i understand that, but i think ulitmately it's just an illusion. players will just reverse engineer it, gather empiric data and interpolate the formulas themselves, if we don't get them from FD.
The next patch, I hope it's as detailed as this
- Thread starter Titus Balls
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i understand that, but i think ulitmately it's just an illusion. players will just reverse engineer it, gather empiric data and interpolate the formulas themselves, if we don't get them from FD.
Yeah, I was playing Eve during all that, from September 2003 until 2007 - was a fun game.
Maybe Frontier isn't saying anything because they aren't sure what all is going to be in it.
We'll find out during beta
Consider that despite long experience, enormous investment in and engagement with their products and IPs, some companies just aren't very good at communicating what they are doing - the culture of literate and copious high level discourse with their customers isn't there, they are more comfortable communicating with users as peers on lists and forums (not speaking from personal experience, oh no
).The problem comes when there are also a lot of get rich quick fly by nights in the same market...
Yeah, I was playing Eve during all that, from September 2003 until 2007 - was a fun game.
Maybe Frontier isn't saying anything because they aren't sure what all is going to be in it.
We'll find out during beta
Since they've been talking about it for weeks and it's been part of the DDA/DDF in various incarnations - if they don't know now 80-90% of what's going in it, and instead doing it on the fly druing beta - that's worrying in itself.
But I'd like to doubt that.
The point is the thread isn't about Eve - but you saw the word and made an assumption. The thread is about how Frontier communicate with the community and explain their goals and features to us.
I don't care if you played for 1 month, 1 year or 10 and that you've a bittervet or not. At no point did I say "Elite should have sov", "Elite should have industry", etc. But your reply showed that it's exactly where your mind went.
What I am saying is that Frontier haven't learned from the mistakes of others in how you communicate with your player base, build trust and put out the fires of confusion - and it clearly shows by the daily occurrence of the same threads over and over.
Sorry if my reply was spurious and flippant, but I'm trying to avoid people derailing this thread into another type of discussion like you seem to be determined on doing.
You do know Frontier Developments has been around since 1994, DB even longer in the industry? They've worked with major publishers. You'd have think they'd have learned a thing or two along the way.
YES! You are correct they do have more experience in these matters, which means you only have to look at what they are doing and learn from it - which is what I am merely suggesting - nothing more, nothing less.
There's a lot of the original points made being lost by replies focusing on the EvE subject matter. Whether it's EvE or another dev studio the original point remains true: Frontier are an established player and long before the game was released should have had the resources and planning either in place or in their minds as soon as Kickstarter was realised. Why we need to wait for FD to 'grow' a basic marketing discipline is slightly exaggerated, there is no shame in copying what works from other companies or adapting a strategy that works to your own. Making the same mistakes that others have learned from over a decade ago isn't good practice.
Yes, FD appear stretched right now but did they not anticipate this demand, or understand the planning involved from a marketing/ community engagement point of view that the player base would ask for information well in advance of a patch release ? It's not an uncommon thing, but there is a sense that FD aren't equipped or experienced in this area. David is obviously the main spokesperson for Elite as this is his baby but he can't be expected to be in all places at all times. For Elite especially, they need someone who is at point; someone who fronts the dev release videos, who does the interviews for each release, who helps write the patch notes for the Forum in a clearer and more concise way, someone who can devote their time to answering queries via social media (they do very little of this, people ask questions that have been answered on the forums but the Twitter presence ignores them entirely which is a shame.)
Perhaps what's needed is a few people to assume responsibility for a number of key areas much like a Chief Marketing Officer would. They have a Chief Creative Officer for example. There would be a marketing and comms plan in place for every new release detailing what messages to be delivered, when, by whom and what medium. I think what FD lack is the discipline of planning these things in advance. It's the same as GalNet, I feel like some of the updates are written on the train to work rather than have a rich story arc that's been months in development.
The OP made a valid point about the usage of social media as well as the forum. People consume information in different ways but there are multiple sources to get it from, perhaps it would be easier for FD to use social media as a point source for the forum and make people use the forum as their main area of engagement for FD. I get that FD are learning about launching a MMO but there's no point repeating mistakes others have made for the sake of 'growth'.
I understand that content creation and these activities require a team to be embedded and full-time, apparently they have some people in these community and marketing positions already but I do question how the execution and coordination appears, again as soon as the Kickstarter was successful I would have hoped a hiring strategy would have been executed for a long term vision such as ED. Maybe this year we'll see it but they do need to put their foot on the gas now. I think a lot of us will be watching how they communicate v1.2 and whether any changes have been made or adopted.
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All very good points, but I can't help but feel you're writing this on the train home from work, DR.
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CCP and Frontier are experienced yes, CCP is very experienced with its niche, there's cross-over of Elite and EVE and it's good to learn from the more experienced on what you can adapt/use for your own. That's how industries, companies and individuals grow and improve. They will come off as better in handling some design/problems which E
might have that EVE solved but it's not to take that in bad light but learn from it and use.A lot of recently released space games and upcoming ones have issues that EVE has solved from design standpoints, some people (I'm not referring to you) shun EVE away but there's a lot of legitimate stuff to learn from EVE and that can be applied in a different way to a game. This is how the industry functions, it's important to look at other games and how they do things and how you can adapt it to yours, look at problems they solved that you might similarly be facing, etc. The industry does this a lot to begin with, it's a good thing and it's always weird to see people on forums/communities shun away other games (again, I'm not referring to you).
