WHY can't I get a reply from Funcom?

Conan Exiles General Discussion
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IMO

Well, I think there are a few good reasons for that.

Most of the posts that FC does not respond to are those which are intended changes, whether stated in the patch notes or not (there’s only so much room for changed stuff). The very helpful community here offers tactics or strategies to cope with the problem you are having. A problem is not necessarily a bug.

Secondly, bugs are acknowledged by the FC reps and passed along to the team. At that point, they are probably compiled into a list and prioritized. If it affects a significant portion of the playerbase or is an exploit used to ruin the fun for others, it probably lands above the line and gets resources immediately assigned. Resources are limited and FC is a business.

If acknowledged and it falls below that line, it’s prioritized in a similar manner for resources as they become available.

That line moves on a daily or weekly basis as does the prioritization. This week it may be below the line. Next week may be different.

Personally, I applaud the folks who read every post and help build that list, since some posts come across as rants and bashing the people who work hard to let us have fun. They still read the post and do their best to pull the meat out of the putrid.

My twopence.

Regards

jim

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After reading this it feels like it was scripted.

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The short answer is yes Funcom replies to people. But not to everyone. Not everyone is equal, and there is a good reason for this. Well I shouldn’t say people specifically, but rather the message. The tone, the content, or the timing of the message may cause it to be replied to or not.

Here’s a list of things they won’t reply to:

Insults. This is a no brainer. Calling them poor at their job, saying they don’t care, or using conspiracy theories to explain why they do or don’t do a thing. All this will get you no reply, and often times will get the thread deleted, locked, or unlisted. Many of the common posters in the forums are guilty of this, and I can say I’ve thrown people out of a place I’ve worked for fall less.

Wrong Location. This one is pretty common. Bug reports in the General Discussion and not the Updates and Bugs section. The developers only glance through the General area. The CM’s pick through it and point out interesting posts with ideas and suggestions for Devs to focus on. They don’t do that for bugs and exploits.

Repetitive. If its about a bug or glitch they’ve already replied to in another post, or on a livestream. They’re not going to reply about the same bug 100 times. Also if you have information about a bug, use the search feature, find the thread someone else posted, try getting the earliest one. Chances are, it has a reply, and post the new info you find about it there. That helps far more than make a dozen new posts. They bookmark the first thread they see on the bug that helps them.

Unclear. ‘Game broke, fix please’ is not helpful. They’re not going to reply to that. If you find a bug, follow the guidelines in the sticky. Find out which steps can reproduce the bug and list them. Give your computer specs, OS, and other information that might be unique to you compared to other players.

Timing. Sometimes someone beat you to the punch and made a thread first. Like stated under repetitive, you need to post your info in that thread. Or maybe they are looking into the bug already and don’t have any information to give you based on what you posted.

Like most of this response, the following wording is meant to the forum community as a whole, not directed towards the one quoted.

I know many people on these forums want a dev to sit there and go through the forums and go ‘acknowledged’ ‘looking into it’ ‘we’ll check it out’ to each and everyone of their posts. That it would make you all feel better. But they’re only human. They neither have the ability to do so nor the time. Of course that time is spent fixing bugs, adding new features, making new content for us. That isn’t even realistic.

So they’ve given us guidelines on how to report bugs and glitches, and exploits. If you follow them. You’ll likely be heard, even if not replied to. If not, you’ll be ignored. They’ve laid that standard out in black and white. You can like that, you can hate it, it doesn’t matter, its how they’ve operated for the last three years. I doubt they intend to change it. You’ll simply need to ask yourselves if that is acceptable or not.

At the end of the day, these devs play the game too. They play with mods and without. They play occasionally on official, though mostly on private (which ones, I will not say nor speculate). So they do want the game to work. They want to be able to play without glitches and bugs too. They DO care about the work they put in.

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Well put, Taemien, and good advice to heed if you want to get your point across.

@Stone-Spear, this was off the top of my head having spent quite a while on the forums (primarily PC, 55k posts read) and watching what got replied to and what did not. It also was viewed from a business perspective, of which I have plenty. Sorry you took it that way.

Regards

jim

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And on the other hand, there are many who complain that that’s the only answer they ever get.

It would be really nice to have the developers and bug fixers write thorough progress reports in every relevant thread, but it’s even nicer that they spend their hours doing their job rather than writing forum posts about the job they should be doing.

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Spot on, Kap.

Regards

jim

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Tencent bought Funcom in January, I guess Tencent aren’t bothered about support for an older game.

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My correspondence with them on the forums and in discord in the last few days determined your statement to be false.

