Not putting dates on big updates is unacceptable, and it just cost my players and dozens upon dozens of hours. I am confident that my server and your game has lost players that we’ll never see again. And I am confident that this is a trend among a multitude of private servers.
And it’s because you refuse to communicate with your community about these updates. You put out a community newsletter on Thursday, and didn’t include that the update was due on Friday.
So either you did know and you refused to communicate with your paying customers and hundreds of admins like me who put in real-job hours to keep your community up and running. Or you didn’t know, and it’s time to fire some people. Either way, it’s not acceptable.
At this point, I don’t know what it is that you think you are protecting by refusing to communicate with us in a reasonable, professional, people-who-give-a-crap way. From what I can tell, you’re down about 6k average players and 10,000 servers since Early Access and Live Launch. Do you think that not telling the last of us anything is going to reinvigorate your playerbase?
So why don’t you go ahead and tell the tiny fraction of your original playerbase that is still sticking with you through all of this sort of crap what we need to know to manage our servers, update mods, etc…? Can you do that much for us, in exchange for the enormous contributions we make to this game that pays your shareholders and your salaries?
I’m okay without having a solid date when you don’t know when for sure when a patch will be done by. You never know when something comes up and you have to delay the patch, thus upsetting your players. I’m even okay without having a rough estimate other then “when it’s done.”
But, when you do know a date, I think it’s reasonable to let your players know, and mod authors know (like me) that hey, it’s arriving so be prepared. I’m not sure who decided to just drop the patch completely out of the blue on all of us, but whoever made this final decision I think needs to reflect on dropping it so suddenly and how that can impact the playerbase and the modding community. It definitely caught me off guard and I read and watch every stream and newsletter, and every discord message by a dev for even a HINT of something coming so I can be prepared, and I still didn’t see this coming. While it’s a nice surprise to see the patch, It is also a bit aggravating for sure.
I don’t think it’s the end of the world and as always, I’ll adapt and get my mods updated like I always do, but I definitely feel this is an area of improvement Funcom can improve on.
to be fair my mod manager was like that we had feature that was game breaking and had to patch it over n over n over. I had to tell her woa woa… stop the patching.
Funcom has done a lot of stupid things regarding this game but YOU are not entitled to know the milisecond changes are going to be made.
Easy fix, don’t use mods. Mods are third party changes to the game. Funcom in no way has to “OK” it with the playerbase to make changes to their own game.
No other game works this way, modders always play catch up if they wanna use their mods.
I agree that the random dropping of a patch is unacceptable. If you don’t know when it will be ready, so you don’t want to give a date I totally understand that. I do the same thing in my line of work. But when I do know, I don’t just show up to start installing my product without letting the customer know. What if they aren’t available, or in some cases, have something else being installed that day. While these aren’t perfect analogies, they still represent good business practice.
Why not just assign a day for dropping patches during the week, like WoW does? Tuesday mornings are for patches. If it’s not ready, we’ll drop it next Tuesday. It’s a good point that major patches shouldn’t get dropped before the weekend to prevent interrupting gameplay. But you should also not drop a patch on a Friday when no one will be in Sat. or Sun. while players are finding bugs that might be solved by a simple hotfix. Dropping patches at the beginning of the week gives you time to react if something gets terribly messed up before everyone will be online over the weekend.
I’m not a modder. I own a large server. And, yes, the server owners and the modders keep the wheels on the community’s bus by giving them an enormous amount of our time and efforts - and they don’t have the common courtesy just to tell us when big changes will take place. It’s very cut and dry.
The server I play on went from 30-40 players on average to 55-65 on average after the update. I’m curious to know if the OP’s server could even run more than 40 players. Or if they’re salty cause his playerbase went to greener pastures.