Regarding the Thousand Cuts and 3 Changes threads

[Jaigen]

Im guessing that the devs have a boss right? That boss wants a timetable created and deadlines met (assuming he's running a tight ship which I would think EA would want) to make sure that he/she is paying employees for a reason.

 

Im also assuming that as a creative studio (making new content and ideas), they have weekly or bi-weekly meetings with at least the heads of each department (whom i would hope know whats going on in their department) At said time, they can take 20 minutes to create a newsletter for paying customers. Choosing a few great ideas a week or every 2 weeks to get answered more thoughtfully than the previous Q&A with better selection than the weekly Q&A since the questions asked were generally f'ing stupid questions like "i want a pink speeder!" Hell, they can even pick 10 questions to get polled on by the community and ask the top 3.

 

Lets look at this from another profession. As an automotive technician, im expected to complete work in a fast and timely manner, both for the company and the customer. If it takes me an extremely long time to complete the job (the customer is paying a much higher bill since work is hourly, and is effectively wasting money when another shop couldve done it quicker and cheaper. When im doing say, a brake job, and my boss comes out to the bays and says, "Hey, how much longer till you're done? Im paying you you know right?" and if I reply "Soon, i have no new details to share at this time." Im getting fired.

 

People need to stop thinking that software development is like some kind of magic that nobody understands, its like people think that the timetables on new content are always going to be a mystery because its only when the purple snicklous of the 8th plane conflumigate their mystic and ancient powers of gordlunsh will content be allowed to release to the public so we should just shut up, roll alts, and continue to feed the higher beings our subscription money so that they are appeased. No, its a group of software professionals who have a job and reasonable expectations put onto them since their pay is coming out of our wallets. it's not unreasonable to ask, hey there fellas, soooooo.....what have you been doing for the past 8 months while you've been billing my paypal account?

 

As an automotive technician 99% of your problems can be solved if you look into a manual. This also goes for me because im a network manager for my company. But i have seen how programmers work in our company and they have to rely on trial and error. In short creative processes are different and sometimes time consuming and tedious for the developers. Their is no manual on how to create new FP WZ or Ops. So comparing your job with with the BW programmers job is not valid. Also with my own mmo experience i can tell you this± the amount of content BW has pushed out is the highest so far of any mmo. So your complaints are not valid at all.

[Jaigen]

Considering the sheer volume of people who quit based directly on the changes in 1.2 (half a dozen in the guild I was in at the time alone), I have no idea how you can say that brushing off hundreds, if not thousands, of comments with a 2 sentence response was good for the game. It is a huge mistake to assume the people in charge of a game play the game at the highest level. This has been proven in basically every MMO since EQ1

 

QQ less please 1.2 changes in my opinion where good(You sound a bit buthurt about the sorc changes mate). In fact the problem with many people leaving is because of the lack of endgame content. BW is addressing it 1.3 and future patches.

Edited August 29, 2012 by Jaigen

[Goretzu]

MMO players, in general, seem to take a "board of directors" entitlement approach to the games.

 

By this I mean that they often behave like they are on the companies board and that everything they share warrants a direct and immediate response by the companies developer and support staff.

 

 

Sorry, but that's nonsense.

 

Take the SSSP, I'd imagine most players would be satisfied to have the information the tea lady does, it's the vague hint followed by CIA information black out that causes people to get irritable.

[Hessen]

We're very excited to see constructive feedback, and the threads mentioned here have generally been exactly that. Part of what the community team does is read what players are saying across many outlets (the forums, social networking, places like reddit, etc), compile feedback, and send it along. These threads have provided us with a lot of good and generally focused and detailed feedback, and we wanted to encourage them so we'd see even more constructive feedback in them to round up and pass along!

 

I don't have any specific plans of action on individual items to share (and remember, we're always gathering and passing feedback along already - you may remember the class feedback threads we posted a while ago), but your suggestions, complaints, and feedback definitely reach the developers, and it helps inform decisions about upcoming changes and content.

 

Good to know.

 

May I suggest some kind of "you've said, we've listened" type of thread, where community feedback that has been listened to (and something is actually implemented as a result) is documented.

