Where is the community engagement?

But I’ve heard it’s much greener over there.

As for the engagement, any time I have needed help from the Community team they have been very helpful. They generally respond pretty quick and have been extremely professional. I cannot disagree with the OP more. But, I have also been polite and engaging in my post to them and provided any help on my side that I could as opposed to ranting about “THIS GAME SUXZ! YOUR DEVZ SUX! YOU ALL SUX!” So, I wouldn’t be surprised that post like that generally get ignored while more constructive post get responded to more often because there is a far more likely chance of getting something resolved with those. But that is just my opinion and not based on anything other than opinion, I really have no idea if that is the case or not.

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Well it seems easier for you guys to replying to a fun thread then a serious one. And this is what makes me personally believe that you try to avoid getting into topics where you get a lot of critism. Saw it after the last pvp update when the forum got overrun with negativ spam post. I am not saying don´t particapate in fun topics. But you guys should seriously try to get more into conversation with players in topics that are important to them even if they are not that convinient to you. In that regards you s… I am sorry to say it this way.

Yeah, them not responding to a flood of spam post of uber rage noobs crying about the same exact thing in 50 different threads is not exactly winning your point there. :woman_facepalming: And again, you will catch more flies with honey than you will with vinegar so go back and re-read those post and then ask yourself WHY anyone would actually chose to respond to them. :woman_shrugging:

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They replied multiple times in this thread, which is considered a “serious” topic. And let’s be real, if they responded to every thread that was nothing but a “FuNcOm sUx” thread (which is the majority of the posts on this forum, including the dozens of PvP related threads you refer to), they would just get dumped on more. It’s not like they aren’t reading and listening to feedback (or even responding to them, which they did, and you are conveniently ignoring).

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But it wood be good to get annotificaton that you atleast have sean the post even if your not able to respond to it.

and here in lies the problem. I can´t take a company serious that avoids hot topics like the devil, just because they can´t provide the com with more then a couple of phrases: we are looking into it or we are working on it and yet nothing is happening ever, oh wonder. People are not buying into that nonsense comments forever. If Funcom wants us to take them serious they need to start talking to us seriously and I am missing that entirely.

Its not about answering in every thread but giving people an honest answer to their questions. Not this stage comments that mean nothing.

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I am not sure why they have to respond to every topic anyway?

Such as the follower discussion months ago, beyond saying they are thinking about what numbers would be best. The current building pieces discussion now. Or Server transfers, etc. When they already stated what their thoughts on some of these topics before as being looked at, working on, etc. We can’t discuss yet since we still figuring out what direction we want to go. They usually state a direction they are moving towards in the dev streams when they are ready to release information. Lot of these threads are feedback to Funcom anyway but as you can tell, we do not always agree with the feedback people write. They are not going to wade into these discussions of ideas and such.

Bug issues, they usually respond to queries, if people like Multigun and others who do not help the player first.

I think overall the community has responded fine. Plus when they respond, they have to research the answers first since it not always a quick easy answer.

I could respond and make a mistake and it wouldn’t be such an issue since I am just a player / admin of my own server clusters. I am not official CSR where my words carry weight of the company.

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maybe have this on posts you just responded on in the last hour :slight_smile:
200-3

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:eyes:

:eyes:

Let me get this straight: you are saying that you personally don’t think those posts were worth anything, because you called them “spam”, and yet you criticize community managers for not responding to each and every one of those.

Community managers’ job is to help players. That’s what it boils down to. In what world is their time better spent on responding to garbage posts than on providing actual help to whom they can, when they can?

