Look ma’! I got mentioned! I’m famous! Yee haw!
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Yes. If you were around at launch and before, the communication from Fatshark, the promises, etc all gave people the impression that Fatshark was really caring about their product management. The sense was that “this is just a beta, wait until launch!”
Well, the launch happened and basically nothing changed (except cash shop) and all those promises either materialized months later (and underwhelmed) or still haven’t been realized. Fatshark did a masterful job of a bait and switch and the launch review scores reflected that.
As a community, advocate that people review games based on what it IS. Reviewing based on “potential” or what it could be let’s companies get away with scamming people.
REVIEW SCORES From November 30 onward (excludes beta period):
47% positive only.
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Honestly, this is probably the most based mindset now. FS already took our money, and when we complained loudly on the internet FS shrugged it off and gave a big middle finger to the community. Just continue to play a round here and there for the only redeeming quality (the gameplay), and move on when it becomes stale; the circle of life.
It’s just so incredibly disappointing that the first game in years I’ve felt excited to actually take time to participate in the community is actively being run into the ground by a typical greedy company with no interest in community building… Just my luck.
I’m not mad… Just disappointed
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Yeah exactly.
I’ve been a 40k fan since I’ve been 12-years old, played multiplayer FPS games since when Doom first came out (yes, over dialup modems!), and have loved the horde shooter co-ops since Left 4 Dead (#1). I’ve also played action RPGs since Diablo 1 (still play diablo 2) and so the combination of gear and loot, with co-op FPS in a 40k setting. I look at DRG and they way its developed and managed as a live service game. And so for me, Darktide is a sort of holy grail game opportunity and moment.
But to watch Fatshark flail around and drive the game and community off a cliff is so disheartening. Especially so because the major issues to be fixed don’t even seem that onerous to fix - but there is just no leadership will to do it at Fatshark, for whatever immeasurably complex reasons they’ve told themselves.
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Every time I play DRG I get a pang of sadness when I think, 'man, imagine if DT was being developed with this level of love, polish, and community engagement ’
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No worries mate, yeah they were a poopposter for sure.
Well, yes. It is toxic towards CMs and Devs. It’s arguably better than it was 3 months ago, or 6 months ago, but try and put yourself in their shoes. Your making new skins for the shop, you’re putting your all into a tiger camo, you think it’s coming along great, it gets released, and you skim through the comments and someone’s calling 8 hours of your labor poop. No one called you out by name, but you know your work, your contributions to the game, and someone’s calling your work out as poop. Not giving actually criticism. Do you think that makes the dev more likely, or less likely to come here and interact. Same idea thing with all the other non-constructive feedback. If you spent a big chunk of your life on a project, and for half a year, a small but vocal group kept trying to tear your work down, would you bother to try interacting with the larger group know the smaller group would just be worse because you showed up.
None of those examples call people out by name, sure, but the devs know the work they’ve done. When they call something poop, someone made it, someone put their time and effort into it. When they call all of the devs lazy, it really doesn’t matter if they don’t say names, it’s targeted at all of them. And remember, the worst of it gets deleted. I can’t show you those, I got lucky because Asukas quoted them. The rest get seen by someone at FS, and get deleted, but the damage is done from them whether or not the rest of us see them.
And rightly so, game has issues.
Yeah, and that’s a problem, it’s just a $40 game. If they didn’t like the state it was in the open beta, they should have gotten a refund. Day one when it was in the same state, they should have gotten a refund. And 2 weeks in when they had 10 hours, but never completed a mission without a crash, they should have gotten a refund. They chose not to get a refund, instead of moving along with their life and being done with DT, they choose to stay and wallow in anger. And direct that anger at the devs again, and again, and again.
With the restaurant analogy. If I go to a restaurant, and I order a steak medium rare, and it comes out raw in the middle, I’m going to politely send it back, and wait patiently for another. If it comes out bad, again, I may try again, but I may just ask for a refund. I’ll probably leave a bad review, but it will be factual, ‘steak came out raw twice’, not ‘chef is lazy and incompetent’. And I sure as heck aren’t going to make a bad review every day, or stand outside the restaurant shouting at people.
There is no ‘nebulous Fatshark Devs’, they’re all people who spent years of their life working on this. They each have identifiable contributions… It’s not ‘exceptionally toxic’, but it is toxic/rude/disrespectful, whatever negative term you want, and it drives the devs away.
I’m not ignoring it, there is a far greater amount of polite and reasonable critique, and it’s even better than it was 6 months ago. It’s not relevant though. If you go to a bar, and 99% of the people there are cool, but one guy always tries to kick you in the balls every other time you go, you’re going to stop going to the bar. It doesn’t matter that the majority of people are offering good feedback the small group of poopy people are going to push the devs away.
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I didn’t want to drag you in, but I also didn’t want to quote you but hide quoting you. I agree with most of what you said. However instead of staying and getting more irate, they should just leave. To extend the analogy, the people I’m talking about are going to the restaurant everyday, standing outside and yelling at the staff and customers. Not the ones sending back food.