 

I think it would help give a visual demonstration to the customers that the lines of communication are open.

 

Yes, it might stir up some "I can't believe they implemented this, and didn't implement this" type of responses. But I think that's just something that would have to be put up with. One man's meat is another man's poison and all.

 

Even initially as a show of faith, or as an example, fix something fairly minor that the forum community have been asking for, just to show that the words above aren't just lip service.

[Tolunart]

Also with my own mmo experience i can tell you this± the amount of content BW has pushed out is the highest so far of any mmo. So your complaints are not valid at all.

 

Rift:

 

Since March 2011, nine updates each with a new World Event including new quests, NPCs, equipment, titles, costumes etc. WEs are multi-phase usually around 6-8 weeks long and include repeated seasonal themes and one-shot events.

 

Added a warfront and several dungeons, for solo/pair and 5-man teams, several new raids for 10- and 20-man teams. Last Fall they added Ember Isle which increased the size of the game world by 1/3rd and added a similar amount of content including new dungeons and raids.

 

They've made numerous quality improvements such as adding wardrobe options and recently the ability to reset character appearance. And Instant Adventures which is basically a 24-7 PUG that scales to the size of the group and is helpful for levelling alts when you've already done all the low level content twice already...

 

They're getting ready to release the 2.0 expansion around the time TOR goes FTP, more than doubling the game world and adding an equivalent amount of "stuff" along with it.

 

SWTOR is not a bad game. It is what it is, KoTOR 3 with some MMO parts duct-taped to it. But their content updates are abysmal, Rift had its first major update, World Event and new raid dungeon the month after release, and in its frst four months had added more content that TOR has added in nine.

 

The multiple storylines give TOR some replayability though the linear nature of the quests makes me reluctant to level two toons of the same faction together or one after the other, I'd rather do one Imp, one Pub and give it a rest for a few months before playing again. The MMO features are severely lacking and show the developers' inexperience at this kind of game as well as indicating that they tried to switch horses in the middle of the river and as a result a lot of things got washed away.

Edited August 29, 2012 by Tolunart

[ziphii]

This is probably not something you should be proud of. There were 4? 5? max locked threads protesting 1.2 sorc / sage changes, with detailed and constructive write-ups from actual high-end raiding sorc/sage healers which were completely ignored in favor of what you described as "internal metrics". 6 months later, our sage healers still haven't seen any reversion and still run out of force in HM EC.

 

If you're actually compiling the data like you say, the devs seem to genuinely not care what you give them. Does that not give you any sort of pause about what you're doing or what you communicate to us?

 

This is think is something that people are frustrated about. When the majority of player feedback goes one direction, and the game takes off in the opposite direction. People feel like why bother giving feedback if you're not listening?

[Vandicus]

This is think is something that people are frustrated about. When the majority of player feedback goes one direction, and the game takes off in the opposite direction. People feel like why bother giving feedback if you're not listening?

 

The 1.2 sorc changes were a good thing. Brought them inline pve wise with ops. Mercs are still the weak end of healing but now sorcs aren't totally op. 5, 6 sorc buff threads are not the majority opinion. All the classes every day get threads recommending buffs or nerfs.

[ThePedigree]

Anyway, people are going to continue insisting that everything be handed to them immediately, changes have to happen during next week's maintainance if not sooner, etc. But the reality is that it just doesn't work that way, you can demand all you want but you're not going to get it.

 

This was not at all the intention of this thread. I totally agree with what you are saying, and people are way too entitled these days. MMO playerbases are some of the worst offenders.

 

Example - In 3 things you'd like to see changed about this game, person X asked for more options to customize your starship.

 

1) Do the devs like this idea - e.g. let us know you're working on x idea suggested by the players

2) How high of a priority is this idea (can be general), but is it something that will take weeks, months, or years, based on where it is ranked? I don't want to hear "we want to do this someday", too noncommittal. Is there or is there not a resource working on it.

3) What's the rough timetable for the implementation of this idea? Can be tentative, but 3 months, this year, this spring, are all nice things that give us something other than "soon" or "not any time soon" to look forward to.

