It will be nice see more frequent communications, tweets, small quiz posts on SM etc to increase engagement with community. Other people need to know the game is active and always busy. This complete silence and a stream that happens once in a blue moon is not cutting it.
Especially during early days of this new game where RTS genre is pretty much dead and has become a boomer genre. It’s very hard to get people play games that don’t give instant gratification in today’s landscape.
Please be more responsive, at least put some art competition or do some free portrait icon give away, just do something. The devs and community team needs to be more active with player base.
Constant communication in various languages is also needed, the official discord has people from many parts of Europe, Asia, South America, South Asia.
This is by far not the first moment that this franchise has faced blistering criticism from its fans about the quality of a game in active development, so we have the benefit of hindsight on our side. When this has happened before, the crowd responded far better to transparency and interaction with the developers than to silence. I suppose the developers have the right to write off this community as toxic malcontents and ignore the playerbase. But I fail to see the strategic value to them in doing so.
It’s one thing to do streams and interviews. It’s quite another to hop in and answer people directly. There’s real power in talking with people rather than at them. It’s disarming for players to feel heard and to see that actual humans are reading what we each are actually saying.
People with your logic seem to forget that we are paying for a product, and the developers/community relations teams literally make their living from -selling- this and other products.
If it wasn’t worth their time, they wouldn’t have done it.
The least they can do is give us support after they’re gotten their christmas cash infusion.
Edit:
I -do- feel like the devs are listening, because a lot of the patches and things they are focusing on are echoing straight from opinions and discoveries here on the fourms, but it would be nice to see developers commenting on questions and ideas and giving us an idea of what the thought process is like over at relic.
Double edit:
I have had interactions with what I believe to be the community relations or fourms moderator, but it seems they only operate in an official capacity and only comment or take action if forced to do so by community guidelines.
It feels like the team may have direct instructions to not interact with the community in the discussions fourms.
I’m not sure if this is an accurate take, people were complaining about clockwork siege and bombards in general way before the patch.
Also im not sure if I’d consider majority of these posts “bitching” or “concerned fan trying to help and give suggestions”
The video by Aussie drongo about his opinions he recently posted is a good watch if you haven’t seen it, basically he hits everything head on.
To sum it up, the gameplay feels bland right now, the meta is just mongols>cannon spam, or China>cannon spam, or France>knights with guess what, cannon spam.
Actually, nah, their job is to make and maintain the game. Forum outreach is one small subset of community engagement that falls to specific members of the team. Community management is also a historically-small presence (with regards to team composition), too (for better or for worse). If you’ve got a team that’s handling all the social media, other PR, website content (sometimes that falls under community management), and so on . . . what you’re saying here is that on top of their daily workload they also need to wade through excessive toxic nonsense . . . because it’s their job?
Nobody’s job is “deal with toxic nonsense”. It’s 2022. It’s long past time we should be normalising such behaviour.
Reading critical posts? Sure. Feeding back hard truths to the rest of the team? Sure.
While this is absolutely true insofar as history goes, we learn more about mental health and the like every year. Nobody needs to be written off; that’s the wrong angle to take on this. Rather, we need to safeguard people effectively so that they can continue to do their actual jobs. The nice to haves are nice to haves. Not a core part of the job description.
Now, if that person’s job is “responding on the forums”, that’s great. I’m pretty sure we have at least one answering what seems like every bug report thread.
But to expect people who aren’t ready or perhaps even willing to do something like this, why should they? I’m not expected to deal with clients directly. I do, there are situations where even ten years into my job it’s still required. But there are boundaries; processes to follow.
(also it goes without question that nomatter how harsh the disagreement, the software sector by and large has far more professionalism from its paying clients than consumers give to developer accounts on web forums)
It’s easy to just see the upsides of the process, especially with us potentially being on the receiving end. But I know for a fact you champion the human element of the developers, and I don’t think it’s fair to assume that just because developers have faced blistering criticism before, that this is automatically justification to talk about the strategic value of them doing so again.
You won’t see me argue with Relic putting out more frequent communication. But given the specific qualifier of “cruel and harsh articles”, I don’t see why anyone needs to put up with that. There’s no strategic value in that, either.
I never once said this, I would just appreciate some more interaction with the devs and community team, maybe some weekly polls about things like balance fixes and or bug fix priorities, some posts and feedback about what they are thinking and feeling about the game and community progress.
Sorry for the confusion, but the post we were all replying to was specifically talking about “cruel and harsh articles”. Your answer was “because it’s their job”.
EDIT
Semantics are always a wobbly thing to talk about, but “cruel” is a specific and strong word. It doesn’t mean “criticism and frustration and stuff”.
Maybe I misunderstood what this post meant, but I took it to be dismissive of this entire thread and basically saying our suggestions here were unproductive, which I did not feel was accurate.
Edit:
I also feel In general that majority (75%) of posts on the fourms in general are constructive criticism, I very rarely encounter someone I feel is being “toxic”
Sure. I just feel that’s a very different thing from “there’s toxic stuff, why do they have to” → “because it’s their job”. Even for someone whose job it is, they shouldn’t have to put up with stuff like that.
As for how you understood the post, that’s a possibility. That’s not the way I read it though. I’m not really going to guess percentages either, because percentages are misleading. It’s about presence, about how vocal these things can sometimes be. I’ve lost count how many times I’ve been called a shill, or similar, for example. But what does that mean in the grand scheme of things? I can’t quantify that in terms of percentages. The toxic element is real, quibbling over what mathematical proportion of the community is takes up is kinda aside from the point.
It’s a tricky line to walk, because of course more developer interaction would make a lot of folks feel better. But likewise, these are real people and even if their job is “scour the forums for feedback”, that doesn’t mean “post in threads and inevitably get tagged a billion times by someone who thinks Abbasid balance is a secret government plot to insult the memory of the Caliphate”. There’s certainly not an easy answer, other than to say “yeah more interaction would be nice”. It would also be nice if we considered the costs, is all.
To any extent that any employees would suffer any mental or physical injury doing their jobs, then they should absolutely be protected. But to any extent there is some way for some person to safely speak to players on the forum, then I submit it would be in the community’s best interest that it happen.
yes, but if you check number of threads on release and compare “moods” of articles, you will see how charts are going down. Youtube view (for ex. Grubby) dropped from 40k to 4k
Yes, minority but the mood you can check on the forum.
It’s job for PR team and community managers. It’s literally thier job. Not only do some “promo youtube video” but also calm people.
I have no idea what their job duties entail. I’m fairly certain that in earlier games there were community managers assigned to monitor and interact with the community on the official forum. The franchise executive producers used to jump on regularly, too.
I get the sense that internally the priorities have shifted and they focus on other things like streaming and interacting on Reddit and discord. Plus Twitter and Facebook. Brand management is like a 20-headed monster now.
It takes a larger team, and I suspect that due to so many people being involved each individual person may feel less free to spitball and chat.I also get the sense that somewhere up top there is likely someone advising everyone to keep their cards close to their vest.
As a former moderator of a 5000+ member discord, trust me I get how annoying infinite pings can be.
What I quoted is basically all I’m asking for, some more interaction here on the fourms
We can tell they read them, I’d just love to see a dev or community team member posting their opinions on some of the ideas floated here, I don’t expect them to reply to everyone’s comments.