Fatshark Robin answering general questions

Fatshark Lounge
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Questions:

Will there be more cosmetics in the future?

How do you plan to handle the locked content in the game?

How come you don’t pin important interviews on steam?

People feel like you neglect the steam community, how do you plan to address this.

fire bomb and bw sienna dot have not worked since beta. how is it possible that after three months of bugfixes nobody has already managed to fix something that was working in vermintide 1?

I have been experiencing the “new items” bug for about a month and the best reply I got was “you need to delete a file in your %appdata% folder”, making me replay the tutorial and lose ALL my previous settings. is this bugfixing?

some red weapons were released at launch deliberately without a red skin. can you justify this in any way, shape or form beside simply you not having enough time to finish the product and selling it anyways?

both the boss quest and the kill elite quest only trigger when said player makes the killing, not “as a party”. still unfixed, which makes some classes who do not focus on boss and elite killing handicapped towards these quests, hence they basically waste rerolls every day. we had two patches after the okri’s challenge patch. fix?

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Fatshark Robin:

Ok, I meant what questions that Darcurse felt I missed to reply to in the reddit thread, not any random questions, but sure, I’ll try to answer those I can.

1, 2, 4: I’m sorry unless it’s related to Modding I’m not the right person to ask about individual bugs or bug fix ETAs.

  1. I’m not sure what the status are on those, I’m not awfully up to date on what the artists do day to day. I guess the choice likely was between not having reds for those weapons at launch or having them with non-unique skins.

Cosmetics? Yes.

I’m not a community manager, but maybe Hedge can answer this?

Regarding feeling neglected. We’re a small company and these days there are a lot of different platforms and forums we “need” to have a presence. We do try to be active here, on reddit, on Fatshark forums etc, but except for pinned announcements our replies very quickly get buried just due to the massive amount of traffic this forum has, so even though we do reply here a lot, most forum users will likely not see most of our posts. Therefore focusing our time on actually fixing issues and implementing things that are requested by the community is the best way we have to interact with all communities at the same time. You might think we are slow at that and that’s you’re right to do so, all I can say is that we’re working as hard as we can to improve and expand the game. How stuff gets prioritized is a complicated issue bigger than to try to explain in forum post as well as why testing and delivery pipelines may cause something that’s a 30 minute fix in code to take weeks (or sometimes months) to get into the live game. So in short, I think fixing the underlying issues is the only way we can, replying to every person that is angry on steam is not a viable solution for us.

If you want direct feedback, I welcome you to partake in the streams we regularly have, ask questions there as you can get replies essentially in real time

Source: https://steamcommunity.com/app/552500/discussions/0/1728701877484810140/?ctp=4 Pg 4, scroll down.

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Fatshark Hedge answering general questions:

Question:

How come you don’t pin important intwerviews on steam? A lot of people would have missed the CEO interview, if it werent for me posting it here.

Fatshark Hedge:

Sure thing! So we try to have the sticky real-estate keep a limited footprint. 4 stickies (5 max) is ideal as most users run the discussion boards with the default setting of 15 threads on view (I run at 50 which is a much easier way to digest the ongoing active discussions, but this is certainly not the norm).

An effort is made to keep threads that answer a lot of questions and promote ongoing community challenges highlighed. So you’ll always find the latest patch notes up there, the FAQ (which I should probably do an update to truth be told), a challenge where active (Next Top Mod at the moment) and the Guidelines (a staple, immovable thread if you ask me). At the time, red shell was a big deal and we wanted to keep that up there to allow for regular forum postings to remain visible and not drowned in the flavour of the month posts.

Whilst true, the interview with Martin answered questions, it was also an existing and active thread for a couple of weeks with a clear title which remained bumped by discussion for a fairly long time.

I guess there’s always going to be some vying for the sticky spots, and in this case the timing meant that the CEO interview wasn’t able to get pinned, and I suppose it falls on the interpretation of the Community Team as to where the focus should lie (and we may not always get it right). What’s important to one person or the most dedicated users might be ousted by informaton we want to ensure (or try to ensure) new visitors, in this case ‘Red Shell’ concerned players, see upon first opening the discussion boards.

Source: https://steamcommunity.com/app/552500/discussions/0/1728701877484810140/?ctp=4 pg 4, scroll down.

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I still don’t get why they’re trying to pander to so many different social media sites. Slap a sticky up on those sites and let everyone know that all official information regarding the game will be released on their official forums. And any questions, suggestions and so on can be asked there as well. I mean, it kinda makes sense that information about your game would be on the games website…

tl;dr - Basically, all that got answered was that we will be getting more cosmetics in the future. Cool

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lol

Also, if you have any suggestions you can always pm Hedge. Dude is pretty cool and is open to suggestions, just don’t be rude.

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Yea, dude is pretty chill. But I guess you got to be when dealing with a bunch of pricks like us. Also, he’s liked a few of my comments, so I guess you could say things are getting pretty serious.

hqdefault

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While it certainly stretches some resources thin and I think they should change priorities a bit, I can see why. Steam forums reach the widest audience by far by being the default platform for most users and doesn’t need additional logins. Reddit is active, and it seems to me that devs other than the actual community team are more active there (likely outside the game subreddit too). Here we have the official forum, which is good to have as reddit is still run by fans and Steam forums are, far more filled with anger and hate than here. And then there’s Discord, which I think is a bit more informal and personal. And finally the streams, which are more one-sided, used more for devs talking about thing to fans than the other direction.

