TIME FOR A PUBLIC STATEMENT -The Reply

Conan Exiles General Discussion Feedback
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Hello Funcom Team,

More specifically I would like to reply to Thomas for the following statement first

ThomasJProducer

1d

@dekkar, I understand that you are frustrated, and I appreciate your passion for the game and community. However, that is as far as I will address your post. Why? Because you make demands and threats, and you single out one of our employees. Please refrain from that.

@Sayuri, thank you! Your post is critical and tough, but fair and full of constructive feedback which we can take to heart and act upon. I wish it had stood alone so I could respond without also locking the thread, but I will do both.

Firstly, yes I am passionate about the game and the community, over the past 4 years I have invested thousands of hours in this game and provided multiple servers for its players to enjoy the game on many different levels. From basic vanilla to fully modded communities. I started with mods personally when I saw the livestream about the scaffolding mod, if you can remember that old video. I am also aware that you cannot address the vast decrease in the player base, nor the financials of the company publically and I did not expect such. The purpose of my original message was to bring awareness, nothing more.

Although I do want to address your thoughts on my “ultimatum” and figured I would be more constructive.

When I said, if you silence us, we will leave, this is because and I’m sure you have experienced this, when you talk to someone and they constantly ignore you, eventually you just walk away. This does not mean I’m quitting the game or leaving you, after speaking to many people after posting only 2 of you thought that is what I was implying. Nor was it a demand you do something or else, it was simply stating if I can’t voice my concerns here, where should it be?. Please note it was posted intentionally in the SUGGESTIONs section of the forums, because it was a SUGGESTION that you make a public statement to stop all of the drama.

Walking away from Conan to me means shutting down multiple communities and leaving my friends and community members to fend for themselves. Destroying personal relationships I’ve spent your entire Conan Exiles development cycle growing into a positive and accepting group of friends and this is not something I plan on doing.

It took a lot for me to return to the funcom forums and make my post, and you dismissed it. Wished others posts weren’t in mine so you could address them and what delete my post? My stance has always been “why bother” when it comes to reaching out in the past, because frankly Funcom just didn’t listen no matter how polite or nice I was. However with the recent outbursts on the forums in multiple threads, I’m sure your team is struggling to deal with all the additional people here losing their minds over the noticed changes.

My previous post was comprised of factual data and nothing more, it was a suggestion to you to stop hiding and simply publicly address the issues, rather then letting the community tear itself apart. On the forums there is a policy where people can report your post because they simply didn’t like the subject matter. This should be removed, only Funcom should be flagging toxic posts, or at the very least, hand picked forum moderators with previous forum moderation experience. Interpreting text can often be difficult, especially when you attach various emotions to it on your own. Not to mention language translations that have some people thinking words like Debauchery (immoral on the border of sinful activities, proper term to describe the recent verbal assaults people have put on each others threads, twitter posts, facebook, etc.) only have single meanings. Leaving this to public census to silence the heretics is bad form, and results in valid useful information being locked/deleted because legit concerns become buried in toxicity and need to be put to an end.

You mentioned that you wished Sayuri’s post stood alone so you could address it, however why should the community stand alone? We are currently standing together and standing up strong all in our own ways to show your team that we do not agree with changes being made and don’t like the way you have been treating us. Remember, we are the community YOU BUILT. Well, what’s left of it at least.

You asked me not to call out members of your team, however if you re-read my post I didn’t call out Iggy for anything, I called out his auto-reply posts. Because COMMUNITY DIVISION is not something that should be addressed with an auto-reply? Or do you disagree? But after telling me not to call out people, you called me out? This seems a bit double standard don’t you agree? But I am okay with dealing with the Hate posts and messages I received due to your influence.

You disagreed with Sayuri about where to post concerns like this, well what do we do when you haven’t listened to any of the other methods. These are not things that should be hidden behind an email address no-one reads or replies too.

Now to address the ACTUAL issue and reason for my suggestion.