Exactly what is it that you want them to say? Fact of the matter is that they have improved that aspect, too. Now they give more detailed status updates, too. And guess what? People still dump on those status updates out of their own ignorance, because some people simply don’t have the empathy and/or the humility to communicate politely, they just want to rage out of their entitlement. Let me dig up an example:

Key words there are “reliable repro”. When I saw that, I got excited, because I know that meant that they cleared an extremely important hurdle and were in a good spot to find a solution. So I commented about how that’s awesome news, and guess what:

I’m sorry to dump on someone who otherwise might be a great person – a person who later acknowledged their response was too harsh and apologized for it, so kudos to them for that – but that kind of reply exemplifies all that is wrong with the attitude that a certain part of this community has towards the devs and the community managers. Your attitude is just like that, and it’s part of the problem.

Why should anyone take you or people like you seriously? You combine ignorance with arrogance and expect to be treated respectfully. And before you get more outraged by this critique, please explain the following:

What exactly do you mean by “honest”? What is so dishonest about the way they have communicated?

Can you give one concrete example of what you think they should have said at some point, instead of just insisting on this vague, toxic smear campaign?

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Yea, they never do anything. We never get free dungeons added to the game. We never get an entire new map in a DLC. We never get improvements made to the game like taking an old mob like rocknoses and give them a pretty big upgrade with new appearance and new attacks. Oh…wait…they did do all that in addition to fixing meshing issues and other glitches. And all of this for the monthly fee of NOTHING.

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They’ve done this more times then I can count (and once again, their thanks is this community raging at them 99% of the time). You all just choose to intentionally ignore it.

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“Should” is a tricky word. I don’t want to get hung up on what they “should” or should not do. What I’m saying is that they already offer what we can realistically expect from their business model and that they keep improving that despite the limitations of that business model.

Speaking of which…

These two quotes make it clear that you didn’t understand what I was trying to say. To be fair, I didn’t explain it, I just pointed you towards the problem and expected you to solve it on your own, so that’s my fault :slight_smile:

It’s not about how much you pay them in total, it’s about what revenue they can rely on and how it’s tied to their playerbase. That’s why I emphasized the words “mandatory recurring payment”.

I’ll use myself as an example. I bought Conan Exiles during early access, in February of 2017, for $30 USD. Subsequently, I paid $20 USD for the Barbarian Edition Upgrade, $10 USD for each of the 9 DLCs that they released before Siptah, and $20 USD for Siptah early access. In total, that comes out to $160 USD. The time that has passed since my first purchase until today is a little over 52 months.

To recap: Funcom has seen $160 USD revenue from me over the period of 52 months. If we wanted to get an average monthly revenue from me, that would come out to roughly $3.08 USD a month.

During that time, they have fixed many bugs and implemented many improvements, including big and complex new features such as mounts and thrall leveling. Also during that time, I have played on the grand total of 4 different official servers, each with 40 slots.

To put things into perspective, G-portal would charge me $33 USD a month for a 40-slot server. I have paid Funcom less than one tenth of what I would have paid to G-portal.

But not even that is my main point. Like I said, that’s just putting things into perspective.

My main point is that G-portal’s revenue is guaranteed to scale with the number of their customers. Each new customer pays a certain amount on monthly basis until they stop using their services. Or to put it differently, each customer who wants to use their services must pay that amount each month. That’s G-portal’s business model.

Funcom’s business model is different and much less certain. They are basically gambling that:

  1. more people will keep buying Conan Exiles
  2. people who buy Conan Exiles will keep buying DLCs

Both Funcom and G-portal have staff whose salaries they have to pay. Those people are not gambling that they will receive a certain amount of salary each month – they have contracts that stipulate how much they’re paid. Of course, they can always be fired or quit, but that’s beside the point.

The point is that the money for expenses has to come from somewhere, namely from the revenue. G-portal’s revenue is a simple function of the number of users they have. Funcom’s isn’t.

Going back to my example, I’m one of their dedicated fans, the one who bought every single Conan Exiles bit of digital content they released. As such, I have contributed less than one tenth to their revenue compared to what I would have had to contribute G-portal’s revenue over the same time period.

If you think that this difference in business model has no effect on the customer service they are able and/or should be expected to provide, then you are ignoring – worse, denying – how the society works in real life.

