Honestly, I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, I feel like there is no dialog at all between us and Fatshark, it feels like we’re just screaming into a void.
I get that game development is karking hard and takes a lot of time, but with the lack of information that we have, we’re only left to speculate on what you’re planning/doing.
I understand that some people take it way too far with their emotions, at the end of the day you guys are making video games and trying to bring joy to players.
I can only speak for myself here but I feel like there is something wrong with some of your core practices and goals.
I’d kill to be a fly on your wall to at least know what’s going on there.
I might not be the right person for writing a nuanced post like this I honestly wanted to get this off my chest.
I’m not asking for a lot here, just honesty from you.
with that, I would be able to understand to a degree why or how things are happening.
I rarely (if any) see any of the devs posting here on their own forums (aside from our CMs) explaining reasons why they might have done something or the philosophy behind design decisions for example.
Back in Planetside 2, we had Matt Higby and during Overwatch 1 we had Jeff Kaplan, they might have not been perfect but at least they gave a sense that we as a community are being listened to and are taken seriously.
Right now it feels like a one-way street, maybe it is way more complicated than I am able to speculate/imagine hopefully someone here can put what I’m feeling into a better way than some of my silly rambles.
Genuine question for you guys reading here; Are we that toxic of a community?
Agreed, someone else suggested a roadmap so we can at least tell whatever FS is “planning” to do. I feel more communication is definitely needed as the community seems to be screaming about the locks and not a single response afterwards to the system has been made. The locks are horrendous and should’ve already been removed a long time ago and I’m curious as to why it is still in the game. I’ve enjoyed a good while of the game and I could be enjoying it for a long time but recently I’ve just been disappointed by the lack of real content and lack of real quality that its just making me hate the game more. If FS just turns a blind eye to something so simple that the community is asking for- that being removing locks- what hope does the community even have of continuing to support the game?
Answer to you question in the end: I don’t think we are a super toxic community (there are a few bad apples who take things too far) but as a whole our frustration is definitely reasonable
These forums are full of literally hundreds of the same posts in the same issues since launch. After months of feedback and a game critical update is due, we get 2 rehashed maps and a cosmetic shop designed to specifically milk money from players more efficiently.
Fatshark absolutely doesn’t care about this game or this community. Game is factually doomed until further notice.
That same sentiment had been repeated for Vermintide 2 as well. When Catfish first came on, for the first few days she was posting a lot on the subreddit about improving communication with the community going forward blah blah blah
We have been talking internally as well about the comms issue (amongst others) and I am working to set processes to make sure we communicate more and more transparently too.
But I think it’s become apparent that something/someone internally forces Fatshark CMs to generally be quiet and ignore repeatedly posted pain point community questions over and over, or if not outright ignoring then at most delivering the same “we hear you and will share more when we can” nothing statement (nothing will ever be shared).
And people get understandably frustrated when the questions they’ve asked or feedback they’ve provided for the past four months has been continually ignored, so they tend to get more and more toxic.
I think the promise of this game landed in a certain spot with the community that most 40k games couldn’t get near. Most 40k computer games are pretty skin-deep versions of the tabletop game. But Darktide promised to take us inside the habs of a hive city and see where people in that world live, see what a chaos infestation looks like from a normal person’s perspective. They got Dan Abnett to build the setting and their artists clearly put in great work to bring it to life.
Then for some reason they threw in so many unnecessarily kayfabe-breaking mechanics that the end result is a skin-deep 40k-themed arcade shooter. But because the promise was so great, we can’t just walk away and judge the game on it’s merits as an arcade shooter. We’re still, understandably, hanging onto that promise and would like to know why it didn’t pan out.
the community is not toxic. Fatshart is pathologically avoidant, as well as pathologically passive.
fatshart leaves things in the game that are clearly wrong and easy to fix for far to long. For example, the crafting button you have to spam 500 times to get the perk you want.
everyone in the world has the right to complain about a toxic element like that. its such a terrible mistake it should never even have been placed in the game.
thousands of people complain about crafting, fatshart does not reply.
I suspect they enjoy it, they must have some psychological research they are using, some function of Stockholm syndrome they are exploiting to keep people around. There is also a lot of gaslighting from the community managers.
you would be naive to think that a billion dollar industry leaves psychology alone and is not using it to manipulate its customers in the current year.
CM’s are basically muted to the point of questioning why FS even have them. I’m not attacking the people who are CM’s, just the fact that FS could literally go without them and the result would be the same, apart from the CM’s wouldn’t get all the flack.
I am absolutely not advocating to sack the CM’s BTW! Just loosen the handcuffs so they can do their job better.
Reminder it was actually patched to be worse. It used to be a button you could spam, but then some youtuber made a funny video about mashing it at high speeds so fatshark make it objectively worse by making it two clicks.
That might be true for some of them, however at the end of the day Fatshark is a business with investors and shareholders to please. The only thing that matters is that they make money. If people are happy on the side that’s a plus. Since Darktide got so many launch sales I feel like they are trying to replicate that with an xbox launch to make similar profits.
I assume that’s why they aren’t communicating at all. Who would want to be told they are being ignored in favor of a different audience? But at this point I feel like that’s the reality of our situation.
Personally I think it’s because of Hedge’s initial responses to the community’s complaints, and the backlash to those statements, that has made Fat Shark hesitant to state anything substantial or respond to the community. They’re never going to live down “Immeasurably Complex” or “This is not CoD, nor was it ever intended to be”, even if they turn this game around and make it into the game we’re all hoping it could be.
This goes back before Darktide, but the just of this statement seems largely correct. Fatshark seems to have a policy of non-engagement for the mental health of its own employees. It’s like a YouTube not reading in engaging with their their comment section because it’s negative and often counter-productive, and there is some legitimate wisdom in this.
Unfortunately, making games is slightly different than making something like YouTube videos, the least of which is we can offer legitimate feedback about how to improve the quality of a single product through significantly more exposure and experience than they are able to get themselves. This is where a Community Manager comes in.
I’m a bit perplexed by this. FatShark employs three “Community Managers”. I think Hedge has another role in the office and is likely a volunteer from the early days when they were a smaller company, but they have a dedicated CM for each of their properties, yet we hear almost nothing from them nor does it seem our feedback is being passed to the development team or at the very least taken seriously.
I have a serious question: What do they do all day? What value do they add to the company?
I thought maybe they’d have been busy making a big announcement for Skulls, but all we got was a 3 minute video read by a tone-deaf Juan. I don’t mean to sound derogatory, it’s just a bit baffling.
Community Managers have the opportunity to engage with a community to make their game feel alive and worked on, to garner excitement for upcoming content and make us feel like we’re a part of something cool and our voices matter. It genuinely seems like Catfish has tried in this regard. You could almost hear some of the frustration after she tried to get people excited for the May Comm-Link just to have it pulled at the last minute. It does feel like they’re being purposely held back. This, combined with a glacially slow development pace and lack of transparency from the company as a whole, must leave them feeling pretty valueless as well. Good thing the benefits of working at Fatshark must outweigh this!
They are relatively speedy for relatively focussed areas, like Quickpaw for bugs and Julia for technical issues, but general CM engagement is overall pretty low and tend to be in places like Discord rather than actual official channels.
My reply wasn’t even to you (it was to Positron, the forum doesn’t show it as a reply to a post when it is immediately after the replied to post), in a thread you didn’t start?
I’d just like to shout out Quickpaw and Julia as I generally have and see (relatively) good experiences with them.