Recently several community youtubers posted their findings in video format, and although you might not have enjoyed the content, it is media just the same. The stuff they revealed was legitimately included in the Test-live and the information was not portrayed to the community who would be testing it. Other content media creators reached out via social media and were met by hate and dismissal.

The changes resulted in a multi-thread division of Funcom Defenders vs Funcom Concernists. Where the Defenders side-tracked posts with Funcom can do no wrong, and the Concernists tried to voice how damaging the changes would be to their experience in the game.

In the past several livestreams the team at Funcom has advised they would try to be more transparent. We are months later and its still happening. Not only is it still happening, but we are now getting mixed messages. Below are two examples (name was removed, and wording changed slightly to protect the poster);

Funcom - These changes are bugs and the content creator may have “jumped the gun” on these changes and we ask in the future to report these bugs to us first.

Funcom- We have decided to work on additional bug fixing for 2.2 and not the intended combat changes.

Okay well which is it? Was it a bug or was it intended? Are you dis-crediting everyone who noticed the changes, or are you simply stating that these changes were coming, they just weren’t meant to be in test-live yet as they still under review, or meant for a patch further down the road? Is this why you didn’t mention it yet? Or are you now reverting the changes because the Community reached out?

You see we as long time fans test every test-live and go through all things with a fine tooth comb. Personally I do this myself just to make sure that the players on my servers can get easy answers to changes. (Ex) “What bench is X item in now?”

The only way to stop one side of the community from attacking the other is to make a public statement concerning the major issues everyone is looking at. With the truth made public in a statement, the Concernists will be appeased (at least temporarily) and the Defenders could use your public statement to help prove it will get better. Leaving everything in the dark when major issues arise only complicates things and results in hurt feelings.

All “press” is good “press”. This is the motto of many, and it stands true because no matter what the press says, I hope you realize that people stopped talking for just a moment about what other games they were going to play and looked at Funcom.

My suggestion, I will state it again would be to take advantage of the added attention and release a statement that can both unify this community and put the faith back in its players. As you can see clearly outlined in the “data” in my previous post, and I’m sure you are well aware, the number of us that “care” about you IS dwindling. This is not an opinion, simply a fact. (Or do you have data proving otherwise?) No amount of brown-nosing and throwing endless heart emoji’s at you is going to change that. We NEED your HELP.

I get you don’t like being told negative things, and it took an incredible amount of courage for every single person to post here on the forums knowing that they face hate, discrimination and harassment, or their voices will just be silenced. I know how hard your team actually works and the struggle of managing large community while trying to keep all players happy to a moderate degree. I get it. I chose my words very carefully previously, and will continue to do so in the most unbiased way, because I’m actually one of the Defenders who only recently became a Concernist.

If you would like cut and pasted copies of all of the data from the above statement to clarify any of these points, I would be happy to provide it, though I’m sure you already have/know these things, I don’t think it is required to collect all of the posts together here.

All of us are invested in this game, all of us have spent money to play it. I don’t speak FOR anyone, but I am willing to STAND UP for them when they cannot.

To anyone who reads this post, if you agree with the message that the community should be able to stand up to hold Funcom accountable, please click the like button to show your support.

If you disagree with this, please understand this is simply a SUGGESTION to Funcom to release a public statement to address the misinformation and to help the community return to a supportive, excited and super hyped group of people excited to log into Conan.

So Funcom, I pass the peace pipe to you. Ball is in your court.

-Dekkar

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By this point i’m pretty much desensitized to Funcom’s balancing decisions (its easy when you aren’t even playing lately), but there is one thing about all of this that bothers me.

Patch 2.2 goes on testlive. Its known that this is an experimental branch meant for testing new features, changes, and ultimately getting feedback. Feedback about how the community feels about the changes (on some rare occasions, if enough people quickly complain on the main post), and also bugtesting.

Patch notes get released, we have a few changes, nerfs, and bugfixing (a ton of bugfixing, btw). Now, here is what grinds my gears:

~there is a good enough explanation on what might have caused the changes on the current testlive patch, so i’ll remove my comments about it.~

There are so many changes that i simply don’t understand how this goes unnoticed. Does anyone even check if items simply change values outta nowhere? Apparently not.

