Fatshark's biggest failure, communication

Roadmap has been down for 1 month. No info on whats being worked on after 1.1 outside of fixing few (very important, but still few) bugs. The worst part for me is how they keep coming to topics saying “its on our radar but not a priority right now” without stating anywhere what the actual priorities are. Acknowledging things is great, but zip the whole mysterious top priority behaviour. Its not hyping anyone, it only serves to annoy people.

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On the flip side, whilst yes, we do struggle to communicate at times through our clumsiness or failures in internal communication leading to a breakdown of external communication - let me take a recent thread as an example of what puts developers and CMs from communicating.

We’re asked by the OP if we have plans to address this, the answer was ‘yes’ but that we’re not sure in what form it will take and when that will happen.

Follow the commentary onwards from there. It shouldn’t take long to figure out why we oft-times avoid coming out with any answer, because it’s either ‘the wrong one’, ‘not enough’ or results in us simply being flamed for telling the truth.

There will be times where you don’t like the answer. There will be times where we don’t have an answer yet. There will be times where we cannot tell you what our current focus is, or cannot share dates on what’s coming.

We made a mistake publishing our roadmap. We made a mistake in being confident in what we could fit in for launch (re: dedi-servers, mod support) and we made a mistake hinting towards our first DLC when we did - because as is tradition in games (and in particular ours! :smiley: ) we slipped on those things and new challenges arose that absolutely needed to be addressed. New challenges appear all the time and some will take priority over existing promises or features, and some of the chalenges we face we just cannot talk about openly.

Game Developers have a super hard time and many players believe we’re more than human, or robots incapable of emotion and thought and are infallible - none of which could be further from the truth.

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I just want to point out that even though we’re sometimes harsh, we (at least most of us I hope?) do appreciate all the hard work and dedication you guys put into the game. Just want to put that out there. And I’d love it if you told that to the entire team over there that we appreciate them all.
I for one love the game, even if it is a bit of a buggy mess at times. I have over 700 hours in it now and I don’t see myself stopping any time soon.

I personally feel that the behavior of some people on forums when you guys do respond to something is pretty atrocious. And I can entirely understand the reasoning for not wanting to post very often since the negative backlash can, understandably, be pretty draining. Which only makes me appreciate those answers more when they do appear.

I, and I hope a lot of other people on these forums, and in this gaming community as a whole, appreciate what both you @Fatshark_Hedge and all of the rest of the team do. We know it’s not easy even though sometimes it can seem like an easy thing.

So.
Thank you for a great game.
Thank you for the times you do respond, even when it’s with limited information, any info is better than no info.
Thank you for the time and effort you all spend on making this game even better than it already is.

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Thanks for the answer.

Ok, all we people and all we make a mistakes, but i didn’t see that people say that you robots and more than humans. Most of questions was about causes of problems not about “do it or die”. In topic that you provide like example people just share their pain and just want to know “Why?”, what prevent you form a simple solution. I didn’t saw a lot of toxic guys(my behavior sometimes toxic in my opinion) on this forum(i just dont’t read a lot this forum, only interesting topic for me) and most of people understand that you “take a look” and etc. But people don’t understand why you refuse to communicate about causes.

You can’t talk about some problems? Ok, just say like you do “It’s on our radar, we are working on it, but we can’t call a causes which blocking us”.

And people who try to communicate with your team in most cases just worried about future of the game and about feeling that they have about this game.

In every community, not even gaming, will be haters/fanboys/toxic people(sry that i’m repeating) and other and like you say we all people, but like devs you have much responsibilities than users who “consume” your product. Dura lex sed lex.

As dev myself i understand you, as user i understand too and i really worried about game, but moments, that can improve game and feelings about game, doesn’t happen and people became mad/sad/angry etc.

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While I’m empathetic to your position and I think it’s fine to make mistakes, customer treatment’s still a big issue. The state of the game still doesn’t coincide with the state it was advertised as being in so it’s hard not to feel taken advantage of while we playtest the path to a console release that actively impedes FS’ ability to address “early” adopters’ valid concerns. The red dupe thing is a good example because it’s a pretty big deal. 500hrs, 30+ red accessories and like… 2 weapons I actually want? With other people being even worse off? That’s dumb man… That’s blatant Skinner box bs… Hearing it’s not an immediate priority is a kick in the balls.