Funny you should mention that.

First of all, people who don’t work for Funcom help all the time. You can see people like @Narelle answering questions, helping provide information, and even relaying information to the community managers by tagging them where necessary. I have tried to do that, too.

And it’s not just the two of us. There are other forum members who have done that and more, for long periods of time, to such a degree that Funcom chose to recognize their help through a program called Chosen of Asura.

Care to guess what interesting consequence that has had? For a certain period of time, it was extremely common on these forums to bash the Chosen of Asura for their contributions. They were treated badly by people who were raging about problems, they were called names, and in more than one occasion they were told to “stop pretending they work for Funcom”.

Not only that, anyone who tried to help – or pointed out when complaints about Funcom crossed a line into unreasonable and uncivil – was called a “Chosen of Asura wannabe”. That was, for some people, the ultimate insult for what they perceived to be “Funcom fanboys and white knights”.

In short, providing unpaid, volunteer help has made certain people into targets of constant, unending abuse from other forum users.

As for merging threads with a common topic, it used to be so that forum users with a certain level of trust had the permission to edit the title and move the topic to a different category. I know that, because I used to have it and I used to use it to help move bugs to bug forums and things that weren’t bugs to general discussion or feedback forums. At some point, I lost that privilege. I don’t know if that’s because my trust level was downgraded or because Funcom decided that people might abuse it. And I don’t really care, either; I’m not complaining, I’m just pointing out that things aren’t always what they seem to you on the surface.

Long story short: I understand that you want things to be even better than they are, but it might be better if you could understand just how good they really are before you demand further improvements. :slight_smile:

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But then people would be mad they read it…and didn’t reply. XD

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We can’t be thanked for every Bug Report, or legends like Sir Bowen would have a full inbox. In the day, he turned in 43 consecutive Bug Reports and not a single thank you given. Also not a single crap given. It’s data, it’s anecdote, it’s vapour until someone can repro. My own Bug Reports have about a 90 percent closure rate, meaning I’m off 10 percent of the time. Thank Mitra they don’t waste praise.

If what makes a “better community” is verbal praise from the devs, you’re in the wrong place. The Exiled Lands are harsh, and we’ve already been through so much righteous struggle to get here. We’re barbarians, we accept the ambrosia of the devs’ good works. That’s thanks enough.

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People who are unsure of themselves are just as welcome as others in my book. But nowhere else in life can one ask for some sort of compensation for one’s uncertainties.

With experience, if you say worked for a AAA studio as a glitch finder, and day after day your reports are like pennies into a well – only to find the studio has no desire to fix its car-stealing game at all – you come to enjoy the world of the Exile. Here the devs are very open and approachable, to a fault.

What I think you’re saying is “why don’t the devs give feedback” about novel subjects, or important ones. They can’t, and I’m sure you might recall my self-undermining post about 90 percent success rate: it’s because credibility comes from solutions. Not promises. “We’ll look into it,” or “we’re now aware of it,” might actually be harmful to the game as well, as it might expose an actual exploit. Thus in support it’s often best to err on the side of tacit.

I’m attempting to build a foundation for communication. Had I proceeded with all of your questions, we would be in a spaghetti island of trying to understand each other.

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I don’t know, I found it useful. It’s not just you who keeps thinking that Funcom needs to have the same level of customer service as G-portal or any similar company that has subscription-based business model. Now I can bookmark my answer and point other people to it :stuck_out_tongue:

On the contrary, it’s very much worth it. I sincerely apologize to you and to everyone if what I wrote sounds like participating on the forums isn’t worth it, because that wasn’t my intention at all.

These forums can be toxic from time to time, but it’s worth being active here, because in exchange I get the opportunity to help the game improve, to have my ideas heard, to help other players with their problems, and to have fun with some truly great people.