Getting back to the “its on testlive, we gonna fix it”, well, does that mean that if people didn’t go out of their way no developer would have noticed it and it would go live? Are we just working for FC to avoid having everything messed up now, thats it?

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I honestly can’t tell if you are deliberately taking the second comment out of context, or you are misunderstanding to a heavy degree. Against my better judgement formed from past experiences, I’m going to try to provide education on the matter.

In the last dev stream, Alex stated that 2.2 was internally referred to as the combat update. That has now changed, which the Funcom employee referenced and said they decided to focus specifically on bug fixing this particular patch. He further replied that some of the intended combat changes made it in (stamina), and other intended changes would come out after more work is prepared on them in a future patch.

Said Funcom employee has also repeatedly stated that the damage nerfs to weapons (that weren’t in the patch notes), durability problem with shields, and thralls taking durability damage to their weapons are all bugs and are being treated as bugs. If it was an intended change that they decided to address based on feedback, they would just say so. For some reason, it’s easier for certain people to assume it’s some mass conspiracy though.

Based on your context, I’m going to assume you mean people who feel negatively towards the company and game are afraid to post their thoughts. You’ve got that backwords. There’s a reason a lot of the helpful members of the community are gone from the forums now, and it’s not from Funcoms actions.

Guess you don’t come around to the forums much.

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Hello Multi-gun,

As you are the Funcom Defender listed in my post, there is no reason here for us to debate issues. Asking for a clear statement about what is going on isn’t a bad thing.

Aren’t we supposed to be able to come to you for HELP as a Chosen?

Does Funcom pay you? Or do you volunteer your time like the rest of us?

Now don’t take my meaning here out of context, I fully appreciate your specific hard work on all aspects of Conan. Including your mods, and how you stood up to take over mods from others to keep them updated so players could keep using them. However, the post isn’t about this VERSION of Test-live. Its about the negativity and sidetracking of posts on the forums and the finger pointing. Which you literally just did to me like 3 times. Its is about getting clear and detailed information from the DEVELOPER so we all know what is going to on.

It is creating mass confusion around the community and we are simply asking for clarification.

“Enough of the resistance between the company, content creators, server owners and players.” - Sayuri

Maybe mod creators should be added to their statement.

This is what the post is about.

It is clear that you chose to read only partial details in my posts, and I understand it was long. However I did state I don’t post on the forums often, but I have been with the community since beta. Just because I’m not constantly berating people on the forums, doesn’t mean I’m not one of the people currently playing the game or invested in what happens with its future.

While I do appreciate your voice here, I would also like your support, because if you are as close to the Developers as you make yourself out to be, maybe you could get them to just post some clarity in a single location for all of us to see.

Thanks again Multigun!

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If you post false information, be prepared to be called out on it by anybody, especially somebody who has knowledge on the matter. I was hopeful that you would take my statement and admit you were wrong and take the opportunity to learn, but people don’t do that anymore.

Read the whole thing. Along with your threatening post from before.

I corrected your false statement with education. Am I supposed to support “the community” no matter what they say? Didn’t know that was “my job.”

And this, RIGHT HERE, is why Asuran’s and other’s don’t post anymore. Did you just seriously ask me that question? You’re own my discord, how many times have I bent over backwords to make mods, help people with modding, work tirelessly on the dev stream summaries, and to help people FOR FREE. How many times have I been sick and STILL worked on creating FREE mods…and this is what you come back with?

I think it’s time I start to think about why I bother to do any of it. You, and a lot of others recently have made that oh so very clear.

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While I largely agree with the sentiment of your post, I really hate this particular trope and wish people were mature enough to avoid it. I can’t even begin to tell you how freaking tired I am of seeing people branded as “Funcom Defenders”, “white knights”, “fanboys”, or any other variant on that same theme.

It’s in human nature to categorize things, but people then go a step further and use it to dismiss and invalidate. “Oh, you’re a Funcom Defender, I won’t bother trying to change your mind or even debate a specific issue with you.”

