At the end of the day it’s a business. Like any business ; if you do not hear what your customers have to say and respect their views/points/suggestions then the company will slowly lose profit and plunge.
In all honesty i would be proud to have made this game. It’s great fun, highly addictive and has a lot of progression. It is just frustrating when there are loads of great suggestions being put out there and nobody there to acknowledge them. It gives you the feeling of ‘why even bother, they don’t seem to care’
The last thing i want to do is moan but i also hate seeing great feedback go unread/unused.
If I were a community manager for a company that specialises in mobile gaming that had its own forums I would. Something tells me it would be part of the job description.
They’ve proven time and again that they read the forums.
They may not respond to questions
They may not action all feedback
We may not like the actions they take
But they certainly read. I know this because whatever actions they take are generally influenced by, or in response to, the crap that we throw on here.
There are some inexplicable exceptions like sparkly victory banners and stunned opponents magically jumping to the back, but I won’t get into those
Here is how it typically goes in the games industry…
Particular dev’s may check a bit just after release to get a sense of what the temperature might be like for the update with respects to pet features and the like, but after that it is the community managers responsibility to represent and express our interests to the developers as a whole. Most devs are encouraged NOT to participate in community discussions, because interfacing with customers directly is its own skillset. Most dev’s are not trained in how to properly communicate directly with end users.
Remember, the community team is generally a separate department from the guys who actually build games.
The Community team-to-developer team pipeline can have mixed results. Its success is dependant on how good the community team is, and how competent the production team is on the development side to pipe community feedback into actual achievable, executable goals for the developers within reasonable timelines.
Have they though, they seem to fix bugs pretty fast but i have not really seen anything from suggestions and feedback ever really make the cut. I certainly have not seen a suggestion for a ‘sparkly victory banner’
I read a lot regarding ISO for one, 20 iso per match is abysmal in the direction the game is going. I completely understand that it is a marathon not a sprint but someone who starts the game today i doubt very much would play for long with the sheer amount of iso they need to gather and then champion before they start getting a very small slither of that back for every cover they get; and lets face it these covers do not come fast.
Another example i read in suggestion is regarding the sell all function when you have multiple covers to sell. Sometimes you just have covers you wish to keep hold of for more reasons than one. I cant imagine it being that hard to implement a check box system of some sort as was suggested.
Again these are examples i see regularly with no feedback or thoughts from the devs themselves. I understand if this is not a simple thing to do but some acknowledgement every now and then would go a long way.
Would it not be a good idea for a dev to take a look every now and then to see where and what people think of their work. How things could be improved, even without responding they could perhaps pass the message on that certain areas are being looked in to. Look at Ice for example, at least every so often he would show his face and reply. Start topics of what we would like to see from the game etc.
From what i know:
the Devs (Demiurge), other than posting the odd announcement here and there, really only check the suggestions and bugs threads (they may read GD, but rarely post in it).
Supposition:
The producers, (D3Go) ala Dave and Cthulhu pop in from time to time and check general etc.. but mostly announcements and sometimes clarifications or answering of questions.
We know they read, or else the PVP list error in the Jan Preview thread would have gone unnoticed, but remember, they are at work, and with 4 games, most likely very busy.. the forums, in general for companies without a dedicated forum/media person (like blizzard has), are usually for players helping players, and announcements.
I’m sure at some point they will pop in for a little Q&A or to answer some things, but for the most part, now, they do read (you can see them lurking from time to time) and save posting for important stuff.
Well, I made a request to receive all the gifts at once, and they did that, so I don’t know if it’s because I posted it, but I’m happy that it happened all the same.
many, if not most. we sure have a lot of passionate people about the game on the forums but when those for whom the game is their job don’t show the same passion or dedication, the dedicated/passionate playerbase doesn’t understand. really, I wish I had a job I could be as passionate about, but I don’t and the devs job is probably a lower level of passion than the core of the active forumites. and I can understand that somewhat, but that doesn’t make it less frustrating.
Sounds about right based on my own experience in gameDev as well.
It can also be a weird thing where devs aren’t “allowed” to talk about what they are working on until it’s final. The champion feature is the best example of this. As soon as data miners found out about the possibility of such a feature, the devs should have just come clean and admitted the feature was coming, but many details of the exact implementation were still to be determined. Instead, it got so ridiculous that people’s posts were getting deleted and even forum banned just by mentioning it because the information that was out there was not gated correctly.
“Don’t you dare mention anything about a vague feature that maybe is possibly coming sometime within the next 4 months or else you’ll be banned.”
Coming clean earlier in the process would have felt much less antagonistic to the player base, and let people know more specifically something big was coming, instead of a vague “a big new feature is coming” with no context whatsoever.
The dev that let’s slip mention about a vague feature everyone takes as gospel because a dev said it. That’s partly why IMO those dev video are dangerous (it’s been November since the last one; I have a feeling we won’t get any more), because they don’t ever answer questions or address specific issues that we want them to. When they do attempt to mention specific features/issues, it’s always vague intangible concepts or “no comment” that just leaves us guessing or confused.
It almost feels like the Drew Rosenhaus / Terrell Owens press conference from back in the day where he answered every question with “no comment”.
Why even bother say anything if you technically aren’t saying anything? It makes them look bad because it seems like they don’t have their shit together, or are just being obtrusive.
The moral of the story is:
Dev to playerbase communication can be hard. There’s lots of things to take into consideration that makes it take more thought than one would think, but it can be done if you know what you’re doing or think of it as important.
As this game has grown (and both the dev & publisher have more total projects active), forum presence has probably been squeezed out in favor of supporting other things.