holy moly, fatshark burns through CMs faster than the overlook hotel does with caretakers
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Duo Duo is CHONK!
also, best of luck on the future Kitefin. At least you have a studio who’ll already know you when you have done your degree. That is valuable.
Best advice for the games industry is persistence and develop a thick skin. Just keep pushing, no matter what, and you’ll get to where you want to go. 
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they cooking the genestealers guys
Beautiful! Incredible creatures. Fantastic! Gosh, look at ‘em!
Omg fighting a genestealer would be so intense. Don’t tease 
Fatshark CM’s be like: “What’s this? A handsome forum thread full of people complaining about a lack of comms?? A severe lack of comms ought to put a stop to that!”
Seriously, the last CM reply was post #21 out of 105 (106 with this one).
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Maybe some media attention would move the needle. What’s Jason Schreier up to these days?
Joking. They do have the philosophy of a schoolmarm ignoring petulant children, which is entirely misguided even in its original context.
If the issue were to be solely the fault of their most passionate fans and we ignore the half-dozen or so competitors in this space that experience only a fraction of the vitriol you see directed at Fatshark, I think it’s still kind of tragic that rather than pivot to more collaborative, open and positive communication (about their games) in order to foster a new vocal fan base, they hang onto this sort of undeserved condescending and sparing attitude toward their existing one. And then engage in all kinds of whale-milking and drip-feeding tactics to stay afloat.
It’s just not something I could ever be proud of - I’m sure no small portion of the office culture runs on jokes about how their fans are silly, which are - of course - unwittingly self-deprecating as well.
But given that the cosmetic store update has read both “Augmenticists” and “Augmentics” - both clearly referring to the people who install augments - for the last week, I’m going to guess the DT team is also simply short-staffed. They’re probably training the replacements for the leads they lost and pulling people to learn UE5 since Stingray has been deprecated for almost a decade at this point.
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This speculation all sounds ridiculous to me, but at the same time what can I decry about it? We know nothing about what’s going on behind the doors of FS, and they’ve never told us.
Man this is depressing. PvE horde shooters have been in a rut lately. KF3 and Payday 3 are the same mediocre game in different coats of paint and HD2 straight up just doesn’t work for a majority of PC players.
I also find it ridiculous. And I’ll decry the comically-unsubstantiated assertion that “no small portion of the office culture runs on jokes about how their fans are silly.” Where do people get these ideas? Because FS doesn’t release blog posts more often? Because there’s a FOMO shop?
The last time I sensed even a hint of aggression/negativity towards players was the Sister Septiwhatever thing from 2 years ago now. I wish FS communicated more, but I don’t think they don’t because they hate me.
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Yeah, I don’t think the lack of comms comes from a place of spite towards the players (definitely not from the CMs at the very least), it’s just baffling to me that one of the major complaints about the game is a lack of comms about what’s going on, and it’s the one complaint that’s easily fixed. I’m the bjggest solo mode complainer but I recognize that it’s not exactly an easy thing to implement correctly (it would be easy to change private lobby requirements though). Same with balance complaints, adding new maps/weapons, etc. But complaints about lack of comms is easily resolved by… having more comms. Yet the response seems to be to double down on not havjng comms, it’s just weird.
This thread was a perfect place to engage with the community and have a “share your pets and lets chat in a casual setting about things going on in the company” and yet…
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It comes from professional experience at developers who have similar communication cadences and tone.
Anyway, what speculation are you referring to?
Everything I said can be verified except that the engine they’ll use moving forward is explicitly UE5 and that the exact reason they’ve plastered an easily-rectified grammatical mistake on their launcher is being short-handed (which is probably the least insulting and most parsimonious interpretation.) Both of these I clearly labelled as guesses, and I can’t imagine a more appropriate place for them than the company’s forum.
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Someone posted a screenshot of your 4chan post on another site. This will be the only interaction we have, as a direct result of your choice of community.
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It’s not really doubling-down so much as continuing the same strategy. I have no idea why they don’t communicate more, but they’re not really communicating less lately, are they? We get comms about updates when they’re ready to drop. I guess this year we didn’t get a heads up on a big feature, but crafting was a pretty unique beast I think.
Quickpaw responded pretty quick to the question about when update info was dropping, then they released the teaser trailer the next day. Kitefin did a dogtalk comment and then discussed leaving FS. But it’s mostly negative in here. Are we going back to talking about dogs? Because I don’t think we’re going to get robust rebuttals from FS on why some CMs left or why they won’t communicate more.
lol (i have no idea what you’re talking about)
They probably intended for it to be exactly that.
Unfortunately, the hard truth is that leaving multiple aspects of the game hanging really do start annoying the players, and so trying ‘oh hey look at our pets’ comes off as disingenuous at best.
Fatshark comms do need a bit more than just ‘talk more’. They also need to be sure that what they talk about is accurate. This is something Fatshark, historically speaking, has a hard time with.
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I will absolutely double down on this.
Even though they might have intended it to be like that, Fatshark need to read the room. They honestly have no leeway to pull off a thread like this. It is not the right approach - wrong place, wrong time, and most people here pick up on that immediately, myself included.
To me, this post makes it feel like they are even more disconnected from the player base.
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That’s fair! I also thought it was poorly-timed. If it had dropped after we got the first blog post, sometime this week I reckon, I think it would have gone over a bit better.
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Like I said in another thread, the optimal time to make this blog post was around the week after the cops got added to the game, because they were still fresh in everyone’s mind and we were still thinking about how all the dog effects were done. Would’ve been a great blogpost to meet the beasts and learn the details of how the dogs ingame were done.
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As well as not being in “Announcements” and instead in “Off-Topic”
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I’d agree with that too!
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that’s the impression i’m getting too: that darktide has only a small team maintaining it, therefore the long times to finish anything.
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