“Honestly it would be really helpful for me if the memorial was split between before and after the last update to crafting e.g August 8th. I have overview data from programs we use, but its less personal than a list of names.”
Yeah that’s the one. So the idea here, which is fine, is that maybe patch 12 solved issues for everyone and the crafting memorial is “out of date” or that people now are a loud minority or silent majority post patch 12.
Which is why I made this poll to try and address whether it would be the case or not^
Measuring the impact of changes to a system by collecting data that accurately captures sentiment or use before and after (major or minor) changes is perfectly mundane. I don’t agree that there was any hidden meaning in her message that “patch 12 solved issues for everyone and now the crafting memorial is out of date.”
I am not saying there’s a hidden meaning. I am saying there’s an implicit meaning in that they think patch 12 COULD have resolved the issue enough to consider crafting “solved”. Which means those left STILL complaining could be the minority. Essentially you would need all 400 whatever to come back and say, yes, this is still an issue. It’s fine to ask for a delta, but what I am saying is that the statement provides the possibility. If, hypothetically, 90% of people on the crafting memorial list said “patch 12 solved all crafting issues for me”, then when a new thread or two pops up about awful crafting you could hand wave it as a “loud minority”. If you were being hopeful. But instead if you had 95% of people say “no patch 12 didn’t solve this for me” then it SHOULD pop the possibility it’s changed and that crafting is still an issue, not just a loud minority. The meaning behind the question. Not saying the intent is deceitful or harmful or anything, it’s fine to ask if the changes resolved the issues and ask for feedback (although I am sure some would argue that maybe the intent is disingenuous, or to buy time, or that they don’t understand the issue if they think that would solve it, or that the odds were so small in real change that they’re committed to dark design, but I can’t make any of those claims with a degree of certitude).
I don’t think it’s an all-or-nothing type thing, and I don’t agree that Catfish casually wishing the data was clearly delineated after a major update means she (or anyone else at FS) think crafting has been completely “fixed.” I mean she even said more changes are coming in her post here.
But Patch 12 did bring major improvements, like shared wallets, which made crafting less painful…and it’s a good thing for FS to see that making improvements helps the numbers/sentiment.
Sorry I think I mostly lost the thread here. Have FS done this about the crafting system: publicly waved off concerns about it or attributed vocal dislike of it to a minority of players?
I won’t pretend to know the CM’s mind and desires and intentions. Yes they did say more changes were coming, but that was after the ask about the delta. The question would be, what motivation would someone have in asking for the feedback post patch 12 if it’s still an issue? It’s an assumption, but a strong one, that if you’re asking, it’s because you think it has a chance of being true. There’s not much point in asking: “Do you think the sky is green, or blue?” If you think there’s a 0% chance someone will authentically say green unless you’re trolling or something.
Shared wallets are great! Now lets share weeklies and inventories
We mainly just have silence to go off of. You can read between the lines in terms of what kinds of changes they do and the speed of it. “Do you think I am fat?” silence “Why won’t you answer me? If you had something good to say, you’d say it, so why are you being silent!” silence ensues
To measure the effect of the improvements? The effect doesn’t have to be binary.
Right, silence. And for Fatshark, silence could mean “here is a surprise revolution on the Tide formula that most everyone loves” (talent trees) or “here is a surprise bugfix that most everyone hates” (BH fix).
People are welcome to attribute malice to the silence, but I don’t agree that the silence means something negative.
The patch made improvements which people had asked for in Beta. That’s (according to what I’m seeing) eight whole months after being advised that their per-character system sucked.
At this point: Plasteel ends up being the most useful and most used material because of the limited use of Diamantine. This change has done nothing to solve the problems with crafting, but instead created a situation where we’re stuck grinding for Plasteel to improve weapons for a chance at a blessing tier that’s actually helpful. The rewards from playing the game are dismal; further exacerbating the problem so that it’s more effective to grind up dockets to buy Profane gear until you’ve got a stock of the same item at 330+ and upgrade at least to t3 for the first blessing because there’s so many chaff blessings, but also the tiered system of blessings so the likelihood of you getting what you’re looking for is painfully small.
