All good ideas, but again – no criticism directed towards you – I’m not optimistic. If you take a look at their involvements in the forums, it seems that it comes in bursts. There are long periods of almost not hearing a single peep from them, and then there are moments when you’ll see one or two of them post replies on a whole bunch of different threads.
But yeah, I’d love to see some of the stuff you proposed.
Eh. When I first heard about their Trello, I was really excited. It looked pretty much like what I had wanted for a long time: an insight into what they’re working on.
Sadly, they didn’t keep it updated at all, and eventually they realized that if they can’t keep it updated, they might as well close it.
I really wish they would give players a limited access to their issue tracker, kinda like MongoDB does with theirs. It might be a pain to set up – I’ve never done it myself, and Atlassian crap is notoriously bloated so I don’t envy anyone the task – but once you’ve set it up, it works and it’s awesome.
Yeah, at times and I feel you and take no offense from you at all as it sounds like it comes from the heart. I feel like there is a disconnect somewhere be it between the players and the programming reality or the executives and how much they can get away with not giving the player and still stay in business.
What I mean by this is obviously there are players who love this game as if they weren’t there would not be enough of us to be talking on these forums as we are only a small vocal group representing unauthorized by the playerbase mind you and expressing thoughts and feelings directly.
I do at times feel like we are shouting give us the game and we well play the crap out of and stream the **** out of it and yell to the top of our lungs to our other gamer friends about how much fun we are having . While we are doing this they could and should come out with new stuff some payed to keep them making money and some free to keep the game fresh and interesting.
The point that I am trying to make is I think that we are shouting into a vacuum and we could shout till we pass out and nothing would have changed anyway. I do sometimes forgive me, think the game is not dead, but I do feel that Funcom whomever is charge plays deaf at times and mute at other times. I am not entirely sure why this but I can speculate and not all of it postive or negative mind you.
I can say one thing is though dead or not I don’t spend money on games I don’t think are going anywhere or that the proper attention is being giving to its success or its playerbasing making that success possible.
I like the vlog idea especially - TWTE. Keep the remarks out of writing so the coin isn’t turned resulting more disrespect, fear and trepidation than the issue whatever it is, actually warrants.
Yeah but I started in the game on a “dead server” and then it blossomed into a nice server with 5-6 clans (2-4 members each) and then some outside group came in and created chaos and the server lost about half of the clans. Then we started back up again and sure enough…more folks came back in it and once again…some outside group came it and killed it all. My point is that it’s cyclic and the more folks come back into something, the more others come into it. I am currently back in my dead server (taking a break from one of the more active Siptah servers) building and just enjoying the EL. I have seen people pop in and they are new folks. They pop out without reaching L10 but it tells me new folks are coming in.
Communtiy building is rough. Keep up the good fight as I have been there as well. If you can get some good ones that stay it makes it all worth it. And by good ones I mean personality not just game skills. I would really like to have more effective defenses added to this game though as I think that would help the locust wiping of servers as these players don’t WANT to stick around long and better defenses would require them to get their locusting on.
I want this game to succeed. I think it’s good for people.
I will hark to one thing I said that I know @Taemien will remember: PvP Raid killed the game. Taem at the time thought it was server number that would do us in. We have a long history, I dig the guy. We don’t agree much but this game brings us together.
These dominate gangs span multiple servers. They may be alphas, or more likely just toxic. They hang out on private servers and reel-in newbies on officials. If you don’t join their gang, they will get enough players from the private servers to mow down or wipe out your base, everyday.
It is essentially a form of fearmongering. They are misguided enough to believe that if they proclaim to Funcom that the game is dead, dying, or server traffic is at an all time low, etc, then they can illicit the desired course of action or response from Funcom. But others among us with the foresight and complex reasoning skills know that you are far more likely to be taken seriously if you provide a factual, well reasoned, merit based argument and speak to them with courtesy and respect, as opposed to blatant hostility, or the usual tropes about ‘games dying’ or ‘you don’t care about X mode’, or ‘fix your f-game’. As with interactions and dealings with others throughout society more generally, a respectful and assertive communication style will win out against manipulation and appeal to emotion fallacies.
On the topic of more streams; that’s a tightrope that has to be walked. The people who are in the stream have to stop what theyre doing and prep for it. They will get a lot of questions about game direction that they probably can’t answer and could put people off by not having enough “adequate responses”. So too many streams can be worse than none at all if it slows things down and people feel like they are doing it “for show”.
Which leads to not saying anything the audience wants to hear. The people at Funcom aren’t “streamers”. They have their jobs to do. They aren’t just sitting there waiting for the next stream.
All I know is that no matter how often Funcom communicates, it won’t be enough. There were 2 active threads complaining that Funcom didn’t communicate enough. That same day you could look at the number of dev posts within the last several days, and there were dozens and dozens of reply’s that were conveniently ignored for the sake of the narrative of those threads.
More streams and interviews? Whenever they do a stream, people complain about those too (I would know, I write the summaries for each and every one of them. People complain 500000% more then they show appreciation.). And what Darth said is accurate, even if people don’t like the answer.
People DEMANDED that official servers be moderated for years too. Then they demanded it wasn’t aggressive enough, that it wasn’t fast enough (and now ironically we have constant threads about the moderation level, which is just, I have no words anymore). What do you think all those community team people are doing? Pick a lane, either they respond to forum posts every second of their work day (which lets be real, won’t be enough), or they moderate the official servers.
I’ve seen countless occasions when Funcom gave full explanations on something, only for the Funcom employee to be railed into (I’ve seen some absolutely disgusting stuff). You have people who want every bug report replied with “something”, claiming anything is better then nothing. And then you have another person complaining that responding with “we’ll forward this to the dev team” is bogus or not enough.
Years, and years, and years of this. No suggestion with regards to Funcom “communication” is going to bear any weight for me, because even if followed to the letter, people will LOUDLY complain anyways.