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The title of this article says different…

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Don´t bother. This is one of this “fanboy” topics that you read and then have a loud laugh before you close it and call it a day. :roll_of_toilet_paper: :rofl:

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Or “advice from people who think about it, on how to get relevant queries answered.”

How you read it depends on whether you post to score points/forum pvp or actually want to help make the game better and the community more informed. Mileage may vary.

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My post seemed interesting enough for you to make a comment about it. :joy:

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Well sayed, i tottaly agree mine, :+1:, nice post.
The same to @Taemien :+1:
@Kapoteeni, if i remember well you were the one of the 3 persons that i send personal wishes for Merry Christmas in this forum, your posts
are always wise structured with tier 5 foundations. Keep it going my friend, you rock :+1:.

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As I stated above, it doesn’t. They will speak to you on an individual basis, IF you have pertinent information on existing issues, something new, and you’re polite. Heck the devs even speak to modders directly on a normal basis.

I dunno where you get the idea that purges are endgame content. They can occur the moment you have a 1x1 hut at level 1 if you perform enough actions.

Not every area needs a revamp. Black Galleon, Den, Pagoda, and other places haven’t seen recent passes but are fine as is.

I’ve seen some of these fixed recently. The same fix that helped with followers and mobs going through foundations helped with thralls getting knocked through the ground. If you’re still having issues, you need to show reproduction steps, and details on WHERE it happens, WHEN it happens, and screenshots as they happen would help immensely.

This is a Gportal issue. I can say that for a fact. I’ve played on modded (10-20 mods at a time) 70/70 servers that run better than 20/40 officials. Funcom could put pressure on them. But what can they do when Gportal says ‘we did everything we could’? They can’t exactly afford to make a new contract with another host for 1000s of servers. And migrating the database for each one would be a nightmare.

No, the only solution here is to lower official player caps to 20. I dunno how you all would react to that though.

I don’t think there is a way to fix this. How do you objectively measure ‘active’ playing time? These players maybe playing once a week in odd hours for all we know. I doubt you’ve cased them out for multiple 24 hour sessions.

On the server I help admin, there are players who never see each other. I can watch when they login, and when they log off (due to Pippi webhooks to discord). I’ve had reports of people being inactive, yet they login several times a week for a few hours at a time.

Agreed, more people on testlive would be favorable. Perhaps moving a number (every fourth one) of officials to testbranch would force the issue. This would move at least 10% of the playerbase to testing features as they come in. Assuming they remain on those servers.

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You need to do many things before send an email

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I think perhaps we read the title differently. The title is a common theme that gets asked from time to time. The body of the OP post is meant to explain why and offer suggestions to help people with future posts.

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Not necessarily. The title “Community manager” can really mean anything from a semi-automatic helpdesk e-mail reply person to someone who collects customer feedback data on all social media platforms, does analyses based on that data and offers strategic advice to the management based on that.

Most importantly, though, community managers manage communities, ie. the people playing the game. They may not have a two-way hotline to the developers. Sometimes they’re not even hired staff.

In Funcom’s case, the CMs’ public face time is somewhat limited. There are competitions, Question of the Week threads etc. occasionally, but they don’t frequently chat with us on the forums. A lot of what they do is not seen in public because they’re related to people’s account issues etc.

It’s unfair to imply that Community Management isn’t doing their job properly if they don’t communicate the goings-on in the dev department on the forums. That may well not be part of their job description at Funcom. Funcom has a tendency to play their cards close to their chest, so community managers may not even know any details, or they’ve been instructed not to say anything in public until Marketing gives them the go-ahead.

(Also, considering how an ages-old community newsletter describing their future plans was taken as an eternally-binding promise to never sell actual game content as DLCs, it’s hardly a wonder that they keep quiet about themselves.)

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I would guess that time taken to respond is usually down to availability. I have no inside knowledge of how things work at Funcom but I doubt that they all work 24/7 nonstop. I know that waiting for an issue to be resolved isn’t fun and I’m not always as patient as I should be myself so I do understand your frustration. However we should try to remember that the number of players online across all platforms at one time probably always outnumbers the number of people at Funcom available to respond to questions/complaints/bug reports and therefore it’s almost impossible for responses to be instant (unless you want automated responses confirming that your correspondence has been received).

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Somehow i always get answer only i don’t see anything doing something on reports… I know they live in different country, and probably its not minor stuff :smiley: but i think racism and Ethnic hate is forbidden tho guys who did that still plays, but cant blame about replies, those i get everytime, and most even not bot one… mistakened once and send report to hugo directly :smiley: not community, poor guy still answered, ony problem it seems are what players think is priority and what devs think is priority, sure russian players does not care about like hammer and sickle… or day of victory building spams, but for some those are like svastiks… :smiley:

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Yes… yes they do. I applaud their resiliency.

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