It adds nothing to the discussion. If you look at my post history – provided you have time you want to spend on something as miserable as that – you’ll find that I’ve both criticized and defended Funcom. And yet, one thing stands out: when I defend Funcom, there are always people who jump in to call me a “white knight” or a “fanboy”; but when I criticize Funcom, you’ll never see one of those so called “Funcom Defenders” call me any names. They don’t call me a “hater”, nor do they slap any other label on me. If they have something to say, they engage me as I am and my argument as it is.

What @Multigun wrote is true:

I’ve seen many nice, helpful people either disappear from the forums, or post very occasionally, or turn bitter. I agree that this “exodus” wasn’t caused by Funcom’s actions directly. It’s been caused by toxic people on these forums.

No, “we” aren’t. I know I’m bitter and pissed beyond being reasonable, even though I’ve been trying to tone it down, and if you’re honest, you’ll admit you’re pissed off too. No, your previous post was not comprised of “factual data”, and neither that one nor this one is “simply asking for clarification”. If you wanted to simply ask for clarification, you would’ve simply asked for clarification, in fewer words and less emotionally.

And it’s not that I blame you, either. Like I said, I’m pissed off at Funcom and have been very vocal about it in my recent posts. But don’t take it out on specific people. A post in which you singled out Ignasis by name is not “factual data and nothing more” and it’s not “simply asking for clarification”. A post calling Multigun a “Funcom defender” is more of the same.

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Think about the overwhelming amount of people that use and love your mods. They might not come to forums and personally thank you for the hard work, but they are out there. Some of your mods never left my modlist and i wouldn’t play this game without them, same goes for Pippi. Dev recaps help a lot of people that simply don’t have the time to sit down and watch streams.

I know that sometimes it feels like there are only negative people everywhere and there is no point in helping anyone, but its not for them, right?

Thank you, mate

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Only you can determine that, but if it helps, I’m one of those who are grateful both for your mods and your presence on the forums, and I’m sad to see you burned out :frowning:

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You know,

I made a comment about this whole resistance about everything and that’s exactly what I meant. There’s still resistance because someone stated their opinion. That’s what’s wrong with this forum. You can’t state an opinion about how you feel without someone flaming it. Let alone being attacked for stating how you feel. The statement “we” isn’t meant to literally mean the entire community, it’s proper English when speaking about a game in it’s entirety, not speaking for the entire community.

Sadly, written words don’t reflect tone of voice and this is why helpful people or people who are being constructive leave.

The post is there and no one had to say anything at all, so really I’m going to state the same thing I’ve been taught my entire life “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all”.

I’m once again going to say I would personally like a clarification because it’s getting to a point where one thing is said in a devstream, another thing is said on the forums, another on the discord. Some clarity with a game I’ve got over 3,000 hours in would be nice.

Because of all this “resistance” and content creation, mod creation what have you is exactly why everyone is so bitter with each other. Stop attacking each other, it’s not constructive and it’s just childish. No one is better than anyone and no one should ever like they can’t express how they feel about the game because of the fear that they are going to be flamed on a forum post.

Forums are here so that we can express how we feel and ask Funcom for that clarity about how we feel and that’s why we choose the forums - regardless of if we’ve posted 1,000 times on it or just once. It shouldn’t matter if we’ve been in the forums a long time or not, many of us use the forums to get information from them without ever saying anything so when we do say something, like myself who doesn’t post on the forums, it’s because we genuinely feel something about this game and genuinely want to get some clarity for confusion etc. This has been going on for 4 days. Every time points are made about the expression and feels for the game it’s sidetracked by the toxicity of people wanting to be the voice of reason.

No one, again, no one is better than anyone because each and every one of us makes a difference when it comes to feedback and suggestions.

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Stop going down that rabbithole you’re going down. Not everyone who disagrees with you for good reason is a paid company shill. I think you have no right call out central pillars of the community. Even if everything you accused Multigun of is right (hint: none of it is), it would be 1000 times outweighed by the amount of work he put in. But I guess ad hominem is the default if you’re out of arguments but can’t move from your position due to ego.

