Guild Wars 2

I’m just going to give a relatively brief personal take on the current state of feedback in the community and how the community is communicated to.

Feedback

Well, this

But, really. It’s getting rare to see a red post on this forum that isn’t followed up by some kind of vitriol. I understand that some people feel particularly invested in the game for one reason or another. I understand that it’s easy to get frustrated if you feel left in the dark about something you paid money for. Hell, I can definitely understand that some folks genuinely care about the state of the game but aren’t that good at expressing that and themselves well – this is the internet, social awkwardness abounds.

Look, I get it. But the problem is that yelling doesn’t solve anything. You’re dealing with real human beings with real feelings, not robots. They don’t all run around with suits of armour and hearts of ice. Every time one of these staff members experiences criticism with no constructive element or outright personal attacks, that’s another instance of them being conditioned to deliberately avoid interacting with the community which hurts us all in the long run. I genuinely feel sorry for people like Gaile who actually have to deal with this kind of behaviour as part of their job – and we don’t even see messages sent or most of the stuff that gets infracted.

I suppose the best analogy I could give is to ask how you would feel if someone called you up at your work and told you that you were terrible at your job? Would that make you feel motivated about your job? Would that make you inclined to want to talk to people outside of the firm when you don’t have to?

I understand that it’s often difficult to do it if we’re kept in the dark about some things, but keeping criticism constructive really does go a long way. We only shoot ourselves in the foot as a community if we act in a way that discourages open communication with members of staff. And yes, I’ll even go as far as saying that that extends to some complaints about where we’re communicated to. If this were an ideal world where we knew everything about every aspect of the game and how it was progressing, I’d say that there’s a time and a place for a discussion on whether the channels of communication are being used appropriately, but at the moment, I think it’s safe to say that the community is looking for more communication more than it cares about where that communication takes place.

tl;dr: Being rude has been a contributory factor to the decline in communication and continuing in this fashion isn’t helping anything.

Communication

Well, here’s the other side of the coin. It’s not as if I could say that the standard of communication is bad per se, but it definitely feels like it’s lacking. Okay, we moved to a quarterly release format so it’s easy to feel like things are much farther away. Yes, we even had that giant AMA just the other week. I even have to give a fair bit of praise for an initiative like the Known Issue Tracker . Even so, I don’t feel that we, as players, really know that much about what’s going on and the surprise announcement of new legendaries going on hold really reinforces that.

Okay, for the past two months, we knew exactly what to expect to come out thanks to the State of the Game update in January. I would assume that a couple of weeks in advance of the next quarterly update on 19 April(?), we’ll receive a similar update outlining everything to expect in the three months following that. Yes, that’s nice. But right now, as it stands, I couldn’t tell you a single precise thing that I’m absolutely sure is going to be shipped in a majorly quarterly update that’s less than a month away. Given that we know from the AMA that there are even some pretty interesting minor tweaks and changes coming at some point, that’s crazy. This is especially compounded when you consider that there are longer-term projects like WvW where we have had literally no idea how far down the development process they were.

Yes, I don’t think there’s a player at this point who’s unfamiliar with the idea that you don’t want to start trumpeting about things that aren’t 100% done with a confirmed launch date because things can change. I can especially appreciate that timetables have probably been thrown around – and in some cases thrown out of the window – thanks to a variety of factors post-HoT. I mean, even on a basic level, you’ve got an expansion to think about, the lack of a permanent Game Director and a number of staff have gone over to Amazon. Particularly in terms of the latter, new staff don’t suddenly fall out of the sky – I’m sure a number of players are familiar with quite how many open vacancies you have at the moment – and new hires do take time to get up to speed.

Even considering all of this, simply having a State of the Game message to rely on each quarter to tell us what’s going on isn’t really sufficient. If we could expect a regular AMA once a quarter right in between SotGs, I’d say that’s a great step, but it feels like the one at the start of this month was very impromptu and not something we can expect as a regular feature. Honestly, I’d even be slightly happier to see something like the Releases pages being updated with teaser information much earlier as it becomes clear what’s almost certainly going to make it into the game at that point. I realise a lot of it can be in a state of flux in the run-up, but I’m also sure that there’s probably things that even at this point are basically “guaranteed” to make it in and, honestly, it’s fine if it winds up that it won’t make it in at the quarterly update but will reach the game somewhere within that quarter, just as long as that actually gets communicated. It’s okay to miss deadlines by a bit if it’s communicated that that’s going to happen.

In that respect, it would also be nice to have an idea of the development priorities at the moment. It felt from what Mo’s been saying that there is a new focus on working to finish the things that are actually close to completion – in some cases splitting them off from larger-scope projects to do so – and actually having more to show sooner for your work. What the exact details of any of those things are and what’s really being focussed on? Who knows. I appreciate that it’s difficult to say in some respects because it seems that a lot of the development is predicated on fairly small teams (maybe half a dozen to a dozen people) all working on different content and naturally advancing at different speeds. What that can mean though is that some teams wind up having a lot to show regularly (e.g. the raid team), whereas it feels like complete radio silence for others (e.g. Living Story team). To put that example into perspective, had it not been for the AMA, we likely would not have known at this point that we probably can’t expect the next Living Story to start before July.

The best thing I could probably suggest to remedy that is considering something along the lines of developer blogs. For any team that’s working more long-term on something that isn’t going to hit release in the next update, maybe it’s worth considering having them give a quick update every couple of months on what they’re working on, how it’s going and a rough time-frame of when it might go live. That doesn’t have to give details that are still under consideration or be lengthy with really pretty pictures and everything. I’m sure that most players would be happy with a short plain text update of a couple of paragraphs just to let them know that that is something big that’s being worked on and that there is an an end date that might (or might not) be hit. That sort of thing can even be used to get regular feedback on proposed ideas – say you were working on a new PvP map and wanted to get opinions on a couple of ideas that had been had for mechanics on it rather than go through the full development process and find that they’re not at all well-received during testing. Feedback doesn’t have to be sought on everything, but it could be a useful option.

In closing, I do also want to just say that I understand that it can feel frustrating if someone is being very negative towards you, but for every person doing that, I’m sure there are a whole lot more people who appreciate the time taken to interact with the community and explain things/update us with what’s going on.

tl;dr: Additional regular communication, particularly on longer-term projects, would be amazing. It may be worth considering:

• Updating Release pages further in advance with changes that are coming in/around the following seasonal update.
• Having a regular AMA, perhaps halfway between each State of the Game.
• Relaxing the policy of not talking about content that’s not ready to ship in favour of saying something along the lines of “x is being worked on, hopefully to ship in y quarter” and just updating if that drastically changes.
• Short updates every couple of months from teams that would otherwise seem MIA.

They aren’t robots but they are employed to do what they’re doing. They’re not running a charity and personally I’d say that dealing with incoherent yelling and rage posts is part of your job as PR manager (maybe not so much as a dev posting here in your free time, but anyway). Heck, it’s a core internet skill in my opinion. While you can argue that unconstructive feedback is the reason for lack of communication, I’d say it may be a factor, but ANet is pretty bad when it comes to that anyway.
Most rage stems from ‘broken promises’, and while there are surely cases where this was exaggerated (i.e. they say ‘we may want to do X someday’ and then people get mad and demand X because ’it’s already been Y months since they promised that!‘), at this point no objective observer can deny that ANet has been shifting their design goals, game philosophy and approaches numerous times by now, completely scrapping ideas they were unable to deliver or abandoning half-baked concepts.
The solution here isn’t necessarily to improve communication (or avoid it to avoid the complaints directed at those announcements), but to get a fricking grip and decide on what you want to do and what you can do. THIS is the major problem since release, THIS is the reason their announcements are pretty void, because anything can be and was being cancelled and until it’s actually in the game, all you have as a customer is faith, and that faith has been eroded in the past years.

To come back at my original point, yes, praise is always a lot harder to be found than criticism for various reasons, but if you cannot deal with the community, respectively are unable to filter out the complaint-fueled white noise, then you aren’t doing your job properly. Search for the constructive feedback, ignore what is just pointless rants, and communicate properly through all that. It’s your job.