 

This is more along the lines on what I was looking for, but with less of an emphasis on number 3. The problem with asking for rough timetables is that people like to rake the devs over the coals if things don't make deadlines. They see it as "You promised us X pony by Y time. It's Y. Where is my pony?" That isn't my intention at all. I'm not trying to add fuel to the fire here of anyone's "Stuff takes forever to get out." I want to see what things I have to look forward to. I want to see what direction the game is headed (in a vague sense), and I want to feel excited about things coming soon and be able to share this information with my friends. Some of them left the game, some still play, but I'd like to have something to talk about TOR related that isn't drenched in negativity.

[JWillets]

As an automotive technician 99% of your problems can be solved if you look into a manual. This also goes for me because im a network manager for my company. But i have seen how programmers work in our company and they have to rely on trial and error. In short creative processes are different and sometimes time consuming and tedious for the developers. Their is no manual on how to create new FP WZ or Ops. So comparing your job with with the BW programmers job is not valid. Also with my own mmo experience i can tell you this± the amount of content BW has pushed out is the highest so far of any mmo. So your complaints are not valid at all.

 

You sir, have not worked on a car besides maybe doing an oil change. Manuals are general and are only used as a guide to supplement existing knowledge. Also, it is not meant to be a direct comparison, its meant to show that there's a common level of expectations for every profession such as being capable of effectively and efficiently doing your job to your customer's/client's/bosses' expectations. Being one of the "im a veteran mmo player" group and as a CUSTOMER, they have not met my expectations at all which has just recently resulted in me unsubbing from the game.... unfortunately .

 

Any person should be able to give a reasonably tentative timetable for the completion of their work and what they've been working on. The issue lies in that they do not communicate that. They're professional developers who have years of experience in this specific field, not some motley crew of dudes who program calculator games for my TI-84 Plus calculator. It's been apparent for some time that my, as well as everybody elses complaints are valid since over a million people have unsubbed from this game, which means that BW isn't doing something right, (check sub numbers from March/Apr 2012).

 

I add my 2 cents because I enjoyed playing this game....then since it's remained stagnant with little response from the devs, i stopped enjoying it. Unless some kind of major change happens, and not F2P because that doesnt change any of my issues with this game, Bioware is going to continue living in the world of make believe where nothing is wrong. Which they will sadly.

[Jaigen]

Rift:

 

Since March 2011, nine updates each with a new World Event including new quests, NPCs, equipment, titles, costumes etc. WEs are multi-phase usually around 6-8 weeks long and include repeated seasonal themes and one-shot events.

 

Added a warfront and several dungeons, for solo/pair and 5-man teams, several new raids for 10- and 20-man teams. Last Fall they added Ember Isle which increased the size of the game world by 1/3rd and added a similar amount of content including new dungeons and raids.

 

They've made numerous quality improvements such as adding wardrobe options and recently the ability to reset character appearance. And Instant Adventures which is basically a 24-7 PUG that scales to the size of the group and is helpful for levelling alts when you've already done all the low level content twice already...

 

They're getting ready to release the 2.0 expansion around the time TOR goes FTP, more than doubling the game world and adding an equivalent amount of "stuff" along with it.

 

SWTOR is not a bad game. It is what it is, KoTOR 3 with some MMO parts duct-taped to it. But their content updates are abysmal, Rift had its first major update, World Event and new raid dungeon the month after release, and in its frst four months had added more content that TOR has added in nine.

 

The multiple storylines give TOR some replayability though the linear nature of the quests makes me reluctant to level two toons of the same faction together or one after the other, I'd rather do one Imp, one Pub and give it a rest for a few months before playing again. The MMO features are severely lacking and show the developers' inexperience at this kind of game as well as indicating that they tried to switch horses in the middle of the river and as a result a lot of things got washed away.

 

How awesome. But i find rift a horrible game with no replay value at all. so yeah i looked on the history of rift and they indeed added a bit more stuff then swtor, big deal. and a mmo features are always lacking in the beginning of a mmo (in fact rift was even worse). MMO are a long project and only after 2 years you usually see results . And my most important question? if you dont like this game then why are you playing it?