This is the thing, I know it happens, but it shouldn’t happen. We shouldn’t accept this as normal and OK, we should push back against it. Screaming at the customer service desk in an Airport isn’t going to fix any issue. It won’t make the plane load faster, it only makes things worse for everyone else. It wastes everyone’s time and makes everyone’s experience worse. We shouldn’t put up with people who just want to cause chaos because they feel slighted.
I appreciate your level headed response.
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To All:
I’m not saying don’t be frustrated, or upset…. I’m saying when some people are rude, and disrespectful, the devs aren’t going to go out of their way to interact with the rest of us.
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If you want to get almost immediate dev response you just have to threaten to be more toxic to other players.
Interesting response priorities.
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I’m sure that sucks to see, and I sympathize, but this is something that literally every person who has ever worked in a creative or artistic field has had to deal with at some point. These people aren’t fragile little babies who will crumble and quit their jobs at the sight of a minority of jerks on a forum criticizing their work in a way that isn’t 100% squeaky clean and constructive. If you’ve ever seriously done creative work you know that you can’t please everybody and that you’re gonna run into some stupid and unreasonable criticism eventually. Part of getting better at creative work is learning to filter out what criticism is worth considering from what isn’t. It’s unfortunate that there are a lot of dumb MFs out there who blow things out of proportion but if that was all it took to discourage people who’ve spent their lives pursuing artistic careers there wouldn’t be many artists left.
I totally agree with OP in that any community anger should be directed toward the people who actually make decisions at the company, and anything targeting individual devs/lower level employees is severely misguided, but at the same time dealing with unhappy customers and setting expectations is literally a CM’s job and they should know what they’re in for when they sign up. It’s also their job to manage that anger with clear communication on how the problems will be fixed, which they often don’t do because of FS’s apparent massive internal communication problems. You don’t get to stop doing your job because a few people in a sea of constructive feedback have not been constructive.
See
Your whole argument is based around the idea that FS was at some point responding to the constructive feedback and stopped once it became unconstructive, when that’s never been the case. A lot of the posts you pointed to as examples of “toxic behavior” are from people who have been around since the beta, who’ve had their polite and constructive feedback consistently ignored for the last six months.
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Agreed, I feel so bad for Catfish, Aqshy, Hedge, et al. having to be the higher ups’ punching bag.
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I’m just gonna throw my voice in here as well and agree with the OP. This is all on management.
Stop making excuses for the people who are jerks. Being a jerk should not be acceptable, full stop.
Yeah, the people at the top are fair game for criticism. (but not harassment, I haven’t seen/heard of any harassment. I mean stuff like what Bungie just won their lawsuit for, that was some gross poop)
Is severely misguided that the strongest language you’ll use on this? Can you not say it’s inappropriate and it shouldn’t happen?
Are you saying that it’s acceptable to harass the CMs because you think it’s part of their job to be harassed? Do you think it’s OK for a customer to berate a server because they got the order wrong? Do you think it’s OK to yell at the boarding agent at an airport because a flight got delayed?
No, that’s not my argument. I never said it used to be good. That’s not really relevant to what I am saying.
It’s REALLY simple. A portion of the community treats the staff/devs like poop, Therefore the staff/devs don’t interact with the community any more than strictly necessary.
I’ll extend it to say And a portion of the community seems to think it’s acceptable to treat the staff/devs like poop because the game had a bad launch, and all the other issues with it.
I contend, and it’s a hill I will die on, It is never acceptable to treat another human being like poop over something as stupid as a video game.
there’s literally no correlation you can draw, the engagement with the community has not decreased due to people directing anger at FS as a whole or single people, it was Never good to begin with
it wasn’t good after the launch of DT, it wasn’t good before DT, exactly the same with V2, and V1,
at no point did a shift happen where any toxicity directed at fatshark could have negatively impacted communication because communication was always abyssmal.
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I never said communication got worse, I said they don’t want to engage with the community because part of the community is poopy. And after this thread, it seems apparent that another part of the community is supportive of the staff/devs being treated like poop. They won’t go as far as to do it themselves, but they’ll sure try and justify those who do.
Do you think it’s acceptable to treat the staff/devs like poo is acceptable? Do you think treating them like poo will encourage them to be more interactive?
Would you go to a bar where everyone is nice except one guy who tries to kick you in the balls every week, and everyone turns a blind eye, or tries to explain how it’s actually ok.
I’m here trying to say how not being a jerk to the devs is intrinsically good and may actually help things improve, and people are trying to justify being poopy because it didn’t make an already bad situation worse.
Wind of Magic tho…
Oh boy so it’s harassment now? Come off it dude, some people said the new camo pants look like ass and you’re acting like the art team and Catfish are being sent death threats. I made a comment about how people who say this forum is some sort of toxic cesspool seem to have pretty low standards for toxicity and the evidence you followed up with basically proved my point lol. This is like when people said the game is being unfairly “review bombed” because it got a lot of negative reviews on steam.
Of course I don’t “condone harassment” you goof (sorry for the strong language), I’m saying the evidence for your claims makes it hard to take you seriously, and the moral grandstanding you’re doing now certainly isn’t helping either. Typing in caps is not the same as screaming at a service worker in person lmfao. Reading a nasty comment from what is probably a pissy teenager who can barely put a full sentence together is not comparable to “a guy in a bar kicking you in the balls”. I agree that there are people on this forum who blow things out of proportion, you’re one of them.
