Yeah I doubt that, boss. You have no ties to Fatshark yet are in multiple positions of power in the Darktide community, and are also endowed with the privilege of being a playtester - which none of us here are privy to. You also collect feedback for Fatshark.
Sure, and I’m the Muffin man:
Ah yes, Jsat, one of the yes-man responsible for Vermintide 2’s schizophrenic anti-fun balance direction and that catastrophic ‘Winds of Magic’ add on to Vermintide.
You sure are building my confidence here. I am delightfully enthused!
This also, by the cuff, confirms the fact that Fatshark does indeed only listen to its super exclusive yes-men, the two aforementioned individuals you brought up, instead of its actual players who play the game.
As for your claim that no one got kicked out of the program. This youtuber, one of the biggest critics of Darktide at the time, was blacklisted from a playtest:
At 6:00 - “Even though I was blacklisted from the Playtest because someone is a little man with big problems who didn’t like my review.”
So, if there are no “yes-men” (Telopots is unreliable), why aren’t Claysthethics, ChocoB (the finest of all Vermintide/Darktide players), and Mr. Unc on the playtesting team?
I’m not questioning the integrity of the people you mentioned, but it’s interesting how someone like Clay, who has the most thorough guides/tier list, isn’t on the program because he criticizes Fatshark when it’s appropriate, but someone like TheRealAsianRobot, who has a really shady past, is.
Exactly. Influencers hype products up. That’s their job. Their job isn’t to critique or give feedback. There’s a conflict of interest there. No one wants to give negative feedback as it means they might lose their exclusivity.
This discussion is interesting to me as it has done much to confirm why a lot of Fatshark’s patches tend to be completely out of touch with both fans and reality. We all thought they were just incompetent but the closer reality is that they’ve been using hype/yes-men as sources of feedback - dear God it’s worse than I thought.
I don’t know why anyone is or isn’t part of the playtest, I’m not privy to the selection criteria, but Telopots is one of the most critical people I’ve ever met. The idea that Fatshark would exclude people for being critical of the game, the company, or new updates being introduced doesn’t hold any water with me.
The final decisionmaking for the game lies with Fatshark. Playtesters can be deeply critical about something but that doesn’t necessairly mean their feedback is acted upon (for various reasons, including project management-related ones). It’s not an environment of yes-men (we want a lot of things that don’t happen), but it’s also not a council of masterminds that decide the course of the game’s development.
That’s probably about as much as I can say without breaking my NDA.
See what you can achieve by being a positive presence in the community? I never played a Fatshark game before Darktide, I just talked shop about Ogryn in the Discord server for a few months and here we are.
Jesus, that guy is on there? He knows nothing. Of the few build videos I’ve seen, he’s regurgitated other people’s builds, often while completely misunderstanding why they work the way they do.
Is there anyone in the playtest that doesn’t have a youtube/twitch/whatever channel, or isn’t connected to FatShark through moderator status or similar?
For Fatshark might be doing too much heavy lifting. I just mean that I pass it on to Fatshark, it’s not my official role or anything, but I keep an eye out for new or critical bugs, broken cosmetics, or general grievances about the game and feed them back to FS where I can.
Now I am just dying from curiosity. Has Fatshark EVER used its actual players for playtesting/sources of feedback during closed testing; or do they source it to Community Managers/Influencers.
Dictionary definition: a social, religious, occupational, or other group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some respect from the larger society within which it exists: the community of scholars.
The community as the vast majority of people who express an opinion here understands the term to mean ‘the players’. The tiny pre-selected clique of people who see the secret updates and provide feedback are a very small sub-set of the larger body.
Of course, it is important to note and accept that forumites are also a clique of the much larger body of players who merely vote with their wallets or gaming choices for the evening. However, they have expressed their opinion by largely abandoning the game as is evidenced by the limited figures available to the public.
Asserting that whatever small headcount of playtesters over however many number of hours constitutes meaningful community playtesting is disingenuous, I would suggest. We mustn’t accuse these people of malfeasance and a lack of objectivity, but by definition they are a coterie of the Devs and obviously enjoy some form of positive relationship with the studio or else they’d not have been chosen.
This is not community playtesting in any way, shape or form, and would not be recognised as such by the wider gaming industry: testing, yes; not tested by the community.
When the combat lead left, he talked about all the amazing times that was had in the private discord with ‘the community’.
One should be careful to extrapolate too much from one statement made by someone departing the company, but that discord server does not sound like it’s full of criticism.
Yes, there are people from the datamining and modding scenes (very knowledgeable about the game’s code and systems, far beyond what I understand) and ordinary community members. The amount of influencers/content creators is relatively small, but I mentioned two of them because they’re public figures so you might know them.
The same complaints that you all have about the game are continuously discussed in the playtest environment as well. I think it’s a pretty good representation of how the playerbase at large feels about the game – many of us feel compelled to champion the same causes, and are frustrated by the same things.
It’s full of criticism. It just isn’t full of vitriol (thank goodness).
I never played a Fatshark game before Darktide, I just talked shop about Ogryn in the Discord server for a few months and here we are.