Also your entire post is mostly a conspiracy filled rant. I suggest you take some time to summarize your actual arguments before attacking others with baseless accusations. Make it digestible if you want to convey it to a broader audience.

There is no courage involved in raging on the internet. If you don’t like Funcom’s conduct, you can either criticize it in a proper, respectful manner. Or you leave. Threats are never okay.

“Well then, get your sh+t together. Get it all together. And put it in a backpack. All your sh+t. So it’s together. … And if you gotta take it somewhere, take it somewhere, you know, take it to the sh+t store and sell it… Or put it in a sh+t museum, I don’t care what you do, you just gotta get it together.”

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Honestly, that never crossed my mind.

You tell me. I certainly never said that.

…for which there was absolutely no reason to tag him. You chose to do so. I consider that singling him out. What constitutes as auto-reply is another matter, but not really the topic here.

I tagged you as I addressed two people in my post, and I felt it appropriate to differ between the responses. I think it was already obvious to any reader who I was addressing, so I don’t see the tag causing additional discomfort.

I never said that either. However, we do clarify in the sticky post that this forum is for game suggestions, not out-of-game communication suggestions, so an argument could be made.

Please don’t be. Report them, and we will be happy to review and act on them as appropriate.

I gather that’s the intro done with… :slight_smile:

I have in recent conversations repeatedly come back to Hanlon’s razor: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”
“Stupidity” in this case refers to not thinking things through, not being fully informed, making mistakes; not a lack of intellect.

You and others appear to think the test-live patch notes did not match the test-live patch content due to malice. That we tried to sneak changes by you without you noticing.
I can assure you it was… well… see above. It was mistakes.

Please consider the following possibilities for this mismatch:

  • Some changes could have been unintended side effects of other (intended) changes
  • Some changes could have been intended but were not properly documented in time for test-live
  • The list of documented changes provided to the one writing the patch notes could have been incomplete (after all, there were hundreds of changes)
  • The patch notes author could have have misunderstood something and it was perhaps not fully reviewed in time
  • Because this is a test-live patch, not a live patch impacting a live product, all of the above could have been done with less time and scrutiny, simply to allow for more resources to be spent on development and supporting the community

Are any of those plausible? Maybe all of them? If yes, then why choose to believe and/or claim none of them are true and that we would for some reason be out to deceive or hurt you?

And if no, then honestly there is little use to talk. If you actually believe us to have malicious intent toward our player community, I really see no basis for conversation. We can simply agree to disagree and walk our separate ways.

I don’t want us to do that.

My takeaway here is much the same as your first post: frustration and passion. Thank you for keeping it more in line with the forum guidelines this time around, though this is still not what this forum is intended for. We’ll leave the thread open though. No harm in that.

Contrary to what you say, I do like being told negative things. How can we improve if we don’t know what people are unhappy with? We greatly appreciate feedback and suggestions.

I don’t like to be told things in an unconstructive (i.e. negative) way, however. Staying constructive and level-headed is always helpful in any conversation. Let us continue to do that. :handshake:

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there goes 90% of the posts on this forum lol.

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Although, I agree with this - what this statement meant was towards other people. There is no reason to flame anyone

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@CodeMage Thank you for taking the time to write all that. I couldn’t have said it better myself (I wish I was this good with words). I have my own opinion about this whole “drama”. I don’t appreciate youtubers rallying people to post “their” frustration on the forums, I don’t appreciate “concernists” blowing the topic out of proportion either. I am personally fed up with all the negativity on the forums and not once or twice I have been called out for simply trying to help.

I don’t need a public statement from Funcom. I don’t want to hear another yes, we know, we are working on it, you will need to have a little patience. I don’t know how long this whole game transformation is going to take and I am not sure whether I will have the patience to see it through.

