters” doesn’t really refer to people who hate the game, it refers to people who “hate” Funcom. It’s perfectly possible to love the game and pile all sorts of rudeness and abuse upon its devs, but it’s not okay.

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I do not see why it should not work in here also…there surely are some serious bugs around that have been on for to much time and we still do not hear anything apart “we will relay this to our dev team” or “we are aware of it and working on it”…when it comes to live it still does not work although patch notes States otherwise.

I do not live in such a world and always try to connect with same minded people. So many of us give good Feedback to Funcom which is just being ignored or poorly implemented.

Currently Funcom is not opened to suggestions, so it seems at least, they say Its other way around. Looking at the latest Updates coming with Siptah you surely can call it…

Funcom way, or no way!

I share a lot of your frustration and criticism of Funcom, but I disagree with this. I think they’re opened to suggestions, because when people speak up, Funcom adjusts things. The problem is that their adjustments are often confusing and frustrating.

And they never explain them, either, which contributes to confusion and frustration. The best we get is a hand-wavy and vague claims, which end up causing more disagreements and frustration.

It’s a tough problem to solve, too. I don’t think that explaining in more detail will work out better, because nearly everyone on the forums harbors a belief that they would do a better job as a game designer than the actual game designers :stuck_out_tongue:

The only thing I can think of to improve the situation is for Funcom to improve QA and release processes, and do the balancing in updates, not hotfixes.

By that I mean that if you have an update that introduces new crafting stations, changes the fishing economy, and streamlines padding and weapon handles, you need to make sure that:

  • the update is not largely broken when you release it, i.e. there are few or no bugs relating the core changes of that update (e.g. no ichor from cooking fish, missing recipes in new benches, etc)
  • subsequent hotfixes fix only what’s broken and nothing else
  • if the player feedback is overwhelmingly against a certain aspect of the balance (e.g. required padding for armor repairs), don’t change it in a hotfix, change it in the next update

Also, it would help tremendously if they had a proper bug tracker instead of using forums for that.

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I’ve always taken this to mean that they have a private internal bug tracking and simply don’t have anything that’s publicly facing other than the forums.

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I agree with most of what you said, but this part got me confused. Wouldn’t that be worse? You make a drastic change that no one likes, make everyone get used to it and learn to live around it, and then revert back a month or two later? To me it would seem like they are making fun of us.

I see that reverting things in a hotfix feels like bad press but this alternative feels worse to me.

Yeah, I should’ve said a “public bug tracker”. And no, I don’t mean that Trello board, that’s usually stale and hard to read (if it’s even still there).

And I also don’t mean “expose their internal bug tracker to public”. I mean, have a public bug tracker where people can report bugs, search for them easily and see their state (open, fixed, won’t fix).

Using forums for bug tracking is just plain bad. I’ve seen a few cases where a bug gets overlooked because it was reported on Friday night. Hell, I’ve had to “bump” such a bug myself, just to make sure a community manager saw it and replied the usual “thanks for the info, we’ve passed it on to the devs”.

I think reverting balance changes in a hotfix is worse, because they’ve had weeks or months to think about the balance change they wanted to try and its ramifications on the rest of the game (whether or not they did that thinking is a separate discussion). Balancing is tricky precisely because everything is interconnected and you can never just change one thing in isolation without it affecting everything else to some degree or another. When you hastily undo one part – and only one part – of the change in a hotfix, it’s never going to end up being better.

That’s precisely the thing. If you make a change no one likes and they’re still complaining about it a month or two later, it’s worth undoing.

I should clarify that I was talking about haphazardly reverting parts of a change, not tweaking the degree of the change. Adjusting a number to be slightly higher or lower is not the same as saying “oops, get rid of this whole thing”.

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I see, that makes sense. When you change an important feature a lot of other things get tweaked around it (Like healing changes also changing how food works, else everyone would keep eating for heals). Reverting one of these things while everything stays the same might create a mess even bigger than the one trying to be fixed. I can see that, now that you said.

Thank you for elaborating your point :smiley:

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I don´t want and need to listen to kind words from Funcom. What I want is that they start finally fixing their game. Is that rude? Maybe. But I am done with listening to words that have no purpose then stalling people until the next dlc is out on steam. They don´t even are able to deploy a small hotfix that has the fixes in it like they say it has in their own patchnotes. This is a joke!

Well to be fair it’s a forced DLC. If you bought Conan Exiles and didn’t want Siptah or didn’t accept the premise a game you bought which at the time was feature complete has now forcefully regressed .

To argue choice is a factor here means you must be new to MMO & software at the same time.

Let’s be clear Siptah May want to ride the early access & dlc marketing wave all it likes … however the reality is this is a 2.0 release of an existing game that is forced onto its player base regardless of intentions or acceptance.

If I as a player want nothing to do with Siptah beta / unfinished thoughts or changes there is no opt out strategy.

Just so we are all on the same page. Let’s cut the “freedom of choice” crap

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That’s not rude at all. Calling them names, suggesting that such-and-such should be fired, writing profanity-laced rants full of expletives, and generally all kinds of personal attacks – all those are rude and all those are plentiful in these forums.

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The larger issue here is that you can verbally pop-out your veins, type in all caps and rage at Funcom all you want and it likely changes nothing. If anything, it probably increases the chances that Funcom completely ignores your feedback. You might as well just scream into a pillow. It’s probably more effective.

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I’m curious. Are you trying to argue that balance changes to online multiplayer games should be opt-in only?

Ever since Funcom made Siptah available as early access, it has been a popular fad on these forums to complain about how the whole game went back to early access.

It doesn’t matter that they were making big sweeping changes way before Siptah. Nobody said “you can’t force the whole game back into early access” back when they changed dodge roll, or introduced momentum-based movement, or announced the follower cap (that they never activated), or introduced the freaking mounts.

But of course, the facts matter less than the feelings. Funcom dared say that the DLC – and only the DLC – is in early access, and that was enough for a handful of people to start telling everyone else that the whole game is now in early access and that we’ve all been victims of bait and switch.

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While this is true - the inverse happens as well where you get people try to use it as a justification for anything that goes sideways.

It’s all so tiresome.

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Yeah, I’ve seen that too. Food heals too little? Early access! Can’t place fish traps in water? Early access!

:man_facepalming: