"Do they play their own game?!"

[Enderby]

Can't really blame them if they don't wanna play it in their spare time.

I don't do it too often myself.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

It's their job. Why would they play what they're working at in their spare time? Are we the entertainment police now or what?

 

[EUS]

Don't care about their spare time, but those that are paid to play should show some advanced level of knowledge even if they're not a great pilot.

 

[Stigbob]

Don't care about their spare time, but those that are paid to play should show some advanced level of knowledge even if they're not a great pilot.

Playtesting and hosting livestreams are different jobs.

 

[Vedmo]

My brother used to say that about computers... I think it's a bit bogus. I know plenty of people who do work on things that they paid to do in the off hours. How many mechanics I've seen over the years who leave work and restore an old car or build a racer, how many professional pilots I've know who work on old warbirds or build/fly airplanes for the joy of it. In fact, most people who truly love their job and have a reasonable amount of leisure time spend it doing the job they get paid to do.

My opinion is that you really can't design properly unless get in their, without design tools and play the game. Only then does the feedback begin to make sense and you can sort the wheat from the chaff.

I was thinking about the mechanic correlation myself, as I've been a diesel mechanic for about 25 years now, with the last 10 or so focused on agricultural equipment. I definitely know mechanics who use the day job wrench turning to finance after hours activities of a similar nature. I personally will do anything possible to avoid doing mechanic work outside of my day job, to the point I even pay other people to do work on my personal vehicle that I am more than capable of doing myself.

I think the better analogy would be as a mechanic I can completely rebuild a piece of equipment and have a detailed understanding of how everything works together to make its purpose happen, but that does not mean I am at all competent or skilled at operating the piece of equipment. The operator who works with it on a daily basis, who very well may look at everything 'under the hood' as little more than magic they will never understand, is often amused with my amateurish ability at actually running the machinery I can fix. It has happened many times, and is quite honestly to be expected.

 

[Chaparral]

Seems like an FDEV communications employee should at least have a very close relationship with an in-house play-tester that has run through all of the game features.

I don't think it's essential that the communicator be a game master, since their role is to share upcoming changes and features.

I guess I take my cue from American football commentators, one that calls the plays, and the color commentator has the subject matter expertise and interesting personal anecdotes to add.

 

[EUS]

Playtesting and hosting livestreams are different jobs.

And? Am I pigeon-holing anyone? No. Re-read my sentence.

 

[Canoe]

I don't think they play the game even in the form of "play-testing" - some of the most glaringly obvious bugs would have been apparent, and not responded to with "need more evidence" even though we've been banging our heads on the wall providing evidence for months on end. There are always other games to play out there, as it is, ED feels like a wasted opportunity. Hello Games' Greg Buchanan managed to create a truly beautiful storyline with a handful of lines at each encounter, and yet Frontier seem to have trouble even stringing a sentence together that engages the player in a favourable manner. You can only stretch words so far, and content even less so. I'd love to play more, but when time is limited, and you're confronted by bug-ridden missions, it's hard to believe that wonderful "we don't want to waste your time" mantra.

 

[Deareim]

No they certainly don't the game otherwise it would be in a different state....

 

[asphaltpilot]

I also don't take my work home, but I am expected to know more than my customers regarding the applications and services I support.

That's the difference in being reactive and proactive. That's the difference between error correction and error prevention.

 

[Darty]

I'll try and be as fair as I can towards fdev, developing a game is really time consuming. Its a full time job and then some. And the kind of game E is is just as time consuming to play. Unless you really really really love the game, playing it to the same extent as its biggest fans is going to feel like a second job at times. So I totally understand why the devs wouldn't want to play the games as much as some of us do.

I've quit elite twice now, the first time was because I was too busy with school, and I didn't pick it back up until my situation changed and I ended up with more freetime than I knew what to do with. The second time I quit because I just got fed up with fdev's nonsense. But looking back to the first time I quit, I can totally understand how someone who likes the game, but doesn't really love playing it, would not want to force themselves to play it for hours on end every day like some of us more hardcore players have done/do.