Bug reports are valuable, and they’re even more valuable when done properly. Of course, proper bug reporting is not always easy, but even a vague bug report without a lot of useful info is still better than no bug report at all. Even just saying “such-and-such thing doesn’t work for me” will help raise awareness about something in the game that devs might not know is malfunctioning.

One of the frequent problems with the community is that people will report a bug without including a lot of useful info – sometimes because they don’t know they should, other times because they simply don’t have that info – and then expect it to be magically solved ASAP.

I work as a software developer and that’s why I know that those expectations are simply not realistic. But that doesn’t completely excuse people who get angry about it. It doesn’t take much common sense to realize that you can’t go to the doctor and say “my leg hurts, fix it” and then get angry if it doesn’t get fixed all by itself :wink:

Again, it was not my intention to suggest that. I am sorry if that’s the message you took away from all I wrote, but I also don’t know how to write it better.

We shouldn’t, but none of us can magically fix it. We can just keep talking at each other and hope that the understanding will eventually come.

I have had mixed experiences with this. There were times when I reported a bug and it went completely unacknowledged and it left me salty. Then there were other times when I reported a bug and I was actually thanked for it and they went to work on it. And I’m talking about bug reports with decent amount of useful info here.

To be clear, I don’t need anyone to thank me for reporting a bug. When I report a bug, it’s because I hope they will fix it. If they fix it, that’s the best “thanks” I could get.

And although it’s true they haven’t always seen my bug reports, it’s also true that they have actually improved that aspect, too. I’ve spent enough time on these forums to notice an observable improvement, and it’s important for me to acknowledge it.

If reaching adulthood was enough to make everyone understand each other, then we would be living in a utopia already. Sadly, it’s not. Look at just the two of us: we’re both adults, and yet we’re still having a hard time understanding each other, even when we speak the same language. That’s just being human :man_shrugging:

For example, despite going back and forth with you for a while in this thread, I still don’t understand well enough what it is that you actually want. I’m not criticizing you or attacking you, I’m just saying that communication can be hard :wink:


No sé, yo lo encontré útil. No eres solo tu el que cree que Funcom debería tener el mismo nivel de servicio al cliente que tiene G-portal o cualquier otra empresa cuyo modelo de negocios se basa en suscripciones. Ahora puedo guardar un vínculo a mi respuesta y luego usarlo para mostrársela a otra gente :stuck_out_tongue:

Al contrario, totalmente vale la pena. Te ofrezco mis disculpas sinceras, a ti y a todos los demás, si lo que escribí suena como que participar en estos foros no vale la pena, ya que eso no era para nada mi intención.

Estos foros pueden ser tóxicos de vez en cuando, pero vale la pena participar aqui, porque me da la oportunidad de ayudar a que el juego mejore, de que se escuchen mis ideas, de ayudar a otros jugadores con sus problemas, y de pasar un rato entretenido con alguna gente genial.

Los reportes son valiosos, y aún más cuando se hacen como se debe. Es cierto que hacer un informe adecuado no es siempre fácil, pero aún un informe vago sin mucha información útil es mejor que no reportar nada. Si tan solo dices “tal-y-tal cosa no me funciona”, eso ayuda crear consciencia acerca de alguna falla que los desarroladores tal vez desconozcan.

Uno de los problemas frecuentes en la comunidad es que hay gente que manda un reporte sin incluir suficiente información útil – a veces porque no se les ocurre que deberían, a veces porque simplemente no pueden obtenerla – y de ahí tienen la expectative que el problema se solucione mágicamente lo antes posible.

Yo trabajo como programador, y es por eso que se que esas expectativas simplemente no son realísticas. Pero eso no excusa completamente a la gente que se enoja por aqullo. No se necesita tanto sentido común para darse cuenta que no puedes ir al doctor, decir “me duele mi pierna, arreglalo” y de ahí enojarte si el problema no se soluciona así no mas. :wink:

Reitero que no fue mi intención sugerir eso. Me da pena si eso fue lo que entendiste de lo que escribí, pero no se me ocurre como escribirlo mejor.