[RobNightfall]

MMO players, in general, seem to take a "board of directors" entitlement approach to the games.

 

By this I mean that they often behave like they are on the companies board and that everything they share warrants a direct and immediate response by the companies developer and support staff.

 

The flaw in this approach is that you are a consumer, with no NDA in place with the company, and therefore not eligible to receive any information that is not vetted for public disclosure. Much of what MMO companies (really all corporations these days) do in terms of incorporating customer feedback into a product is never directly disclosed back to the customer until it is ready for release to the public in the product. You don't have to like it, but that is the way it is in today's competitive markets. Everything is potential IP, which means they err on the side of caution. That is your free market capitalsim model in action. Whereas what MMO players want is open socialism in the context of MMO games. Not going to happen.

 

Actually, what we want is our money's worth, which is a basic tenet in capitalism. Since I'm not getting it, I've unsubscribed. The lack of subscribers driving a game to a F2P life-support model is also part of capitalism in action. In this case, I have exercised the limited level of control over game development that I have: they aren't getting any money from me. Because several others felt the same way as I do, they too have exercised their ability to impact game development by unsubbing. You seem to have missed a few basics of capitalism, and at the same time seem to feel that the customer has no value in today's market. Given what has happened here in SWTOR, one can only hope you'll eventually learn better.

As for the dev posts in the threads, one can hope the game will have markedly improved in a year when I check back in, but it sounds entirely too much like the empty promises that have been made in the past.

[Jaigen]

You sir, have not worked on a car besides maybe doing an oil change. Manuals are general and are only used as a guide to supplement existing knowledge. Also, it is not meant to be a direct comparison, its meant to show that there's a common level of expectations for every profession such as being capable of effectively and efficiently doing your job to your customer's/client's/bosses' expectations. Being one of the "im a veteran mmo player" group and as a CUSTOMER, they have not met my expectations at all which has just recently resulted in me unsubbing from the game.... unfortunately .

 

Any person should be able to give a reasonably tentative timetable for the completion of their work and what they've been working on. The issue lies in that they do not communicate that. They're professional developers who have years of experience in this specific field, not some motley crew of dudes who program calculator games for my TI-84 Plus calculator. It's been apparent for some time that my, as well as everybody elses complaints are valid since over a million people have unsubbed from this game, which means that BW isn't doing something right, (check sub numbers from March/Apr 2012).

 

I add my 2 cents because I enjoyed playing this game....then since it's remained stagnant with little response from the devs, i stopped enjoying it. Unless some kind of major change happens, and not F2P because that doesnt change any of my issues with this game, Bioware is going to continue living in the world of make believe where nothing is wrong. Which they will sadly.

 

If you do not enjoy this game do not post about it these forums but simply leave. All your arguments are invalid but i cannot be bothered to have an argument with someone who obviously is not enjoying the game .

[Tolunart]

How awesome. But i find rift a horrible game with no replay value at all. so yeah i looked on the history of rift and they indeed added a bit more stuff then swtor, big deal. and a mmo features are always lacking in the beginning of a mmo (in fact rift was even worse). MMO are a long project and only after 2 years you usually see results . And my most important question? if you dont like this game then why are you playing it?

 

Personal taste, and lol at "a bit more stuff." Rift has added enough FREE content for subscribers to equal an expansion all by itself, and is putting the finishing touches on an actual expansion. The big event here lasted a week and consisted of a few fetch quests, from what I can see. The nine events for Rift form an almost continuous stream of optional content added with every major patch.

 

Rift did have its problems at launch and the devs have been extremely responsive, sometimes too much so, and were more than caught up after 9 months, where SWTOR is still a single player game with an MMO taped to it.

 

As for your "most important" question, I knew someone would say it. And I AM PLAYING RIFT! I have a 1-year sub and take a break now and then to play other things. Looking forward to the expansion...

 

SWTOR isn't a bad game, the problem is that it's not a $200 mil (or $300 or $500 or whatever) game, and never will be.