What I want to see though is a patch that goes live and have the major “unintended” issues fixed. I am a bit sceptical about whether these issues were indeed “unintended” but I will take Funcom’s word for it. Even though I don’t support the msg Wak sent, I somewhat understand his frustration as someone who used to be a lot more active on TestLive.

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@ThomasJ - I really appreciate you taking the time to clarify much of the information provided.

I fully agree with your response that there are so many possible things that could have happened to result in the massive “defense” vs “conspiracy” that has made the forums incredibly difficult find all of the information required. Especially when there are so many different threads about the same topics.

Even this post was near sidelined by people attempting to be “right” over an opinion.

I do apologize if any of my @ symbol things were taken as “calling someone out” as people have said, I prefer discord and don’t use forums overly actively, however I simply attempted to relay the feeling that was brought to me about the forums into view. If my quotes were taken out of context or made you “feel” a specific way I do apologize.

There are however people with “influence” in your community and how they “choose” to use that influence is entirely up to them. We(Okay just speaking for myself here) Find it sometimes difficult to get through all the “Part” wagging and “right/wrong” attitudes to get to the core of what will be coming so that as a multiple-server owner I can be as prepared as possible for anything that comes out.

Some of us are in all Conan youtuber channels, in the mod channels, in the forums, watch the livestreams, talk to modders, talk to Server Admins, and between all of it, it can often be difficult to dig through the truth. So yes, I approached the forums again, and yes I read through most of the topics over the past week, and there is so many sides to arguments, that when I finally find a dev related post it says “we’ll look into it” but never see a reply.

What I did notice specifically was the constant PVP on the forums, and I voiced my concern related to that. Sure could have “shortened” my opinion and I could have asked in different ways, but the result was simply to bring awareness to the amount of “opinion” that gets thrown around. (My threads show people of various opinions attacking either myself, or each other)

Though all of that you might not consider constructive, at the very least ThomasJ I hope it brought you some awareness to what the average (non-influencer) faces every time they come here to speak, and just don’t happen to know the right way to do things. If you simply think High Level, and take the words I’m saying away, and simply look at the reactions, I think you will easily see the reason for this entire post.

Again I 100% appreciate fully the amount of work your team does, and that this was escalated to you to make a public statement on the issues.

(To those that replied about how poor my post was, I as well appreciate the time you took to show your thoughts here and how difficult it can be for someone who is not an expert in these things)

Thank you so much for your valuable time.

Dekkar

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Thank you for the kind words. For my part, I would trade being “good with words” for being calm and constructive like @Jim1:

Sadly, I’m not, so I end up writing walls of text :wink:

I don’t need a public statement from Funcom, but a detailed post in its own separate thread would be very welcome. Not a “please be patient, we’re working on it” kind of post, but a post that actually clarifies the situation.

At the very least, I would like to see a list that clarifies exactly what was done on purpose in the TestLive patch, in detail. The policy of not writing detailed changelogs is understandable, but I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that it has backfired badly.

It’s not just about Wak’s video anymore. For example, Chaoruk has reported that the legendary kits are no longer a 100% drop from Unnamed City bosses. There’s no mention of that in patch notes. Is that on purpose? Is that an oversight? A bug? Who knows? Funcom should know.

Going one step further from there, it would be great if Funcom communicated better about the changes in their decisions. Case in point: the 2.2 update is no longer the “combat update”. Wouldn’t it have been better for everyone involved if they had announced that in a separate, prominently positioned thread, instead of dropping it in a post by a producer who doesn’t even work on Conan Exiles, on a thread that got closed? (No offense meant to ThomasJ. I’m glad he did what he did, I just don’t think that’s the best Funcom can do.)

Finally, we would probably all appreciate it if they would actually sit down and write a careful explanation of what they’re working on and where the game is headed. They don’t owe anyone that, but it would be nice.

I haven’t actually watched the video and I probably won’t. Call me a curmudgeon, but I’ve yet to find a YouTube video that presents the information I want to know clearly, concisely and without endless chatter. I’m one of those dinosaurs who prefers books to movies and likes videos only when they actually show something that would be cumbersome to describe in words :smiley:

Having said all that, I don’t blame anyone for getting frustrated or “jumping the gun” in this particular case. The way Funcom has been handling Conan Exiles this year has inexorably led to this point.