So I can't really hold it against the devs if they play the game causally. Its a shame that they don't love the game as much as some of their fans, but that's life for ya, not everything is going to work our perfectly. What I DO hold against them is the way they respond to the feedback they get from the players who do play the game more than the devs. They act dismissive (see sandy's response to feedback on the 6:1 material trader rates, he basically said "nah I'm not going to listen to your arguments, you have to live with this for awhile and then maybe we can come back to it"), are very selective on what they respond to and how they respond to it (I had a serious bug report up for weeks about a mining related bug, didn't even get a response, I made a joke grossly exaggerating how bad a different mining bug was and they removed all mining missions from the game within a day a took a month to put them back in), generally don't take any of it to heart or learn from their mistakes (see grindian modules, which were add right after they did a massive overhaul of the engineer system because it was too grindy and repetitive, only to add more repetitive grind!), and seem to be completely ignorant of things that are common knowledge both on the forums and in game (see sandy saying in one of the engineering live-streams that other than DWE, every engineering material is easily gotten doing things that you already do for credits).

I can accept not wanting to play the game to the point you understand every player's perspective. I can't accept you ignoring said players when they try, time and again, to share that perspective with you. This is why I think you get so many people mad at fdev for "not playing their own game," not because they don't play it enough, but because they don't seem to develop it with the people who play it in mind. You can see this in what they choose to fix as well. There are year old bugs that cause stations to murder you for no reason, known bugs that cause a complete crash of the game, ect, but what does fdev choose to focus on? "OMERGHAD SKIMMER BE GIVIN TOO MANY CREDITS AGAIN, NERF NOAW." When a bug hurts the players game experince, fdev seems to take their sweet old time to fix it, but when it dares to make things easier on the player? They remove large sections of the game while they rush out a fix.

They just don't seem to care about out experience, its that simple.

 

[BL1P]

I want to see them do some of the rubbish they expect us to do, but on the live stream.
Fully engineer a ship in a live stream.
Or collect all the mats and blueprints for guardians during a live stream and do not forget fdev would rather you didn't instance reset.
Spend a whole live stream of 3hrs waiting for a few High grade emissions to almost be able to get the mats to do a g5 on one weapon.

No they dont play the game ! If they did these time-sink repetition elements and mode swapping would be replaced already.

 

[Stigbob]

Not really mate. It's natural to expect that any product being sold should be understood by those that produce it. Mainly this would be covered by QA. There are way too many issues and badly implemented game loops to accept that this game is tested vigorously enough. If they aren't going to play it then set up focus groups of those that do. And not focused feedback on a release they have commited to already. I mean players genuinely telling them what they need to be focussing on. Stop giving us stuff we don't really want in the absence of stuff we do.

They don't need to play it in their on time to understand it, and they probably do have dedicated play testers. Not all bugs/exploits will be apparent before it goes live.

 

[Daynen]

I talk game design a lot lately, though I'm no designer. I've never programmed, designed or bugfixed a videogame even though they've been part of my life for functionally my whole life. People keep saying I should've just become a game designer.

Then I see this very phenomenon. Game devs spend two thirds of their day building a game, putting features in, hiding secret stuff, racking their brains for solutions to common problems and hearing people get up in arms about it with varying degrees of articulation.

Much as I do hold people to a professional standard, I also empathize. It's hard to be as excited for a game, movie, book, etc. as the fans when you've been living, breathing, drinking and thinking it for months or years at a time.

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

Not really mate. It's natural to expect that any product being sold should be understood by those that produce it. Mainly this would be covered by QA. There are way too many issues and badly implemented game loops to accept that this game is tested vigorously enough. If they aren't going to play it then set up focus groups of those that do. And not focused feedback on a release they have commited to already. I mean players genuinely telling them what they need to be focussing on. Stop giving us stuff we don't really want in the absence of stuff we do.

I will guess they actually have QA and design and feedback loop system. They are actually business that earn money with developing games. It might be just that 'us' might be just a fraction of wide player base which each ones different things.

 

[Drelthar]

I get that not all the devs are going to be "Hardcore player" level. They probably have a huge level of knowledge in their specific area, and that's it.

And that's totally fine.

Community managers/front facing staff though, should (mostly) be super hardcore players of every game they help to promote, to a level where they instantly know the answer to any question about the current state of the game. They can't be expected to be the most skilled at playing, but they should know every detail, every current bug, and every current exploit.

They need to know those, so that they can avoid them on livestreams.