[Goretzu]

The 1.2 sorc changes were a good thing. Brought them inline pve wise with ops. Mercs are still the weak end of healing but now sorcs aren't totally op. 5, 6 sorc buff threads are not the majority opinion. All the classes every day get threads recommending buffs or nerfs.

 

Balance nerfs are usually right these days, the days of the EQ monk seem to thankfully be long gone.

[anstalt]

As an example of better community interaction, take a look at LOTRO. Whilst their interaction could be better, it is way better than here. They typically:

 

1) Release developer diaries on all new upcoming changes

 

2) Release patch notes 2-4 weeks before changes hit PTS

 

3) Discuss changes, explain their reasoning etc in feedback threads for the develop diaries.

 

4) Respond directly to pressing community issues.

 

It's nothing particularly revolutionary, they are told what to develop in advance and only start releasing information to the community when its a) ready and b) approved by marketing. After that things generally get better though and you get more responses.

 

For example, think it was with Rise of Isenguard expansion one of the devs released a developer diary for the Guardian class changes. What ensued was a massively long thread discussing the changes in which the developer explained his reasoning, was questioned by the community, and the changes were revised many times. The developer updated his dev diary 4 or 5 times with small tweaks suggested by the community. The dev kept his original goal and idea for the class changes, but tweaked it according to community experience / expectations.

 

Thats what we're missing here with regards to community interaction.

 

Personally, what i'd prefer more would be a general roadmap for the game. I don't care on timescales, i can wait, but I do want to know what the overarching plan is. SW:TOR is missing content for every single playstyle. Raiders dont have enough. PvPers dont have enough. Casuals dont have enough. Crafters dont have enough.

 

I want to know what the plan is for each area. In PvP, are you going to continue to focus on warzones, or are you going to revamp world pvp? Are you going to continue with vertical gear progression (bad) or switch to horizontal gear progression (good)? Are you going to change crafting in any significant way? What are your actual plans for free-to-play? What was your rational behind going free-to-play? How do you think it will actually generate more money?

[vandana_]

We're very excited to see constructive feedback, and the threads mentioned here have generally been exactly that. Part of what the community team does is read what players are saying across many outlets (the forums, social networking, places like reddit, etc), compile feedback, and send it along. These threads have provided us with a lot of good and generally focused and detailed feedback, and we wanted to encourage them so we'd see even more constructive feedback in them to round up and pass along!

 

I don't have any specific plans of action on individual items to share (and remember, we're always gathering and passing feedback along already - you may remember the class feedback threads we posted a while ago), but your suggestions, complaints, and feedback definitely reach the developers, and it helps inform decisions about upcoming changes and content.

 

So, is space content worked on or not?

[AstralProjection]

And the Most Exhaulted ArenaNet does the same thing. "When it's ready" is their trademark. I have played the game for 7 years and probably can count on one hand the number of times one of the actual devs (and not Community Management Member) posted in the forums in all that time. This may come as a great shock to many people, but sometimes the answers aren't there because there are no answers to be given on a particular question other than "We are thinking about it" or "We would like to do that in the future." You know, just like the reasons the government won't admit to a JFK assassination conspiracy or an alien ship at Roswell - because there wasn't any in either case.

 

BJ

 

ArenaNet was never factored into my equation because they had a F2P game, I'm talking about a real MMO, one that can manage to charge a subscription. Once your game is bad enough to have to go F2P, you're going to get as much substantial communication as the Hello Kitty Adventure Island playerbase. In GW's case, it was designed to be F2P.

 

If you look at City of Heroes/Villains, the subscription game put out by NCSoft, they had some of the most active developers in the history of the industry, many of whom posted on the forums on a regular basis and had active dialogue with the players - there were even devs assigned to each class who explained all class changes in detail and conversed about them on the forums, and even changed their minds in some cases, often posting on a near daily basis. As a result, they had an extremely positive community that maintained a subscription model for many years with a smaller playerbase than TOR.

