Honestly, I think we both are in agreement about the answer to this question.
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She’s probably been lurking off and on for a while now. You might’ve even spoken with her here already. 
The problem isn’t that they are making the new CM write a community update. That’s literally the job. Under normal circumstances that would be completely fine and a fair expectation to make.
The problem is that we’re not in normal circumstances.
Right now the Darktide community is feeling like “Ok, we’ve played the game, we’ve given the feedback, we’ve left our ratings, and now we need a good faith response from Fat Shark which demonstrates that they have been listening and are making a genuine attempt to address the game’s core issues both with some quick wins and some longer term commitments.”
Anything short of that will result in some pretty wicked backlash, and it’s all gonna be directed at the brand new CM on her first Community Update. It won’t be her fault and people won’t be upset at her personally, but when she inevitably has to post another nothingburger (or worse) people are going to take their frustrations out on the only person here with “FatShark” in their name.
That’s how they are throwing her under the bus; They’re throwing her to the pox hounds.
You do not hire a brand new person to address an angry mob. You put your most experienced person on it. Better yet, bring in the executives and let them defend themselves directly. This is gonna be a mess.
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Is it you? I bet it’s you.
Fix the dogs please. I haven’t logged in for days because of them.
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Knowing Fatshark’s track record, transparency and honesty ain’t their strong suit. Neither is keeping deadlines or listening to player feedback.
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Virtually every complaint here on this board can be redirected to this single post.
It sums up pretty much how they’ve ended up where they are with almost everything.
So what you say is : community manager shouldn’t have to deal with community ?
Weird statement to say the least…
It’s basically her job…
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Hm seems odd. Why not collect Bug reports as Tickets where the problem is described, then they assign this Ticket to a Dev, he makes changes and references the Ticket in his commit. Then in the release you get the list of all Tickets solved in this Release based on the commits. This is a basic feature of most industry standard Agile Development tools like Bitbucket/Jira, Git, Azure DevOps.
Then the CM can just collect the Informations from these Tickets and Compile them into a List. The only thing left is some Commit Discipline and a DevOp or SCRUM Master that monitors this.
Actually, I just think they just fled with booty…because I don’t see any communication from them (i can be wrong as i did not check whole forum).
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Hm seems odd. Why not collect Bug reports as Tickets where the problem is described, then they assign this Ticket to a Dev, he makes changes and references the Ticket in his commit. Then in the release you get the list of all Tickets solved in this Release based on the commits. This is a basic feature of most industry standard Agile Development tools like Bitbucket/Jira, Git, Azure DevOps.
That’s what I meant by saying :
Most leads and managers will indeed says what they have worked on and what will be ready for the post / update.
But it’s usually just a basic list of modification by each department. A bunch of ticked off tasks that have been completed if you will.
I was simplifying the process.
But as you may know, not all tickets/tasks/bugs are ‘comprehensible’ for common people. Also some tickets are not really well documented by devs, because it may waste their time when they have hundreds of those assigned to them. CM are not coders, nor designers. So they may not fully understand what has been committed in a ticket if they don’t have precise descriptions.
For example, a resolved ticket that said: ‘Tweaked variable damage_overlay_modifier with fixed ratio of 0.2’ the CM will be like 'uh? wut? what does that even mean?'.
That’s why most of the time, in larger structures with multiple department with dozens of devs each, the CM will not be responsible for reading the hundreds of obscure tickets and understand each of them. The leads/managers will collect the tickets from their respective team, summarize and translate it for the producers/assistant producers/CMs, take part in a scrum meeting and lay it all out for them in a comprehensible language.
If you only list the description of resolved tickets, you may end up with a patch note like this :
- Fixed ‘function:Out_of_bound=unexpected_value();’ by fixing the array [int num_weapon_manager; combat_blade_speed] that cause an out of bound
You will have instead:
- Fixed a crash that was caused by the combat blade if the player has too much attack speed.
I don’t know how FS operate precisely, maybe it’s the CM doing that translating if they hire really brainy / programmer CMs, but I doubt it. Again, I may be wrong because companies smaller or bigger don’t have the same processes.
Cheers.
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I mean you have a Bugreport that says: “Players falls through floor in level X at location Y.”
this Report has a Number/Ticket “123”.
The Devs make their “function:Out_of_bound=unexpected_value();” changes push them and reference the Bugreport “123”.
The Release branch should then include “Bugreport 123” as “fixed in this version” automatically thus can be easily extract by someone who communicates what was changed in a Patch.
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Yes, that works and is enough for tickets that have simple description and well documented issues, just like the one you described (falling through the floor)
But not all tickets have a simple title, description, made by users or QA.
Such as this one for example (just looking through the jira board)
The CM will see that this ticket has been pushed in the next version because it has been referenced. But he will have to read the ticket, and try to understand what the hell has been fixed, in order to write the patch note. And that’s where ‘programming translation to english’ is required.
Because one, the CM may not know programming and have no idea what this issue was, nor what the fix is.
And two, because regular players that read a patch note needs to understand what was fixed as well.
We do not see the resolution code of this Ticket. So this is not a good example.
As a Target user in the Jira example this ticket is OK in terms of content and description and i can understand what is the issue here. An odd one btw.
This is just asking the newbie to take the blame for the time it takes to publish it… I understand it takes time to have the necessary discussions and I don’t dislike they take their time, but they could just say so instead of going convoluted ways to obscure it.
That’s not that difficult or long to say : “Hello. We’re always here and be sure we do our best to improve our game in outstanding ways.”
CEOs are usually a major part of the problem. Mostly interested in fulfilling their duties to shareholders as opposed to their duties to the consumers.
I don’t blame anyone that actually put in actual work for this game.
The big wigs’ actions should be illegal–they essentially defrauded us.
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That’s such a weird thing to begin with, as well.
If you make customers happy, you’ll make your investors happy because customers will buy your product and spread positive word of mouth about the product. The latter is free advertisement and marketing.
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