Just think about where we are: anyone who complains about the game being buggy is likely to be told they should’ve helped with TestLive. So if you want to do the due diligence and try to prevent another buggy mess from hitting live, you have to spare 100 GBs on your drive, at least. And now that even the TestLive patch notes are a mess and unclear, if you want to be well informed, you’ll need to spend another 230 GBs (or so) on the DevKit, provided that you have a machine that can run it.

Frankly, I can’t be arsed to do that and I don’t see why anyone should have to do it. And conversely, I’m grateful to anyone who actually does all that, even if they end up “jumping the gun”. I might not be Wak’s (or any YouTuber’s) fan, but the fact that he goes to all that effort speaks for itself.

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First of all, thank you, @ThomasJ, for writing what you did and even more for writing it that way. It’s refreshingly direct, less “corporate” and more “human”. And no, this is not an underhanded criticism of those who have previously had to reply in a more “corporate” and less “human” tone. The job of a community manager is tough enough, but the constraints placed on them make it even tougher :slight_smile:

I’m simply glad someone is willing to engage us more directly here :slight_smile:

I’ve been wondering about that. Summarizing patch notes for live updates is perfectly reasonable. But in TestLive, it seems to have backfired spectacularly. Can you clarify whether the patch notes are incomplete because of the effort it would take to provide a detailed changelog, or because you guys don’t think people would want to sift through hundreds of changes? Or perhaps none of the above?

I apologize if this is an unwelcome or presumptuous opinion, but do you really think that’s the best way to treat TestLive? To put things in context, nobody plays TestLive to have fun with it. People play it either to try to help test the game, or to find out about the upcoming changes as early as they can, or both.

So, given that at least some of the players go to TestLive to help with QA, don’t you think they should be better informed? After all, you wouldn’t send a patch with no notes or incomplete notes to professional testers in a QA team. Wouldn’t it stand to reason that the QA volunteers should also be given enough information?

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I wonder which came first, entitled babyraging gamers or coward devs who can’t speak without first consulting their lawyer.

…But, it doesn’t really matter which came first because only devs can change it. Gamers are a massive unorganized group, devs are fewer and more organized and have access to take definitive actions. It seems ridiculous to be so upset over unlisted changes on a test server but the lack of communication from funcom (and this goes for most game companies) is becoming an insult to players. Lack of response to player input just shows how little respect developers have for the playerbase… which is pretty ironic considering the average player has a gained a lot of knowledge about game development and design compared to 15 years ago when it was like magic to most players. That knowledge makes gamers a much tougher audience than we used to be but it also makes us capable of actually helping, if devs could listen and communicate.

edit: but gamers need to be nicer and not call devs cowerds as often. that would also help 8)

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@ThomasJ To complete Codemage’s questions with another one ( that I think is also important to ask ) , if we don’t get extensive patchnotes for TestLive , how can we know what to report as a bug and what to not report as part of unlisted changes ?

Furthermore , having extensive patchnotes would also mean that people testing would have a list of things to test out which will lead to more iterations of tests (so more potential to find a hard to reproduce bug on a specific change ) , since with a clear list people will tend to use it as a guide to what they have to test out.

As said above , thank you for reaching out to us in a more direct manner, and hope my questions are constructive for a better future :wink:

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I love that question, because it really underscores how important it is to get proper patch notes. I imagine there are many possible specific answers, but I believe they can all be boiled down to one of the following three:

  • “If it’s not in patch notes, don’t report it.”
    • If you do this, you won’t catch anything that was unintended before it goes live.
  • “Report everything.”
    • This would be perfectly reasonable if we had an actual bug tracker. Instead, we report bugs on a forum. Flooding the forum with bug reports drops the signal-to-noise ratio and makes it easier for something important to be overlooked.
  • “Use your own judgment.”
    • This is just status quo. I’ll let the results so far speak for themselves :wink:
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