A lot of us have been here a while. It is funny to think about in the abstract, but what we do and say here gets eventually relayed up high. You know, assuming it makes enough noise.
Management: so how are they liking the new patch? We worked pretty hard on it.
CM: oh, they like it!
Management: think we did well enough for them to ignore the other pain points?
CM: well, the thread crafting memorial thread by @brosgw is about to hit 1000 replies and they’re pondering a way to celebrate it.
Management: they have a mega thread memorializing every person ever who has complained about our crafting system?
CM: Oh yes! They’re very dedicated!
I guess in the abstract it is just funny to think that someone out there has either had a printed copy of our forum posts put on their desk, obviously our feedback gets heard and reacted too, but it’s amusing to think about how we get from A to B.
Thats why CM is almost a redudant position.
Unless YOU have ACTUAL power to push feedback into reality then you are just a mouthpiece.
It doesnt matter how honest and well meaning you are, you ARE still just a mouthpiece.
I DO BELIEVE Aqshy or Catfish mean well, I DO BELIEVE they send the feedback further that we DESPISE the crafting.
Hell ALL FS needs to do is OPEN THEIR OWN FORUM and see for themselves (or f-ck it even reddit)
But not, heads in sand and hoping that all will be well. People will start buying cosmetics if we ignore overwhelmingly agreed upon feedback RIGHT?!?!
I think it would be hilarious if CMs had the power to override management. Basically being the union boss for the player base. Would be funny to see the effects of such a thing.
I originally started this whole thing because I was tired of people saying it was a “minority” who were complaining about RNG. So I was like alright… lets get some real numbers then. And even just from the forums alone it seems quite obvious. It’s not just die hards and sweats. Anytime there is a big surge in player numbers I ALWAYS see new threads and even new accounts JUST to complain about the RNG/crafting experience. I can’t imagine they think it’s (crafting) popular or helping.
I don’t know what else I can really do for fatshark at this point. It has just felt maddening. It’s a great game, it deserves more spotlight, I love what it’s done for me for co-op PvE games. It’s hard for me to go to games that just feel simplistic by comparison with little mechanics to mitigate damage and it’s just trading blows and you out DPSing enemies. I want more “tide” games from the genre… without all the gacha mobile free to play mechanics. I get they’re a business, and they have dedicated servers so they have a constant maintenance fee.
It’s just one of those things that feels like such an obvious (to me) issue but they won’t address it. Hindsight is 20/20 and all but if they really thought there was doubt on the opinions of the crafting they could do a launcher survey if they don’t trust all this. But I would imagine they do. Maybe they’re just worried about swinging too much from the opposite side. I would be FINE with my “efforts” for item acquisition being invalidated for a better deterministic system, I don’t care. Especially to help new/casual players. Delete my whole item inventory if that’s what it takes to balance the economy for a deterministic system instead.
Pretty much. They exist to pacify the community. Same as surveys. It just gets people to shut up and not conjure up a storm on social media that could impact the perception of the game and company.
I believe the entire Wizards of the Coast debacle proved just that.
One has to wonder if by general curiosity, other FS employees or higherups read the forum when they are bored.
Also if the situation will be bad in the upcoming weeks, eventually somebody will come check what the fuss is all about… and it will attract more media attention.
Also a fun little joke.
Fatshark employees on their lunch break.
Employee A : Hey Johnny, lets read the forum and see what the players think about your awesome veteran krieg model.
Johnny : Oh damn, good idea. They gotta love it.
We can only hope that’s when Johnny realized modelling it faithfully off his comic-con cosplay kit composed of random mis-sized army surplus bits, instead of referencing a Siege of Vraks book or an actual Miniature as a reference, was perhaps a mistake
Bug reports, otherwise I imagine its close to nothing. The forums stopped being impactful to the development of FS IPs around WoM as far as I can tell. I imagine even the small testing groups are being phased out in some regard since tencent’s aqquisition.
I imagine a lot of FS’ choices are motivated by corperate interest, as is shown via the somewhat disconnected statements we have recived before from higher ups. This is the natural progression for any succesful - moderately succesful gaming company.
If anything forum commentary is probably evaluated on some aggregate level, like “there have been X posts about Y problem” and someone may try and push it up the chain to varried success.
It is inadvisable to ever listen to reddit. They’ve never had a good take even once as far as I can tell. Individual users may have good ideas but what gets upvoted in that self-selection bias zone is…questionable.
I should probably soften this a bit because its not like I hate reddit or no one should read it, I just mean that you cannot trust the ‘collective idea’ there as its not representative of a significant cross section of players and what gets the big updoots isn’t always a well argued for idea or concept, its just what is popular.
The whole debacle with Creative Assembly’s flagship Total War series has really demonstrated how little some companies want to listen to their own customers and the financial blowback that can fester and then appear as a consequence. Apparently one of their Product Managers said something along the lines of ‘who cares what the players think’. I am loosely paraphrasing. As a PM myself I cannot imagine thinking this. My entire day to day job is to worry about my customers.
“Does this make things better and easier”
“Does this improve our bottom line”
“Will this drive adoption of product?”
“Will the user actually like this?”
etc.
FS also grew quite quickly, moving from a studio that averaged 40-60 people at the hight of V2, to having almost 300 emloyees (last I checked). This can be good and bad, since larger employee counts doesnt always corelate to equally increased productivity.
Yeah, I dunno @Ryshek
As a cynical man with some corpo experience, I struggle to even imagine the forums/Discord of a game having much value.
FS pulled the ol’ “invite prominent members of the community to test the new patches” marketing trick, and I guess thems the voices closest to the actual playerbase.
In reality, and this being very cynical I suppose, the actual decisions being made on a higher level have nothing to do with “what” the game actually is, or “how” the game actually is. It’s the product, it’s impact, current and projected revenue etc etc…
To me, at this point, DT and its related forum/Discord are much like a sub-hobby - I check in once in a while after a long day, maybe write a few lines…
I’ve long since abandoned giving any meaningful feedback or taking the game seriously.
This is much more relaxing, and about as far this FS product can be utilized for the purpose of entertainment.