Basically, the vibe I get from FS through all this is the exact opposite of the vibe I’ve always gotten from CD Projekt Red. It feels like customers aren’t the priority here because it feels like we’re mostly ignored and were duped into buying the game before it was ready. I love the game but it has huge problems. The combination of those problems persisting and the “sucks to be you vibe” I’m getting from FS’ end makes it hard to have a positive outlook, especially with console releases and season passes being mentioned… Like… Can we not just get the product we were promised first? Did VT2 not massively exceed sales expectations? Why is even more money coming before QA, PR, and the company’s overall image?

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Appreciate the answer, in my case for me personally this type of transparency, even if it has answers I don’t want to hear - completely and utterly beats the alternative of having no communication at all and no idea of what the company is doing/aiming at or orienting towards working on next.
So thank you for replying here.

It also helps dispel the illusion that is sometimes easily created around companies that they might’ve ‘‘grown cocky’’ or ‘‘ignore players’’ because it shows a level of willingness to engage with the community, which can be simply admitting that ‘‘hey there’s a rough patch atm, here’s our periodical feedback to you either way, we’re still working hard on the issues and we realize this/that is frustrating but we are in fact working on it.’’

I realize stuff ends up having to be repeated by you at times, however @Fatshark_Hedge, and I realize it might end up becoming a bit of a game of whack-a-mole at times especially when people make a bunch of threads all about the same thing; But thats also why I hope your soon-to-be-reinforcement will help you do that (if that’s their job-function) since there’s so many threads and only so much Hedge to go around. But when someone cannot find said developments/acknowledgements because it’s on spread unevenly on Steam, or Twitter or Reddit or twitch etc. Then they’ll just end up making another thread about it instead of looking for the answer, and then the process will just repeat itself.

I know it must be tough to stay ahead of that however, so you do have my sympathies and understanding there - but at the same time I always do wonder why all this community management has to come down on just you (from our perspective it is just you.) when from my perspective using your website to unify your resources/communication and getting a larger group of CM’s/Forum Moderators would help stem the pain from consumers when they feel unheard on issues that are clearly impeding their potential to enjoy the game to the fullest. Something that doesn’t just hurt you, but us in the playerbase as well when said player ends up leaving because they have no clue whats going on or where the priorities are.

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Oh i can certainly understand majority of what you said. With that, that’s exactly why i put those suggestions up. A little more honesty can help deal with exactly what you are having problems with. People tend to gain unrealistic expectations when they don’t really understand how things work.

Just having a developer diary that explains where your work has been going. Explain some difficulties that have slowed you down would add humanity to the developer team. I’m well aware how emotionally degrading it is to be yelled at by so many people when there is nothing you can really do. A developer diary may use about 30min-1hour of your time every 2-3 weeks but the impact can be surprisingly large when it comes to community engagement.

Holding Streams and somewhat nitpicking questions that you want to answer comes off extremely badly. Don’t sweep things under the rug, just be blunt and if you have to, raise the issue and outright say “I legally can’t tell you about it right now.” It’s a lot better than the alternative which causes more frustration from people feeling ignored.

As for Roadmaps… yeh those never seem to end well in the long term. People generally never feel satisfied, even if you follow it many say “you didn’t do it good enough” but are not aware of the constraints involved. As i mentioned earlier things like Red Shell would have been nowhere as bad if you guys were a little more blunt about it. A lot of the issues with Red Shell as a “I CAUGHT YOU!” realization for many users which means no matter what you wanted to say, it wasn’t good enough.

Having a thread in suggestions that just show what issues you ARE aware of and want to improve on in the future helps. For example, as a huge fan of the game myself i have NO awareness of if you guys know how insanely terrible WHC and BW are right now. Information if shared is often hard to find.

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Yeah people can be rude or toxic, especially on the internet. We don’t live in a world of kittens and puppies however.

I deal with people all the time at work, from regular joe on the street, to multi-billion mining corporation, one based in sweden that you might even have heard of. I may get shouted at in the face by regular private customers or representatives from companies - for anything from faults we didn’t do, to faults we actually did, to faults that happened because of things outside our control, such as supplier issues.