Again: all this does is waste players time.
If people are silent about the issue, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re happy, it’s probably more likely that it’s not worth the time nor the effort for them to voice an opinion that is going to be ignored.
Having been around a many game communities over many decades now, when we start hearing the lines from higher-ups about how the most viewed/commented/used areas of feedback and discussion, (including areas set up by the company for that exact purpose) “don’t represent the entire playerbase”, it’s is pretty much entirely so the Developers can hand-wave away clear and consistent messaging from those communities that they don’t like hearing, simple as.
It’s the old “silent majority” deflection. There’s literally no reason to bring that point up otherwise.
Now, there’s definitely issues where such communities may not offer the best solutions, or may not have a full understanding of back-end operations, but as far as feedback on gameplay/crafting/etc goes, that’s as direct and comprehensive as any company could ask from its customers. It’s where customers go when they feel passionate about something. If something is truly wrong, you’ll see it consistently and repeatedly on these places, and in the case of Crafting that is absolutely the case.
As the majority of customers/users are never going to go out of their way to offer feedback in almost any service/game/product/etc even if they feel strongly about it (because people have lives and this is a game) it’s easy to say “well they’re just a small group” if nobody wants to address that feedback, but we need to be real clear that it’s not like they’re getting any other source of feedback or data on these things some other way from secret polls or hidden communities.
Y’all, just put him on ignore. You don’t owe him your time and he’s not going to stop being an apologist.
EDIT: I see the flags and maintain what I said. If acknowledging that someone isn’t worth the time to engage with is ‘abusive or hateful conduct’ then so be it.
Fatshark is slow and silent. Most Tide fans agree on these points. Most Tide fans also know that FS keeps cooking and improving their games. It is how it is.
Agreed. And the quiet unhappiness will be reflected in data that FS sees and Catfish collects/collates into reports.
It could have…just been a true thing? Perhaps Catfish was trying to be personal there and subtely sympathize with frustrations around the speed of crafting improvements. Or maybe not! I’m not a mindreader.
Are you suggesting they don’t have data on play time, crafting time, materials spent, and so on for every player across the entire lifetime of the game? That seems rudimentary to me, and strongly implied by Catfish’s post. But again, none of us really know I suppose.
Fatshark could EASILY prove whether or not the majority of the community is happy with the crafting and rewards systems as they currently are by either placing a poll in the launcher for people to go to (once they fix the damned formatting so that everything is INSIDE the launcher again because that seems to arbitrarily change from patch to patch or hotfix to hotfix), or create a poll notification in-game once you’ve loaded.
I suspect they have a full picture of the pain, and threat to their game, that the crafting is. I don’t think a poll would do much for them, like how almost all communication (positive, negative or totally benign) seems to bite them in their fat shark butts.
And what does that mean? What effects are you specifically measuring? If it’s not number of people satisfied vs not satisfied what else would it be? And if you agree it’s numbers of satisfied end users, then you must admit it’s ultimately to ascertain to what extent it “solved” the crafting problem.
Not just silence. Also the what they implemented and why. What they were going to implement but didn’t. The feedback they said they have heard but made little change on. The assumption is if there was something to dose the torches and drop the pitch forks they would. Or if they were willing to make progress on it and saw it as a priority it would take more precedence over new maps and weapons. There’s enough things stated and done, and not done to make conclusions. As well as how the crafting fits in with the rest of the FOMO and Gacha mechanics. You can see similarities in an overall architecture of “Dark design” and I think that’s valid.
Their lack of communication is problematic because it gives the players zero idea of what they’re planning to do to resolve problems they themselves created; thenc when they choose to communicate changes or plans, they backpedal or completely ignore/forget plans and promises made.
It’s like they’re intentionally trying to upset their playerbase.
The issue too is when it’s just a big surprise there’s little engagement with the consumers. It’s why, if done properly, early access games can be good when devs design the game with their fans in terms of what they would like to see, not see, etc.