A bit of focus on what each platform is meant to be wouldn’t certainly go amiss, but any PR type stuff needs to be spread over several platforms nowadays, even moreso in gaming.

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It’s true, in an ideal world we’d love to be able to keep our focus on one channel (we actually had closed our official forums mid-way throgh the V1 lifecycle so we could focus on existing channels such as reddit and Steam, but we needed to bring them back for the V2 betas and I kind of fell in love with them all over again).

In an ideal world, I would spend my time here and on the major social media channels, like Twitter and FB, but really, players will go where they feel most comfortable or have the tools they like to discuss with.

Reddit has updoots and downdoots which is a good way to get a loose idea over general sentiment. It also keeps fresh content nearer the top with a natural decay over time and bumping/necro goes unnoticeid (which is nice).

Steam has no barrier to entry as you have to have an account to even play the game (and has no tools to cull the trolls, it’s open season and some people get kicks out of that).

Some people prefer an official forum as it has some cool features such as liking posts, reporting and feels a lot like a traditional gaming forum which old timers, like me, are more comfortable with. But trying to steer people to one place is a bit like herding cats. So we have to spread ourselves thin and do what we can to avoid situations where people feel unheard.

Some studios have notices on their Steam forums that they will not engage in the Steam forums and direct all players to their official boards. I thought about that for a while, but you cannot have a game on steam without one accessible forum available on it for your game. And what you want to avoid is having that one forum entirely un-worked. So you have to work it.

And it’s great for the redditers to have some engagement as it’s very google friendly and some people (myself included) love the reddit format.

And removing official forums is not on the cards unless something shifts, so here we are.

We have to be present on Twitter and Facebook because it’s 2018 and that’s, I hear, where all the cool kids go :slight_smile: It does spread us thin, and it’s desperarely difficult to keep up with everything and as I’ve said before, I wouldn’t change it for the world. It’s a great problem to face and a new challenge every day.

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Ditto… I ran a Starcraft/Warcraft forum for years back in the day(Early 2000’s, I’m not really that old), it was called SCindex. Still keep in touch with a lot of those guys to this day.

And yea, the steam forum is pretty cåncerous… I only go on there to check the V2 Community Hub artwork for dank memes and funny videos.

Well, glad you’re on top of it Hedge. Out of curiosity, is it just you and Julia (who you said is coming on board soon I believe), that handle all of FS communication?

EDIT: Also, can you remove the blacklist on curse words? How is cäncer a curse word? And pìss? Kruber even says in game, “pìss on those ratlings”. lol

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Cancer is a filtered word as it’s never used in an appropriate sense in a gaming forum. 99.999% of the time it’s used in a context I find absolutely repugnant. Similar to the use of autism as a slur against people who aren’t as good as other players (which more often than not couldn’t even be less true) or is thrown at a poster when they’re upset and venting in the forums. Piss is just in there because it’s a ‘bad word’ filter. Just because bad language is used in the (mature rated) game, doesn’t make it acceptible for the (not mature rated) forums.

If the word filter triggers on a post - firstly we ask not to bypass it with accented characters :wink:

Secondly, consider if there is a way to say what you’re trying to say without triggering the filter (and moderators, and other users) in the process.

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Is there a way to actually find out what it triggers on by now? In the past, I’ve wrote a really long post, and then I had to cut it into sub-paragraphs to check which one it didn’t like, then search that for potentially banned words. Took me a half hour and I ended up deleting parts I just didn’t want to also check.

PS: Why is a forum for a game supposedly more accessible to kids than the actual game? I think the demographic is the other way around.

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It’s not a very thorough word filter but your most common curse words are filtered out, with some additional fruity ones added. It does evolve, some get added, some taken out. Ultimately I do a lot of reading here both logged in and logged out and from experience, when you allow for rampant foul language, you can see discussions degrade much quicker than when posters have to stick within mostly clean language. I’m all for swearing and cursing out but there’s a place and time for it, and that’s with familiar company and not anons online.

Maybe I’ll move the list over to the censor list as opposed to the blocked list and do some A/B testing.

Anyone can access the forums.

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anons

It’s been confirmed. Hedge is a person who frequents 4chan, who woulda thunked it.

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Trips win socks

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So that’s where that word comes from?
I’ve seen it used in Japanese, and guessed correctly what it means, but still enlightening.

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Can everybody asks questions here?
Of course if you don’t want to regret later that you raised expectations you don’t have to answer these :smiley:

Mine are:

  1. Are there plans to expand the quest system?

  2. Is it planed to make a map editor avaiable for the Community?

  3. If i post feedback or bugs, where is it more likely to be seen by a developer. Here or on reddit?

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We’ll be expanding on it over time, with new quests and challenges.

That’s the plan. There are steps to take before then though to ultimately be able to prepare for it.

We see the bugs here and have addiontional resources to help with that now as well.

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thank you very much :slight_smile: