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The post on the phantom swings were acknolwedged after my original post 
And the other one I simply didn’t see.
I’ve lurked on that reddit… sometimes. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a doctor’s health recommendation for the C.M. to take a hiatus.
This actually came to my mind as a direct response to a certain comment in a relevant Reddit thread, but as I don’t have an account there (and won’t have, at least for a while yet), I’ll mention it here:
It’s certainly our right to criticize FS’s decisions and give feedback, both negative and positive. But especially negative feedback should be worded politely and, even more importantly, constructively. There’s a world of difference between “This thing sucks and you suck for making it suck, fix it now!” and “I think this thing feels wrong or bad, here’s why and how, this is how I think it could be better.” Unfortunately, a lot of the feedback (in all channels, but far more visible on some) is in the former style, and that doesn’t really help anybody and won’t prompt a friendly response. Those posts are also often made by people who have made up their mind, and no response will make them like (or even accept) the way things are, and as such, are far worse for a PR person’s stress levels than the sensible, constructive posts.
The same “this sucks” posts also are far more likely to draw just people who already feel the same (or merely keep jumping into bandwagons) into the thread, rather than raising actual conversation, so they end up far more one-sided and through that, easily present a more negative picture of the issue than the general opinion actually is. As I said before, in Reddit downvoting things you disagree with is also a thing and thus the opposing opinions get drowned even further. As a nice example of this you can try finding a few threads about Natural Bond in the subreddit, including Grimalackt’s analysis. Most of the threads are just yes-no -contradiction, but the one post (Grim’s thread) that dives deeper into the issue attracts far more sensible conversation, on both sides of the issue, than any thread repeating “NB is bad, it should be removed” or “Why the hate for NB? It works fine for me”. Actually, I think after Grim’s thread I’ve even seen less of the NB arguments…
Edit: Also check the threads about this same issue, for example here, and look at the downvoted comments. The opposing opinions are again being buried, but this time they are the more negative ones.
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It’s sad that the reddit has fallen into the state it’s in, and I don’t blame Hedge for taking a break.
It used to be one of the best reddit communities I had found. I hope eventually all the people who just enjoy hating and ranting will move onto (probably to ruin some other reddit), and the people who actually enjoy the game can again take over.
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Just so I understand, you don’t want to give out dates because people might react bad if you don’t hold to them?
One of the big reasons FS gets such reactions is sticking to one critical date that you absolutely shouldn’t have to: the release date.
FS KNEW what state the game was in on release, you had tons of feedback from the beta yet decided to release it anyway. FS KNEW there was unfinished content and released the game anyway.
…and it all wouldn’t be so shady,slimy and appalling if not for the fact that not a single explanation was given, not a single fault was admitted.
If you want sympathy from your playerbase then own up to mistakes and communicate CLEARLY.
…unless you have investors breathing down your necks and immediately went into debt due to lavish spending after selling over a million copies - because that would be the only justifiable reason for not telling us what you’re doing and how you’re doing it(Even the DLC date was hidden until its release date).
The only other reason would be arrogance.
The only “explanations” we got so far were equivalents of “sigh,deez keedz don’t know the industry,how games are made and a lot of other background factors” without ever going into details of the said things people don’t have a clue about. Is it a company secret? The secret to how well you guys are doing right now? Or maybe it’s another show of petty arrogance where you assume people wouldn’t understand the “jargon” anyway.
Like OP said,I’m not directing all this at YOU specifically. The person or group of persons who have the most influence in the company and affects making decisions like “how should we approach the community on this matter” should get their conservative, stuck-in-2012 behind a solid kick,so maybe their heads start working straight.
Twitch streams every now and then and a bit of forum activity was considered good developer communication years ago.
Now it’s the bare minimum for big games and often not enough for small ones/
i.e Slay the Spire - got extremely popular due to non-stop weekly updates that dug into the details of the developers approach along with mandatory patches PLUS the developers are active not only on forums,but they sit on discord almost all the time- read the discussion there and engage in spontaneous live chat with players - StS may be a smaller game when it comes to the amount of assets and file size, but it’s hell of a lot better crafted than VT2 is and the devs were NOT afraid to tell their community the thing that every respected developer should- “WHEN IT IS DONE” - and when it is,it actually IS done and the polishing coming afterwards is just lovingly caressing a diamond, with a piece of pristine silk.
Not to mention CDPR’s approach to CP2027…
I could give more examples, but you should get what I mean by now- FS does NOT act in the slightest bit comparable to these self-publishing indie studios and is leaning more towards EA or ActiLizzard, which is as surprising as it is baffling.
I couldn’t be bothered to spend a few hours on digging web archives to show you posts that match yours almost word for word from Evolve and Battleborn forums - you’ll just have to take my word for it - and both these games were supported by big commercial campaigns and a wealthy publisher(who incidentally was the main reason for both games swift death)
And I say he did not. Specify the exact place where he said there WILL BE new armors. He only said there is stuff you can and cannot find in game files, so what?
They never promised anything and you cannot cry for something that you don’t have the right to cry for. The impact is that this big new community pressures them into fixing/changing/doing whatever they want, because if not they will complain. They simply don’t have the amount of people to handle this, so they have to set priorities. And those were and couldn’t be making this DLC people are waiting for because there are more urgent matters to look into.
Glitches can be exploited, too. They re not defined as [quote=“liljavarg, post:6, topic:27036”]
get stuck in terrain
[/quote]
Thanks for pointing out your lack of knowledge in basic network matters. Speed aka mb/s has nothing to do with how stable your connection is or how GOOD your internet is. There were a lot of backend errors when they improved the speed for crafting, but that is fixed now. If you don’t even know why people had backend errors “Not to many days ago” then don’t bring it up. I didn’t say I never experienced backend errors or they don’t exist, I said if you experience them, then it is high likely on your end. People like you just buy their internet from their provider and think everything will work fine and the problem is always on the other’s side.
-
If you die at the end of the pit, get good.
Or tone the difficulty down until you’re able to complete the map flawless, THEN turn it up. -
The pit is totally new and don’t you think FS wanted to release this delayed DLC as fast as possible, because everyone, including you, was crying about it? Well, they did and now we’re here again to hear you cry.
Yeah…You never experienced game-breaking bugs in all the games you ever played. Even the big ones completely messed up stuff a lot of times. Day 1 patches with 10GB? Never heard of that? Well, maybe you were just playing stuff like Harvest Moon or Hello Kitty, no one knows.
Totally understandable, for sane people. You’ve got to let it go, sometimes. More frequently a lot of people don’t seem to understand basic language anymore and just interpreting or reading whatever they want.
Good to see you again.
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Reddit is not the official forum. Fatshark has no ability to moderate it and no obligation to be there at all. Hedge shouldn’t need to “justify” not being on that site; any time he spends there is a courtesy.
Also, this massive wall-of-text of a post is exactly why Hedge’s hiatus from reddit is completely justified. If he simply took a break from reddit without saying anything, people there would complain that he went AWOL and start spreading conspiracy theories. If he actually mentions that he’s taking a break, people on reddit instead criticize him for that. There is no way to win on reddit, because the loudest members of that community act unreasonably and entitled, and reddit’s design prevents back-and-forth discussion in favor of only the loudest opinions being heard.
If someone says that you’re upsetting them and your response is to lecture at them about how they shouldn’t be upset, then you are part of the problem.
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I dunno what launch you saw, but they fixed tons of problems from beta to release - I played from a very early build until release, they fixed an absolute ton of things. It did release buggy (though still entirely playable), and they did own up to that. Multiple times they’ve made big posts and comments talking about how they messed up and they have no excuse, but they’re working to fix things.
I guess all these times they’ve admitted mistakes and been extremely transparent are just forgotten?
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Saying “we’re sorry” and then doing things exactly the way you did means nothing.
I don’t know what “tons” of changes you saw, but special spawning directly in front of the player, hordes spawning all around the group within melee reach, patrols dropping on your head- these were “playable” bugs that haven’t been fixed for a long,long time. Not to mention the green dust problem that was a concern for people who played most during betas.
and you omit the fact,that some things they just ignored almost entirely- like the missing content, like the roadmap - Listen,I don’t WANT to bash on FS, but they lost all credibility they had in my eyes and their actions don’t give me much hope of that credibility ever being rebuilt.
My biggest concern is- the more they f-up, the less popular the game will be,the worse the quality of new content and updates will be which will result in even lower popularity and the playerbase dropping up to the point where there’s less than 200 concurrent players - I just can’t understand how a studio could cripple their game like that, especially given it’s potential for greatness. I can’t forgive that. It’s like watching a parent bullying his child. What makes matters worse they seem to have not learned a thing from VT1 release and they just added more mistakes and bad decisions to the heap.
Half a year after launch we got a patch that starts to address issues that shouldn’t have been issues on release, we get our first balancing patch that still doesn’t cut it,but is a good start - or would have been a good start if it was done 3 months ago- but other f-ups and downright negligence prevented that from happening because they had to take ages to code in and make the UI for dust conversion alone - whereas modders - many of them single entities with zero backup - are producing heaps upon heaps of quality content in a matter of weeks.
Plus,treating players like entitled brats, even though most of them just have standards they’d like to see in a modern game. It might not seem like much, but the “they’re whining about there being no cosmetics- no armor skins- let’s stuff them with re-colors so they keep their entitled mouths shut” approach is just disgusting. Because quantity over quality is the way to go,right?
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Must be pretty nice to decide that you don’t want to do your job and still get paid for it.
Take the bad with the good, Hedge.
That said, you aren’t solely responsible for all the mistakes your company is making, but you should absolutely attempt to relieve your playerbase, not antagonize them.
This is a great game at its core, your customers (The people who pay for your living wages) are upset because of the misused potential and the fact that your company has a poor track record for these things in the past, and aren’t learning from it.
Your job is literally damage control, if you can’t or won’t control all of the self-destructive action (or lack of action) your company is doing, then maybe you need a different position. Or less work days in the week, at least.
I’m sorry if it comes off as too harsh, but to me, I am very unimpressed that someone would literally say “I’m not going to carry out my role because it is too hard or unpleasant” and try to take the high road afterwards.
[ninjad]
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It started out terribly, then it went a bit ok, but now I’m not sure. If anything it should be in the lounge.
@Massmurder - I can absolutely fulfill my role without the need to participate in an unofficial sub reddit for a week or two. It doesn’t mean I’m not reading, but if it becomes impossible for me to say anything without what is being said becomes twisted and turned in to something else, then it’s actually better to not contribute for a while and leave a note stating why - which I did - and let it sink in for a little bit.
Upset? No worries, everyone is entitled to be upset for anything that upsets them - but there’s a way to approach being upset when you’re dealing with people. I’d share some of the PMs I received but I’ve since blocked those users after providing what details I can to the authorities, but hopefully that gives you some insight in to the level of unreasoned behaviour that was levied against me personally over thoroughly twisted words about cosmetics in a video game.
Cheers.
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Sounds like when I lost my virginity.
Jesus dude… I guess this is srs businezz
I always come back to this meme, it fits so well.
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Thanks for clarifying that you would still read posts and maintain presence on reddit, even if you don’t reply for your hiatus. I’ve seen every toxic post you have seen, probably. (reddit lurker, no account)
Your point of view and swift reply is appreciated, truly.
I do also understand there are maniacs out there that may threaten your life or well-being over simple wording or in-game issues, quite frankly I’ve never had to deal with that sort of thing, so I do apologize for those people and hope your mental health is all well and good, nobody should have to deal with that kind of abuse anywhere, ever.
Although the professionalism in me was initially confused by your reaction, I’m more worried about the game’s future and well-being than I am upset, I don’t want to see it fail.
I think most of the people that are still around from the beginning feel the same way.
I do see a bit of an edge to your replies sometimes, and while sometimes I agree it is warranted, things like that little shrugging dude wasn’t really needed, you know?
It’s the little things that keep people happy, anyway.
Cheers man
If I could go back and not put in the shrugging dude, I would - certainly. I’m just flesh though and the notion that I’m the kind of chap to go and remove historic posts to bury something felt like an attack on my integrity which is something I hold close and firm - It was a straw that broke the camels back as they say and agreed, not necessary. 
Thanks for sharing your thoughts too. I always look to learn and grow as a person and a professional in the field and even 12 years in I learn something new every day about the job from others in the field as well as from those I am genuinely here to serve and advocate for - the players.
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Nice guy Hedge.
If you ever get out of that dump you call a city, Stockholm, head up north to Gävle, we can have few pints. It’d be nice to be around my own kind, the Swedes are nice enough, but they can’t hang. If I remember correctly, you’re British as well? eh?