This is not a problem with games, and it's not a problem either - it's the mentality of gamers. E
has had spreadsheets around for trading/ship stats since Alpha and continues to exist. E has a few tools as well to minimise use of spreadsheets. EVE evolved the same, people don't use so many spreadsheets any more but instead plethora of tools.Gamers do this with or without the developer. People call EVE spreadsheets in space but every space game I've played has had people doing this, it's the nature of it.
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I officially love this thread, +1 OP
That would be Best Practice. I doubt it will play out like that though fingers crossed.
Agreed, however...considering the revenues over christmas, they should have been recruiting like generals of a tin pot mining nation since. Come April, they should have the personel.
There should be a detailed one by now extending out to a 3 year horizon (without expecting it to look like that in 2018), and a version of it for sharing because that's the business model. Not being able to give people a heads up on the order of release past 1.2 means FD are still being reactionary, let along enabling us to assume they have a road map that comprehensive. If we could, there would be a lot more trust and patience around the community and less dropping of the ball during updates.
Is there a link for this? Would love a read.
+2'd
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Hardly - community management is usually under marketing in the org chart, but what Titus started the thread about is customer communications. The community manager usually gets roped into doing it though, instead of liaising with the community on non-feature issues. When we had our community manager try to rewrite kernel changelogs for release notes, the double Dutch I referred to above resulted.
I'm certainly not suggesting a 3 year plan laid out to all - one that would tie Frontier to things that might not come to pass, and two I think we have a general idea of where the game is going in that time (EVA, Planetary Landings, Thargoids).
What would be nice though it to have the confidence that Frontier tomorrow could drop a big newsletter or forum post, or microsite, saying "here is what is coming in 1.2 and you'll get it in 6 weeks"
Detail the ships we're getting, the UI changes, the features and anything else nice to "sell" the release.
And as part of that confidence say in 1.3 we have X and Y feature coming, but they don't have to sell it all - as a community it helps us trust more if Frontier can give an indication of upcoming stuff. It might not be landing for 12 weeks but as we move past 1.2 it means the new stuff isn't so much a surprise and instead of throwing everything into a two week sprint on a forum that spirals out of control instead we can start to discuss well ahead of time.
The API thread I think is one where this worked well - Frontier asked well in advance what features people would like to see and gave a deadline and stuck to it. I can be confident that I know Frontier are now working on it - it might be 1.4-1.6 before we see v1 of the API but we know it's going on in the background.
On top of that a "nice little things" suggestions would be nice - some nice UI touches like FSD cooldown timer, a back button in the UI, etc - I'm hopeful that all these things came out of player suggestions - I know myself and others also suggested them. These are things that can then brew away and land as nice extras in future patches.
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Indeed - they need someone much closer and technical who can be the glue - but that can also stop silly mistakes like skins going back on sale when they shouldn't, or read over newsletters or other communications and understand what will trigger rage and/or confusion on the forums.
At the moment Development, Store and Marketing are all run separately and things are "run up the chain" - rather than a single point of contact (or indeed failure). I know Frontier have other IP they are working on but none with the size, scope and community passion as Elite has. Really it should almost be considered a separate business running inside Frontier.
Do you think the same teams at Blizzard work on Starcraft 2 and WoW? Those are two "Jewel in the Crown" IPs and I'm sure at some level they share staff but each one will have it's own community manager, communications team and developer relations that can react in real time to the ebbs and flows on the communities.
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I'm pretty sure we will see this information as a forum post and newsletter on Thursday and Friday, now 1.1 is properly or the door. This is their "Next +1" comms strategy. I do how they have been disciplined in grooming their backlog so that 1.3 can be described in as much detail as Wings/1.2 were when 1.1 was announced.
What I don't expect is as much detail as the CCP previews you linked, which would be nice to get even the least imaginative player hyped up that FD are delivering the vision as furiously as the DDF elaborated it.
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Yup, this is the role of community management.
It has been my experience in much larger companies than Frontier that 'poster child' departments/BUs wish they were run as a standalone concern with independent functions for a tightly connected startup atmosphere, but it doesn't happen, and it won't happen at Frontier with only 200 odd people. But I'm sure ED is getting the lion's share of sales and marketing's time at the moment.
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FD should have the experience. They should know what best practice is and follow it. They should communicate far better. I also believe something is driving all these rushed buggy upgrades. Anybody noticed how quiet they are this week? Ignoring the bugs and working on the next rushed upgrade.
I have another theory. Maybe they aren't talking to us because MMO customers are a pain in the (bleep) to deal with. Imagine for a second if there was a crowd of customers standing in a bakery as critical as MMO players. "This pie crust sucks!" & "You could really learn a few things from Hostess™." I'm a bit guilty of this myself. I think I'd go insane as a developer. As critical as people on the forums have been lately, I wouldn't be surprised if they weren't waiting until there are more bug fixes and content in place before doing more heavy marketing.
I think another issue with the game is that it was kickstarter funded by a majority that were Elite 84 fans that want the game to stay as true to the original as possible. That's great if your target market is purely Elite fans, but if they are going to make any real money from the game they will need to sell the game to the broader MMO market. A market that will be accustomed to playing more modern MMO's that have in-game market tools and browsers and different ways to look at and customize your character, or ship in this case. In a way it's very similar to the issues ESO have been dealing with. They want the game to be a success by making it appeal to both ES players and MMO players. What they have now is an Elder Scrolls flavored MMO that has been fairly successful so far. I think it's probably a tough thing to balance, and think kickstarters will need to be more flexible with the direction of the game for it to really become a success.