This is like exactly what correlation is lmfao. The devs can’t “want to engage with the community less” because they already barely interact with the community in a meaningful way as it is.
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Speaking of which, that surge of positive reviews from the"Beta" gives me conniptions over how discourse of this game was like in terms of community engagement in steam forum. I still like how my highest rated review on steam is from this game:
LMAO!
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I asked if you thought it was OK because some of your previous comments seemed to imply that taking abuse from customers was expected as part of the job.
Really glad we on the same page with that at least.
And again, the worst of the posts get deleted, I can’t show you those… They don’t exist anymore. I’m not going to scrape the forum every few minutes to try catch something before it’s deleted. And again, it’s not as bad as it was months ago.
Again, it’s not what I am saying. I am saying a part of the community has been poopy towards the devs and staff for a long enough period of time that they do not want to participate in the community beyond what is necessary. This does not imply I believe there is currently a correlation between the level of poopy behavior and the participation. Correlation implies there’s is some mathematical relationship between one and the other. I do not believe if the community was 10% less poopy, we’d get and change in participation. We’re well past the point of going back. I think there was an opportunity when the new CM came on board, but that clearly didn’t work out.
We’re not going to see eye to eye on this. Hope you have a great weekend!
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I may have actually upvoted it. It’s honest and accurate.
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I’m pretty sure at this point this game is on life support an FS don’t wanna resituate it.
lauching on console like this would be a mistake. But im pretty sure this is TenCent’s MMO strategy and they don’t understand the user base.
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While I understand your argument, reality is: Wherever there is passion or strong need for a product or service, disappointing performances will lead to strong emotional reactions.
This isn’t unique to Gaming. You also find this all over Logistics, Finance and other important sectors. But it’s less publically known, because when the local inventory manager of the Nestlé warehouse has a meltdown in his office over shipments not arriving and he blasts somebody else over it on the telephone line - That stuff usually stays within the company and isn’t publically posted.
The confident sales representative, sales manager or community manager can withstand this onslaught of emotions and counter it with a firm, collected and self-confident response. Sometimes not giving a comment is also the right course of action, in some discussions with the customer it can even be beneficial to agree with said customer and use the argument as a base for a follow-up sales approach.
Sounds ridiculous, but it works.
So yes, it absolutely IS part of the customer service job to deal with outrage, disappointment, sadness or feelings of uncertainty and fear. I have worked in sales for a long time. I cannot even count the amount of times I heard “You are criminals” directed at reputable, long established companies whose polo shirt I wore. And that’s okay. Mistakes can happen to anyone. Even big players. In those cases where people scream obscenities, customer service made previous mistakes and people were “left hanging”. Some of those mistakes are very costly to their customers, financially or emotionally (giving time and energy into something is also an expense of sorts). And it is natural that these people would then be erratic.
Death threats are of course another ballpark and unacceptable, but that’s not what’s happening here. People are critisizing the product or service, here the pricing model. And it is their good right. Their language may be too colorful at times and provocative, but the core message is legitimate.
I also want to add that I find Catfish and Hedge both do a fine job, although their strategies are different.
Catfish doesn’t reward overly negative feedback with a response, but does summarize it’s content and clearly gives that feedback on. It can be seen in the patch notes.
Hedge on the other hand used to give slightly snappy responses to snappy inquiries, but clearly the image this portrayed isn’t desired of Fatshark so they changed this approach.
This forum is rather tame, I don’t think it’s much that has to get deleted. The Discord is decidedly more volatile. In part because faster chat functionality encourages loose, emotional responses more and in part because you gather a difference audience there.
Reading long texts requires a certain amount of attention span, so by using a forum we all have already a filtered userbase with higher patience levels and intellect here.
I agree whole-heartedly with what you say here.
- Being abusive or “colorful” in language all the time is extremely draining and demotivates contact between customer and customer rep.
- Whether someone likes their job and the community will change how often they do one extra, in the form of engagement. Will also change what type of energy they give. People are less joky when they feel exhausted or dreadful.
Furthermore, I want to add that Fatshark’s Community Interaction is despite common belief actually above average when it comes to both frequency and quality. Especially when compared to equal competitors (AA devs with a comparibly higher employee count / AAA devs with a comparibly “low” employee count).
People make the mistake of comparing a rather large company with all it’s machinations and workings to a small sized indie company.
Having pieces of content such as discussion answers, blogposts, community contests and more looked over, approved and then moderated before sending them out is totally common for companies of this size. It’s also true for companies in many other fields.
Small dev teams can afford to put out whatever they want whenever, because they’re usually single digit in team strength and live from the casual nature of their venture.
It absolutely is the exception and not the rule.
Most companies are dead silent for a majority of their product development process or even secretive when things such as unique formulas are involved.
Normally messages, public relations work and advertizing only comes about when the advertizing campaigns are started.
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This is exactly what I’ve been trying to get at. Thank you for saying it more eloquently than I could.