Today's community update isn't a community update. It's an advertisement for seasonal content and a delay announcement disguised as an apology letter

So, that letter is actually the Community Update they’ve been saving for over a month, by the way. We’re not getting any more information than this. Let’s break it down why that’s weird by looking at the letter itself and compare it to what’s been promised, but let’s make it brief by looking at the only part of the entire letter which actually has anything to do with anything here.

Nearly the entirety of Martin’s statement is 100% bland, vacuous corpospeak except for this part:

The only part of this entire letter which says anything substantive is another delay. Everything else Martin says - from “We fell short of meeting those expectations” to “We’re working on implementing a finished crafting system” to the entirety of the first paragraph - tells us absolutely nothing that offers us any information that either doesn’t matter (The Xbox port infamously lacks any launch window to begin with, man, you can’t delay something without a date) except for two pieces of the above paragraph, neither of which was anything we’d known about but could probably guess:

1.) There’s seasonal content coming.

2.) All of it, and everything else, is getting delayed.

Fatshark, you haven’t told us anything about seasonal content yet. We know, because we’ve been begging you to tell us what any of your plans are for literal weeks, and you won’t. Which means that this was supposed to be a crumb of actual content for us to learn about. Nobody advertises Live Service because they think it’s fun, they advertise Live Service because they think we’ll think it’s fun. Live Service is where all of the content is that you think people will pay for. So when you say Live Service, we can assume that you were going to sell us a new subclass every three months and additional content or a Battlepass that you basically pay a subscription for.

Of course, that’s technically all conjecture. Because what that letter doesn’t do is this:

Or this:

Or even this:

These quotes are off the offical Discord, and they’re quoted here in text instead of copied and pasted images because I wanted to highlight specific parts of them. They’re entirely different flavors of intent. What it sounds like to me is that Catfish, who doesn’t have a history that looks like Aqshy’s or even Hedge’s, was really trying to hand us something off the bat. Everything she says here sounds like she wants to give us specifics. Maybe not a specific specific, if you catch my drift, like I don’t think she’s been trying to offer us a particular piece of placating information, but she recognizes that this radio silence is interminable and that it’s gonna get worse the longer they all waffle and it’s important that we receive some kind of communication that isn’t just another Next Week nothingburger.

And then today - without any announcement or prior mention or “Look out for our patch notes later today!” or any kind of comms whatsoever, two days earlier than we’d anticipated - what we get is this letter, which tells us absolutely nothing that we didn’t already know other than that now everything else is delayed.

I don’t think this was the Community Update Catfish had planned to put out. I think they didn’t want to put their trust in, or have faith in, a new CM to handle this the way it should be handled, which is a shame. I think Catfish wanted to deliver us any actual information and got told, over and over and over again, that there wasn’t anything to offer and Martin had to step in because there literally wasn’t anything else Catfish could say.

It’s just more Nextweek, all the way down.

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I agree with you on this. I think they did not give anything that the CM could share with us. Just cause it is not their way to do it. Sadly, the situation requires more than a 244 words letter to say, “next months”.
Only points that please me is that they stop developping the console port and that they will work on crafting.
I just hope few months is the delay they give themselves to fix the mess and that is is like 3 months. Afterall, I suppose they really want to port the game to console to earn more money.

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You are correct, this letter is not a community update. But for what it is worth, I think it is the right call, communication wise.

Unless crafting system is ready, I dont think any community update would make the anger go down. And even if it was ready, FS really needs to make sure it is going to be well received.

The “next week” dynamic is only increasing frustration with part of the community running on fumes at this point. Having an official communication anchoring expectations a few month in the future is better I feel.

I can only hope actions will speak for themselves, because oh god, this game is loosing players faster than VT1 or 2 at launch.

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This 100% is just an indication that Fatshark is planning on selling season passes.

This is the nail in the coffin for me. :joy:

I don’t care what kind of improvements they make. Done.

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Best of luck Catfish, you are handed a nightmare scenario while the other seniors seem to have become mute.
I’ve not seen a single senior CM acknowledge anything else than harmless posts that weren’t even matter to debate upon.

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Must admit that if that was the case, it’d be a problem for me too. It’d depend on what “season pass” means exactly, but I haven’t seen one yet that made me want to stick around.

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Is it the right direction? There’s been countless bash posts of people claiming Fat Shark is going to pause development of this game for the console port and then the announcement finally comes where we get that confirmed. This legitimately did not happen with VT2, despite people remembering differently with rose tint. I’m worried. I can play the game now without crashing, so I’m sure these hotfixes are only going to introduce chaos for people like me who somehow fit the build of this poorly optimized game.