No deberíamos, pero ninguno de nosotros lo puede arreglar con una varita mágica. Lo único que podemos hacer es seguir dirigiendo palabras uno al otro y tener esperanza de que en algún momento logremos entendernos.

En cuanto a eso, he tenido una variedad de experiencias diferentes. Me ha pasado que he reportado un bug y ni siquiera me lo han confirmado que lo recibieron y eso me dejó molesto. También me ha pasado que he reportado un bug y me agradecerion por el trabajo que he hecho y se pusieron a solucionarlo. Ojo que estoy hablando de informes con suficiente información útil.

Para que quede claro, yo no necesito que nadie me agradezca por mandar un informe de error. Cuando reporto un error, es porque tengo la esperanza que lo vayan a solucionar. Si lo hacen, es el mejor agradecimiento que me pueden dar.

Y si bien es cierto que no siempre han visto mis informes, también es cierto que de verdad han mejorado en ese aspecto. Me he gastado suficiente tiempo en estos foros para darme cuenta que ha habido una mejor notable, y para mi es importante reconocer eso.

Si fuera suficiente ser adulto para que todos nos entendamos bien, estaríamos ya viviendo en una utopia. Lamentablemente, no es asi. Mira nos a nosotros dos no mas: los dos somos adultos, y aún así nos cuesta entendernos, aunque hablemos el mismo idioma. Así es el ser humano no mas :man_shrugging:

Por ejemplo, aunque hemos intercambiado varios mensajes aqui, a mi todavía no me queda lo suficientemente claro que es lo que quieres en realidad. No te estoy criticando ni atacando, solo digo que la comunicación puede ser muy difícil :wink:

Por mi parte, te pido disculpas si algo de lo que escribí en español tuvo errores o fue poco comprensible, ya que no llevo tanto tiempo hablando español como inglés :slight_smile:

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Hey there,

Just a quick dip into this thread again to clear out a point of confusion that might be originating some of the recent arguments:

This forum is not meant to be customer service, nor we, the community team, are customer service representatives. This is a key difference with what other forums are providing, such as our hosting partner G-Portal’s.
It may seem like an insignificant difference, but it seems that it’s what for some this problem boils down to.

As the community team, we take care of collecting feedback, trying to keep the majority of the community informed and on the loop about major events (for instance, the thrall cap) on here and other places of engagement, identifying major pain points for the community and keeping both devs and community informed about it whenever any major breakthrough happens. It is also in our responsibilities to engage with players in ways that can be considered as fun, as mentioned above.

For 1-to-1 problem solving and direct answering to every thread, that is a luxury scenario we can afford only in periods of time where our other responsibilities don’t take the majority of our schedule.

As usual, there’s always ways to keep improving the way we communicate, and we’ve aimed for that since Conan Exiles was a baby. Sometimes we hit, other times we miss. But our aim is to keep improving. However, please you need to understand the key difference explained above and how not taking it into account may lead to some misleading expectations.

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Well sure as heck did pay them for their product which made each of us their customers. I am not saying it should be as fast as 30 mins but seen many bug reports go days without one response from a funcom employee.

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TL:DR the community menagent does not repond to us the way we would love to. Not redirecting us. I try all the time to see marks of them, but i have to search hard for these to see marks. In Digital Extremes - for example you can feel that they read things, they redirect you (moderators also do) and are giving us feels of their existance. While (unfortunately) funcom seems to do things above our heads.

I perfectly understand that you have team for that and that other thing, but maybe you should hire just a few poeple to GET THINGS RIGHT (mostly of that players complains in most), listen, answer, at least redirect us ! And confirm that you are working on things. EXPLAIN to us how and why you are doing things, even those of us who would like to contribute their ideas and solutions are limited on possibilites if you do not talk with us.

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