Even if thye dont know them through directly playing the game, they should know them from the play testing team, or, the communities they manage.

 

[Rafe Zetter]

Other players don't play the game like I do, so I have no reason to expect that anyone from FDev plays it that way either.
There are SO MANY different ways to play the game and for some styles it works 'perfectly' and for other styles it's a total nightmare - which is why we get the constant mode/grind/immersion/spacelegs arguments.

Equally, I'm not sure it matters if the community managers don't play the game - they're just there to tell us how wonderful everything is, not to fix issues.
I'd much rather the development team played it more. In particular, FDev need to buy whoever designs ships' internal lighting an Occulus Rift so people no longer feel they're being interrogated every time they fly.

So - we have employees of a games developer who can't identify a ship, and have not played the game enough to be able to afford a newly added ship.... and the entirety of the stable of games the company has made recently is ... err... THREE.

Community manager is a person who liases between the community and the devs - is that right?

If that is true, I would be certain that in my company a community manager would be REQUIRED to know the game they are employed to talk about with the community INSIDE OUT, because nothing looks more stupid than an official spokesperson of a company being clueless as to what they are seeing or being asked about, without the safety net of giving them time to look stuff up first.

Here we are seeing two employees doing a livestream, which is going out to the players and wider fanbase, and displaying thier obvious lack of knowledge.

And yet the company that these people represent expect us paying customers to take them seriously.

To reuse the OP's analogy, if I took my car into one of the manufacturers dealerships (who always charge more because it's work being done by "engineers and mechanics trained on the specifics of my car") and started asking specific questions about my car and the mechanic looks at me blankly and says "what?"

How long do you think it'll take me to get back in my car and drive away?

 

[Stealthie]

....and they probably do have dedicated play testers.

Then they should be the ones playing the game in FDev's livestreams.

 

[Rafe Zetter]

I talk game design a lot lately, though I'm no designer. I've never programmed, designed or bugfixed a videogame even though they've been part of my life for functionally my whole life. People keep saying I should've just become a game designer.

Then I see this very phenomenon. Game devs spend two thirds of their day building a game, putting features in, hiding secret stuff, racking their brains for solutions to common problems and hearing people get up in arms about it with varying degrees of articulation.

Much as I do hold people to a professional standard, I also empathize. It's hard to be as excited for a game, movie, book, etc. as the fans when you've been living, breathing, drinking and thinking it for months or years at a time.

One - they are being paid to.

Two - you should watch a livestream or any of the question / answer stuff from Star Citizen - the exitement there is palpable.

ED's stuff by comparion is very very limp.

It all depends on the companies perception of the game - are they excited for the GAME or are they just looking forward to what producing the game will bring in money and power and an increase in the companies value.

Star Citizens livestreams always seem so energetic in part because of who they have to host it, but ALSO because the project is about the GAME, and not the rewards the game will bring.

FDev on the other hand have clearly displayed several times that ED was more about what doors and opportunities will open BECAUSE of the game, rather than about the game itself. If you don't believe me, why has FDev developed TWO MORE COMPLETE GAMES when ED itself is still unfinished?

Yes yes I know revenue stream - BUT if ED and cosmetics is still selling as well as FDev make out why is another game needed to prop up the companies finances? Why does it make good business sense to drag out the development period of the game so it'll be a DECADE before all the outlined KS content appears? In what business universe does it make sense to keep your customers who have ALREADY PAID YOU waiting that long?

ED seems very much like it was a means to an end, because otherwise as I've said before elsewhere several times Elite 4 could have been made at ANY TIME IN THE INTERVENING 20 YEARS SINCE FFE.

When you have a passion for something you have no choice but to see it done.

TWENTY YEARS - DB supposedly had "passion" for Elite 4, but it never happened, and during that entire time FDev were still producing games.

*Breathe*

 

[Rafe Zetter]

They don't need to play it in their on time to understand it, and they probably do have dedicated play testers. Not all bugs/exploits will be apparent before it goes live.

Sorry, playtesters?

I'm sure that that fallacy has been proven false time and time again. - or they are the worst in the world.

I've been woodworking for a long time and make a reasonable living from it, and I can understand the complexities of japanese joinery, but CAN I DO IT? No I can't.