 

Somehow they managed to come up with regular updates, make improvements to the game at a steady clip, and still discuss with their players on a regular basis. It wasn't a miracle. It was good management, and good business. People wanted to know things, so they took a small part of their time and devoted it to that purpose. It's amazing that a game with a tiny fraction of the budget of this game could manage that much more developer activity, and appeared to have four times as many developers.

 

When you pay regularly for a service specifically because it is designed to grow and evolve, then you expect to have some inkling of how your money is being used, and it has nothing to do with entitlement. As another poster pointed out, that's how capitalism works. You are compared to competitors, and in this case, the developer has often been found wanting in that area.

[AstralProjection]

So, is space content worked on or not?

 

After a lot of prodding, one of the CM's was able to get an answer for us on that one a few weeks back - the super secret space project is apparently still under construction. We wouldn't know if we should be excited about it or not, though, because of that CIA information blackout.

[cashogy]

developer communication is a joke. the only real form we have is the Q&A, which is becoming more and more infrequent (3 weeks since the last one ). and the questions chosen for the Q&A are a joke; most of the questions are fluff like "i liked the white saber crystal, any chance we see more unique colors?" which the overall playerbase does not care about (not to mention more saber colors wont bring subs back). and when a substantial question is featured in the Q&A, the answer is almost always "this is something we are working on, and will give you more info on soon". yet almost always, there is no follow-up info given at any point.

 

this dev team is a joke. i feel bad for the community management people like AllisonBerryman, because they are only the messengers and are frequently shot at. its not their fault that the devs either arent doing any significant work, or dont care enough about maintaining their playerbase to communicate even once a week.

 

seriously, how difficult would it be for project leads to post once a week with things theyve been working on?

[vandana_]

developer communication is a joke. the only real form we have is the Q&A, which is becoming more and more infrequent (3 weeks since the last one ). and the questions chosen for the Q&A are a joke; most of the questions are fluff like "i liked the white saber crystal, any chance we see more unique colors?" which the overall playerbase does not care about (not to mention more saber colors wont bring subs back). and when a substantial question is featured in the Q&A, the answer is almost always "this is something we are working on, and will give you more info on soon". yet almost always, there is no follow-up info given at any point.

 

this dev team is a joke. i feel bad for the community management people like AllisonBerryman, because they are only the messengers and are frequently shot at. its not their fault that the devs either arent doing any significant work, or dont care enough about maintaining their playerbase to communicate even once a week.

 

seriously, how difficult would it be for project leads to post once a week with things theyve been working on?

 

Q&A was cancelled. And I really don't care about the devs posting about the 10 new rail shooter missions or cash shop items.

 

Why do you think we have had no Nightmare Denova yet? How long can it take to add 1 difficulty mode for 4 bosses? It's because the only thing they are working right now is f2p.

Edited August 30, 2012 by vandana_

[cashogy]

Q&A was cancelled. And I really don't care about the devs posting about the 10 new rail shooter missions or cash shop items.

 

Why do you think we have had no Nightmare Denova yet? How long can it take to add 1 difficulty mode for 4 bosses? It's because the only thing they are working right now is f2p.

 

well i have a bit of a tinfoil hat theory that the reason development is so slow right now is that theyre going all out on the space project. i cant think of a better way for them to recoup some lost subs than releasing a full 3d space sim like we want

[vandana_]

well i have a bit of a tinfoil hat theory that the reason development is so slow right now is that theyre going all out on the space project. i cant think of a better way for them to recoup some lost subs than releasing a full 3d space sim like we want

 

Nope. As much as I too want this was true.

 

A thousand papercuts mentions a small developer team that would deal with the issues raised in those 400 productive posts. Has such team been organized? if yes what have they done so far?

Edited August 30, 2012 by vandana_

[TUXs]

well i have a bit of a tinfoil hat theory that the reason development is so slow right now is that theyre going all out on the space project. i cant think of a better way for them to recoup some lost subs than releasing a full 3d space sim like we want

 

We were told just last week (or the week prior) that the ONLY thing we'll see for the next 4-6 months is more of what we have. It was an interview and that comment blew me away...I think it was from some German site.