Actually at the 2 month mark of VT2, there was a content update with 100+ cosmetics among it.

This is almost a copy paste of the reason that the game got delayed back in July 2022.

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I might be cynical, but my guess is they’re going to have “seasons” like F2P games that have two tracks: one for paying players and one for everyone else.

Just another treadmill to keep people logging in and spending money. It lines up perfectly with the other F2P models they’ve based all of their mechanics around for some unknown reason.

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‘Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned’

I saw this 40k quote on a video complaining about this game and it is basically the current dev ethos.

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If that’s the case, that’s a ‘no’ for me dawg. That is a total nightmare scenario. It already feels like a blatant cash grab…

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The problem is that the letter isn’t specific in any way, shape or form. What does it mean? They say they are listening to feedback. Ok? They are now delaying stuff to finish the game? Really?

Here are some facts.

  1. FatShark knowingly released a completely unfinished game.
  2. FatShark knowingly released a game chock full of bugs and gamestopping crashes.
  3. FatShark knowingly designed the most atrocious unfun systems possible. (This cannot be debated, the systems are so obviously terrible that there is no way they were designed by accident/incompetence.)
  4. FatShark knowingly released this unfinished unfun mess right before they were taking the world’s longest Xmas vacation.

If you put all of this together, it would be astounding that they now have to rearrange their plans, that they now have to change up the internal roadmaps. It’s not like they didn’t know all of this before they got tons of feedback and the review scores dropped like a stone. They knew what they released as a finished product. All of this was done with eyes wide open from management at FatShark.

Now, that means I can’t trust them when all the information is they will work to improve progression, crafting etc. Because I don’t know what improved means to them. Does it mean less RNG? Less siloing? Does it mean actual full crafting, and not the absurd hot mess they outlined in the crafting blog? Does it mean more RNG? Does it mean tiny tiny concessions to the RNG, or does it mean actually making a good and fun system?

Who knows? The letter doesn’t specify anything. There is no information in that letter - only that stuff is delayed. Which was obvious to everyone, because the game was released 6 months early - of course there will be delays. There’s no explanation of their design intent that lead to the mindbogglingly absurdly and obviously bad systems currently in the game. No information that lets anyone know that they truly understand the pain points.

Basically this ‘community update’ contained absolutely nothing of what me and probably many had been waiting for. It had kind of an apology, but that’s it. There’s nothing tangible in that letter. Nothing at all.

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Stolen from reddit by u/-CassaNova-

Figured it was worth sharing here haha

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love it

At the risk of fanning the flames, what part of the message comes across as an apology to people?

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There was always going to be seasonal content.

Not only is it a (if not the) staple of live service games, but they indirectly said it’d be a thing way back when they announced that maps and story would be released over time.

The question has always been how hard they intend to monetise that seasonal content.

Clearly a community update is not going to soak your distrust toward the company, anger at the current product or fatigue at a cycle repeating itself from V1 until now. Nor will it overturn any of these feelings.

I feel for the CM here, must be a weird job to have, when the higher-ups basically prevent you from getting good community feedback/interaction going.

The game was a trainwreck in the beta, but pretty much nothing was done to address the issues people had with it before release. I knew this was going to happen and I let them know on these very forums. Now that their game is struggling they suddenly get this fire under their ass to make improvements.

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That’s what I’m the most annoyed about. Would have appreciated an apology for crafting or the extended break in comms, instead they barely acknowledge for the first time that things aren’t up to scratch.

Then check Deep Rock Galactic. They are best. Their “Season Pass” (currently Season 3) are free content that drops every few months with new theme for all missions and maps, new type of missions and activities to do. It’s free for everyone, no strings attached. You have 100 levels to get (I started playing month ago and I have 135 right now and there few months left till next season) and you get rewards for every level, like new dwarf cosmetics (beards, mustaches, helms etc), skin colors, pickaxe parts, resources etc. Also you have huge tree with season-themed cosmetic skins to unlock with currency you get from just playing missions during season (this season it’s military-themed) and you unlock more skins for every single weapon, armor colors, helms, mustaches/beards and more.

Best? When Season ends all of the Season cosmetics, every single one is added to pool of cosmetics you can earn in game by playing missions and finding “lost equipment” randomly at map, so they are never gone, they are just added to free cosmetic pool in game, which is already huge.

DRG is like best, there is not single predatory thing there. It’s game made for gamers out of passion, for fun and with tons of content.

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