TIME FOR A PUBLIC STATEMENT -The Reply

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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The rant posts seem to get the attention of the staff. This is not intended to imply that you are ranting, quite the opposite in fact: your questions and suggestions are valid, relevant, and necessary to be resolved.

Since this is where the attention is, I’ll just quote myself here.

Emphasis added to point 4.

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Oh, those? I can live with that change. I thought you were talking about bosses.

33% to drop in those chests. That’s not a testlive change. Since it was changed (as I’m told from a reliable source they were indeed 100% at one point in time), then it happened in another version. 2.1, 2.0, etc.

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I see that people here write a lot, and there are very few solutions from their posts.
I’ll write in short, right on target.

I bought the whole game with all DLCs, played 442h.
I have collected some of the developer’s (Funkom) flaws, but I cannot put them here and show you! I want to show you how much work the developers didn’t put into Conan’s game!
But I realized that I bought the game stupidly. It would be better if I bought (Far Cry 6) and was sure that the game was done well, but in (Konan) I realized that they made money on me (Business) and everything is fine.

The solution to the problem is:

  1. I delete the game and demand my money back.
  2. If the money is not returned to me, I will go to court.
  3. In (Steam) I will write a negative review for everyone about all the developers’ flaws in English.

If you all do this, the developers will make the game better!
And they will not make money on you so kind and naive.

After all, it was possible to correct mistakes and modify the game?
Yes, it was possible, but the developers created these DLCs instead of solving problems in the game! Money and more money, business …

Are you saying funcom is being greedy compared with ubisoft? :^ l

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I mean how much is done in the game and how much it should cost money.
Funkom does not justify its work at the expense of Konan.

10 is a decent price to play with all the DLCs, then I turn a blind eye to their problems. Eleon Game Studios, which makes the game Empyrion - Galactic Survival for 5-6 and at the beta stage already has a whole roof, tightness, indoor and outdoor temperature, turning light reflection on and off in graphics settings (bloom) or ubisoft, which makes quality games that I have no complaints about.
The game should be worth your money.

Conan may not be worth the money and should be in beta for bug fixes.
Otherwise, I see money laundering in Conan.

We aim to include everything, but in a layman readable format. If that means hundreds of changes, that’s fine. But it can’t be ambiguous, or code snippets.

Please note, I’m not saying lower priority in some link of the chain is what happened, or that it ever happens for test-live patch notes, only that it is something that could happen. I don’t think singling out a particular cause is a useful exercise. One should tighten (not cut) all the corners, and through that perform better in total.

You can’t. Which is why we want those to be complete. But they won’t always be perfect, and we ask that you treat any unlisted changes as bugs (and certainly not as us sneakily trying to tricky you) until stated otherwise. In extreme cases that will flood the forums with a bunch of reports, but that’s on us and we have to deal with it.

:handshake:


I think the main topics here have been addressed, so I won’t be following the thread as closely. Please do continue to share your feedback though, and we will work on improving all the processes on our end to address your concerns. As I said in an earlier post, it’s not like flicking a switch, but I hope you will notice improvements here and there as we go. :slight_smile:

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I think this suggestions category was designed for gameplay and game design suggestions and user feedback, interface, game theory, usability and convenience, and so forth.

I personally think that the whole topic of politics, money, and entrepreneurship and the entire fan expectations feelings should not be the topic here. I have wholeheartedly faith in the studio to do their best, and they have their reasoning.

I do not appreciate to talk about feelings of customers on such a level, I feel it takes away the attention from the topics of how this game can become better. Sure, nothing is perfect, but if you discuss a difference of opinions only because you evaluate each others behavior from an outside perspective and get judgemental on each other, where will be the progress for us, the gamers, who just want to play?

Please discuss this somehwere else if you have a problem with each other in person, i am already tired reading of claims against persons or coroporations for missbehaviour. All i am interested in as a fan and player, is talking about how to make the actual game better. For anything else, it is a private company and they can do what they like. If you give them your input, it is their choice how to process it, but they have a great interest in the best for everyone, and then, there is no need to argue.

We will see what happens!
Now, lets finally discuss again what changes to the gameplay could expand the interactive and roleplay and building gameplay value :slight_smile: Thralls, furniture, mounts, economy, fields, ships, mines, :slight_smile:

cheers

At least now we have someone from staff interacting and answering us.
This is very good.
The community has a lot of complaints, specially because of game breaking bugs and exploits (which a lot of game has), the bad pvp design choices and the lack of transparency and communication from developers.
This game is a masterpiece, with great potential.
But the dev team needs to pay more attention to the community. There are bugs since day one still working. We are addressing all of them everytime, but we don’t receive any answer about it. We never know if someone read it or not.
So as a player with almost 7.000 hours spent on pvp in this game, i thanks for your participation here.

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Coming from a modder stand point in will say this I think the real issue is that they have someone lazy In the developer department making changes but not actually documenting the changes and getting the auto replay copy paste is not a good answer. Even if it fit the issue. I believe in funcom team to see that this backlash from us isnt the first nor the last because as I said before people invest in a product and when you fail to list even if it mistake own up to it and amen to it and prefix the list and answer before you have a melt down of people. Rule number 1 in anything is clear communication. I’ve already seen friends flat out disappeared because of pvp changes that went almost unnoticed and not asked about it. Kept it as like this weird secret project. Everyone I talked to hate the changes because it offer no compensation a buff in an area nope just more stuff that no one ask for. Hell I’m tired of the crafting system it is. It’s old outdated and clunky to use. I dont know why we have a blueprint item called recipe item … just examples that has useless coding attached

And it seems you were rightly so picked for your Job, =3

Thank you for all replies.

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@seanaza01 If said posts are worded like yours, I don’t consider it censorship so much as taking out the trash. Folks should try putting a little bit of effort and respect into their messages; they might be surprised how often it is reciprocated. :stuck_out_tongue:

Honestly, I’ve seen the staff and moderators here leave plenty of rude and childish posts floating around for a lot longer than I would have if I ran this forum. So I think your suggestion that they’re hiding anything that’s mean is ignorant at best and dishonest at worst.

I will grant to you, however, that some of the features built into this forum software can cause a lot of confusion and misunderstanding, such as how anyone can flag posts and get them hidden - it would be easy to assume that staff members are responsible for that when often they haven’t even read the offending message yet.

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They do.

And they also let many respectfully worded and constructively critical suggestion posts go unanswered, because the respectful and constructively critical posts don’t get a mass of responses by users and thus the Funcom staff ignore them.

Apparently, the only way to have anything taken seriously here is to behave in an inflammatory manner, get a ton of responses, and hope that some of those responses by others are constructively critical and are responded to my the staff.

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I don’t think inflammatory posts accumulate a critical mass of replies because the original post was inflammatory, but because something someone is angry about usually touches on a subject other players also feel strongly about. I don’t foresee any topics around here laden with colorful metaphors and Caps Lock wanting more dye colors suddenly getting 100 lengthy, detailed replies.

The game is 3 years old and still loaded with glitches and cheats that they obviously do not want to fix. Yet they keep changing the core game mechanics which is causing even more glitches and cheats.
When I have reported cheaters it has gone ignored. I paid money for a product. The product is broken.
Is this written to your approval?
I wouldn’t be an A-hole if I was not ignored time and time again