Spouse is former Tencent Designer - AMA

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide General Discussion
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Tencent is a hot mention in many of the hot posts here, even getting a lot of blame.
I have shared the current situation with her and asked her what she thinks about a couple things.

She isn’t a PC gamer, or a gamer much at all. But she understands how Tencent(chinese mobile game devs) operates.

Will start with this quote from another thread:

Absolutely nope. They didn’t become the richest game company being dumb. They wouldn’t hire/fire or control anything at Fatshark. They would want the game to be enjoyable. Enough negative reviews/ no profit from store may get some Tencent involvement, but not likely to have any until things look bad financially.

Based on her experience perspective she assumes/says:
1a. Hedge is definitely a designer(prove her wrong) because only a designer acts that way in response to criticism. (the “this isn’t COD” comment she said she’s 100% sure he’s a designer in love with his own systems)
She thinks the company wouldn’t waste money hiring any dedicated community manager. Normally a small Quality Assurance team would do this community manager job. Definitely if Tencent controlled Fatshark, Hedge wouldn’t be making those snark response posts, but they would not get invovled in FS choices just owning by a majority.

1b. The marketing dept. of tencent would never be this silent, would act like the sweetest customer service and would try to keep designers (arrogant, always right) from interacting directly with players. Marketing teams advocate for player needs arguing against designers. After all, you will spend far less on Aquillas if you quit the game because the hot topic issues are not fixed.

1c Feedback influences design changes if the topic is hot enough. Reviews on app stores matter a lot (to chinese mobile game devs)

  1. The “economy designer” (rewards ordo dockets + armory store) made a huge mistake in pricing, OR the mission rewards designer and store designer didn’t communicate. Chinese mobile games would never have you rapidly end up with a million ordo dockets and not so much to spend it on. (level 4 you spend OD4,000 on a gun, level 30 you spend only OD16,000 on a gun. They would rather the weapons be so expensive you have to play a lot in game or pay a little real money to get the weapon that you actually want.

  2. European company probably doesn’t force overtime to fix issues the way a Chinese company would. She said players would expect a routine weekly client update, even if it’s small. kek.

  3. Out of 170 employees she thinks the largest number are probably artists.
    (<10 designers, 20 server programmers, 20 client programmers, ~5 quality assurance, then a large number of artists(UI, UE textures everything you see)

  4. DT cutting so many VT features, she thinks the lead designer must be a different person and have a big head. VT designer would want to keep the same features. (old wine tastes good, new wine doesn’t taste good)

  5. Mobile games in China are meant to be enoyable for bursts 15-40 minute commute to work or school. Not sitting at an hourly rotating armory waiting for bad RNG to maybe get the force sword you want.

Also: Chinese langauge reviews on game websites comonly saying “unfinished game”.

These were just a few of the answers I got. Obviously there are many hot topics often repeated here, but Tencent is very unlikely to be to blame, and would not let those issues slide in their own games.

Feel free to ask about any more if you would want her perspective as a former Tencent game designer.

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I dont have much to say, but I think this is crazy dumb. People can be very defensive over things that they personally have no actual connection to, so this logic is grasping at best. Hedge being employed at the company is enough reason to have defensive responses (for better or worse).

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I don’t think ppl should focus that much on a community manager, he’s not the issue, the game is.
He’s also a living person who may get frustrated by things he can’t control, I don’t think talking about him helps the game whatsoever.
Regardless it does make me feel like Darktide is from a different game designer though.
In terms of Tencent, I would say I know them by trade. They’ve done some pretty shady business in the mainland china gaming market, I wouldn’t assume them being some totally hands-off investors, but I don’t think cash shop being their direct influence either. Chinese “predatory monetization” does it in much more cunning ways, let along Tencent’s.
Yes a lot of the design decisions, i.e. keeping players online as much as possible, look like from MMO not mobile games, if Fatshark was a Chinese company I would guess a big boss suddenly decide avg. player time should be a KPI on game designers’ annual review and directly tied to their year-end bonuses.
But they are European, I don’t know how their company works :slight_smile:

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Interesting insight/speculation :+1:

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The point on the community manager is the extreme lack of community interaction or acknowledging the plethora of concerns with design choices listed dozens of times in various threads here. He isn’t managing the community and they most definitely haven’t hired someone dedicated to do this job.

What’s dumb is thinking that there’s someone whose job title is “community manager” and is actually getting paid to make 2 posts a week on this forum.

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Been sitting on this thread since it was created, stared at it a bit and went to see where it would go. You are free to critique the game, you are free to critique the studio, but I can see this is gonna turn into a thread to attack specific people, so this is getting locked. Feel free to word stuff more constructively if you want to repost it.

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