The response can be anything from telling someone to get the hell out of our building, to profusely apologizing, offering discounts or otherwise working our butts off to fix a problem.

Essentially, if you’re going to deal with people and customer feedback, you need to be a bit hardnosed, wether it’s on the internet or in real life. You’re going to get negative feedback - some of it constructive, some it just toxic or unfair. If that’s not something FS is prepared to deal with, then you could always put out a weekly/bi-monthly detailed dev diary/update and simply not reply to anything else.

As for people being dissappointed with your reply about red duplicates, you have to understand where they’re coming from. Many feel like they paid money to be early access testers, and paid for an unfinished game. They feel like their time investment isn’t respected at all by FS, all the while duplicates are allowed to exist. This feeling is further reinforced by FS doubling down on console release before fixing all the issues with the PC version, and the fact that you decided to ignore customer dissatisfaction with regards to spent comm chests and cosmetics.

Many, many of the hats are laughably low-effort, and the new droprate for cosmetics is still insanely low. All this skinner box RNG, early access nature of the launch, low effort cosmetics etc contributes to people feeling like FS is trying to screw them over, both on the product itself and on time invested in the game.

Quite frankly, some negative feedback is due. Of course hopefully it is constructive and not toxic, and at least here I feel most feedback can’t be classified as fully toxic. Steam forums are a different matter.

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wait…this game has an official discord? (runs off to look for it!)

It’s linked to at the bottom of every page of this forum :wink:

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Ideally it’d be placed at the top in a ‘‘Want more Vermintide?’’ box with a link to their Reddit/Twitter/Twitch/Discord/Etc. because most people will probably overlook that :sweat_smile:

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It’s also on both the Fatshark site (global footer) and the Vermintide site (Follow Us page).

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I won’t dispute that there’s some measure of linking being done, my issue is with the lack of overview/combined view for people that don’t frequent all these websites and are just looking to quickly read / post / inform / etc - a lot of people will simply call it too much effort at some point and you lose potential active contributors then :sweat_smile:

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C’mon it’s kind’a neat you guys/gals made a game that people feel this passionately about.

I do agree about the communication thing. How much time and in-game resources were lost when Power vs. Factions were “fixed” so that only one could be on an item and not communicating that at all? Time collecting dust + time re-rolling- It’s super-duper frustrating.

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Thank you for coming forward with this.

From now on you keep us posted about the state of the game and direction it is going, right?

I personally would like to hear about plans for upcoming patches on regular basis. i.e whats being done to some particular bug or some feature in the game. Why it is or why it isn’t in your top priority list etc. That would give us (consumers) more grasp on what is going on.

I for one hate being kept in the dark :confused:

I just wish you would centralize information. I shouldn’t be forced to scavenge through niche communities, just to know about the state of the game. For example, there was a interview with the CEO of the company, regarding the state of the game.

That is a huge deal, steam people would have not known this at all, if they don’t frequent reddit.

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They should still communicate anyway. This type of stuff is unacceptable in pretty much any other line of work. For instance, I work in construction and when giving estimates to people you generally add some extra time to it. That way if you encounter an unforeseen issue then you have time to deal with it and if not then you finished early and everyone is happy. If i just told someone I would tile their bathroom in 2 days and then took 2 weeks and never explained anything, the customer would be rightfully pissed off. I don’t get why in gaming people always try to protect devs from criticism.

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It would be nice to at least know that they acknowledge certain gameplay problems, we haven’t had an update that seriously impacted core gameplay mechanics in a long time and there are still a lot of issues, a lot of us were hoping that since 1.08 and 1.1 took so long to come that they would also include at least some more adjustments but so far we haven’t had a serious look at overall balance, bugs, or core gameplay (besides on Huntsman and Shade) since maybe even as far back as 1.05 which was supposedly the patch that enabled them to make balance changes. At this point it feels like more gets done from the occasional J_sat stream than any amount of posting will.

Maybe after they release on ps4.

Game development is a lot more complicated than that at times sadly. All sorts of crazy issues and limitations can end up being put into an already short time frame. Legal issues, time constraints, bad feedback, engine limitations or just outright complicated bugs can really throw a wrench in the plans. It’s an extremely brutal business to be in, many quitting due to burnout syndrome. It’s never that simple, but that doesn’t mean communication is impossible.