I will say that what I expected from Darktide at launch (and was sorely disappointed in the execution of) was V2, but 40k and with more ranged combat relevance.
They nailed the 40k theme (with quibbles here and there) the atmosphere the level design, the enemy designs, the feel of most of the weapons are great.
Ranged combat’s relevant (in some cases too relevant because ranged shooters and Gunners as a whole continue to occasionally ignore being in close combat and just shoot players in the face and back point blank nearly immediately eliminating them).
What I didn’t expect them to fail at was taking the lessons and systems they’d already largely successfully tested within Vermintide 2 and improving on them.
Sorry, you lost me. Why is it either solved or not solved? Why can’t it be somewhat better or worse?
They definitely want to measure if people are happier with the system after they make big changes or not. I mean, just consider it from the fully-negative perspective: Patch XYZ rolls out and it makes crafting worse somehow. Having a clear line (like a new thread with complaints solely post-patch) would be part of the data (alongside player count/play time/crafting time/etc.) that FS would make use of to see if there was a positive or negative effect on sentiment.
Based on Catfish saying that more changes are likely coming, I think it’s safe to assume FS didn’t close the books on crafting with Patch 12 and say, “it is solved.”
But that isn’t really FS’s style, is it? Again, this is assuming malice in the silence.
All we know is what Catfish has told us, and that was linked above. None of us can say it is/isn’t a priority internally or that things aren’t being done. It seems to be a pretty significant undertaking, changing a system that intimately ties in with basically everything else in the game, and it’s good for the players and the game that development/content continue until it is fixed/improved/overhauled.
More that they probably aren’t getting direct customer feedback from some silent majority somewhere else.
On the data note, I’m 100% sure they do have such data, but that data is only part of the picture.
I deal with my companies sales data, we do $4-5B in wholesale transactions each year. I can see the full details of every invoice we have a record of. We analyze this data all the time. However, that data doesn’t tell us everything. For instance, if we have a product where sales have cratered, well, we can see that sales cratered from analyzing invoice data, but that invoice data alone won’t tell us why.
We don’t know if that product has become obsolete, if we’re overpricing it or placing it in the wrong part of the store where nobody can find it, if our competition is eating our lunch, or if there’s inconsistencies such as regionality to that behavior for instance (say it’s continuing to sell well in NE markets but not in SW markets), that all takes additional analysis and investigation. Alternatively, if sales look fine, but we’re the #3 or #4 place customers look to buy that product instead of the #1 place, we don’t know that, and invoice data won’t tell us we’re missing out on a potentially huge opportunity.
Additionally, that data takes an enormous amount of time and resources to properly analyze. If I get a request to report on sales of X group of products in Y market for Z time frame for a promo we ran, I’ve got to build that report in SQL, make sure I include any special conditions (e.g. only sales made at or below a certain price or in conjunction with another product), build that out into some other visualization for the stakeholder (usually Excel, maybe Tableau or PowerPoint or PowerBI depending), and advise as to any caveats (e.g. our internal sales data will look different from online Google Analytics data because Google ceases tracking at the point of sale and isn’t tracking returns/qty changes/cancellations/etc), before I show it to anyone. That’s a couple hours of work for a simple question, and all that data does is show the “What” and some of the “How”, but not much of the “Why” with regards to that promo’s impact.
If all FS is doing is looking at data tables alone, it would explain a lot of their mishaps.
Our #1 source of feedback on “why” is customers talking to sales staff at the counter, and our product team talking with suppliers. Our product managers spend a lot of time directly engaging with suppliers and with our people running the stores to get that feedback. We get all sorts of feedback, a lot of it is garbage and disregarded, but clear and consistent points do emerge. That’s how we find out that the promo we ran last month stank because it was online and most of our customers for that product are older and don’t do online shopping as much. If we had a big open feedback location with a long-running thread like this for 8 months making the same general points over and over…the product manager for whatever that was would have lost their job for not addressing it directly by now, it’s a bad look for the brand to just leave that out there festering and to leave the impression that such feedback isn’t important.
