Can the forum moderators please dowse this place in vinegar?

OP - I have found, only as a fairly minor participant, that the forum, like the game, is both good and bad... (neutral enough - no name calling)
There are many here who appear passionate about the game in different ways and may be a little intolerent of those who perceive things differently to themselves, fairly level for such a large group of individuals. This can manifest itself as somewhat heated discussion in some topics, fairly normal for a public forum and from a personal perspective, in comparison to some other fora I visit this forum is pretty tame! (no offence folk, you are doing fine :) )

The game is having a bit of a rough time since the 3.3 update and following patches, like the forum - some good and some bad...
The latest update has introduced some particularly annoying bugs, some folk are vociferous about them, the rest of us just get on with it and wait patiently for the fixes.

Kindly don't think this forum is completely full of negativity and poor grace, there are many topics - which may have some unendearing comments included - that provide a measure of valuable and helpful pointers to the game mechanics.

Just treat the 'salty' comments as irrelevent and enjoy the 'good' content - in the main the members are pretty normal people :) (excluding myself in that clause, of course!)
 
The reality of unhappy customers is one faced by everyone who sells, well, anything. The thing to do is to manage it to a standstill. Trying to ignore it, or vilifying it, or denying it will not ever work, and will almost certainly make it worse. And griping about it "behind closed doors" won't ever work either. All that does is make it look like the customers are wrong for being customers.

Almost no one goes straight to rage. It usually takes a long time of being ignored or being vilified for rage to set in.

That said, there is never any reason for death threats or threats of violence at all. Period.
There is, however, a difference in-kind between violence and words - something our SJW societies seem to have forgotten to all of our detriment.

The OP makes some suggestions on the management, and some (at least one) are good ones. But there are others, especially pertinent to gaming that can be suggested:
Do not use playtesting as just an advertisement mode. Playtesting is for playing the test. If the devs can't or won't do it, and I realize that the marketing approach is not their fault, hire some actual players of the game to do so. Can you even imagine how they thrilled they'd be to get invited to actually assist with the development of their favoured game. I am (or was) an alpha playtester for Torchlight Frontiers. The enthusiasm for the upcoming game is astonishing. Frontier is making money hand over fist according to their last financial report - so why not put some of it to use making your aggrieved fans happy? If your updates other content arrive playtested and (almost) bug-free, then the level of griping goes down significantly.
 
Could you source that reaction? A quick google search didn't yield any such reactions although vinegar dissolves salt.
The reaction is a double displacement, establishing an equilibrium:

NaCl + CH3COOH <-----> CH3COONa + HCl

In the interest of full disclosure, I will admit that the equilibrium established is heavily in favour of the right to left, but you cant let that get in the way on the internet can you? I was just trying to reduce the salt :p
 
I'm 51, I did play the original games and I'm too old to put up with all the crap on here. I'm also already bored with the term "salt" - it's not a term I use or see used anywhere else that I go online nor is it used by anyone I know in real life. I came back to the game after 4 years away and I'm away again after less than two weeks. I remembered some of the reasons I stopped playing last time but the forum wasn't one then, sadly it is now. Not the sort of community I want to be part of.

We're about the same age.

That's all fine yet, here you are.
And you say you don't even play the game anymore?
Huh...
Doesn't that seem incongruous to you?
And isn't that exactly the "type" of person people are complaining about in this thread?

"I don't even play anymore, but let me tell you how awful X, Y and Z are!"
Maybe it's what you make of it...

Ftr, calling someone "salty" is very common in Hawai'i.
 
  • Breaking the perceived lack of engagement from the developers might reduce the animosity they are currently getting. Which in turn might improve the tone of the forums?
This one is hilarious :ROFLMAO:

I'm a little bit of a dev myself, and if I was told I could make up for my perceive lack of engagement by talking to my customers, I would flip them a 🐦 instead.
Devs working in the gaming industry don't build what they want, nor what their customers want. Yet they do take the blame for everything that makes it to production. No wonder they are behind closed doors and you never see them around here.
 
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I'm an original, early access, 84'r etc blah.

I love this game, it has the potential to become truly great.

However, without applying the blue bag (some will have to reference that) it cannot be right that after this long some major old bugs reappear and a new set of "game breaking" bugs appear. I see only one reason for this and its not good. Updates are being "tested" (I know, I know too much "") on old versions and rolled out without QA. This means that the team supporting ED is now down to around 20, maybe less. The game is in no-spend maintenance mode and will remain so until Elite III appears. Take the game as is until the end of 2020, it will not improve in the interim.

All hope now resides with the 2020 update. I'm not sure if I want to invest further.
 
This one is hilarious :ROFLMAO:

I'm a little bit of a dev myself, and if I was told I could make up for my perceive lack of engagement by talking to my customers, I would flip them a 🐦 instead.
Devs working in the gaming industry don't build what they want, nor what their customers want. Yet they do take the blame for everything that makes it to production. No wonder they are behind closed doors and you never see them around here.
I believe OP meant "developers" as the whole FD Team and not as an individual developers\coders. I understand this as a concern about poor feedback from FD as a company, not the programmers themselves. They have dedicated people for such communications, all those Community Managers and staff, but these communications looks one-way, shallow and often just a pure marketing hype. Ignoring a large portion of bug reports, not fixing years-long bugs, using betas as a marketing tool when not a single bug found in beta is fixed and the game put into the production as is (the worst thing from my standpoint) - all these things cause this perception.
And release of a poorly tested new version with a lot of obvious and game breaking bugs (FPS issue, modules management), with old bugs mostly in place despite the fix (DSS mapping) and with some very old bugs resurrected (SRV issues), does not improve the situation and salt and bitterness will eventually evolve to a rage. Proper communication can calm people down and improve attitude.
 
The reaction is a double displacement, establishing an equilibrium:

NaCl + CH3COOH <-----> CH3COONa + HCl

In the interest of full disclosure, I will admit that the equilibrium established is heavily in favour of the right to left, but you cant let that get in the way on the internet can you? I was just trying to reduce the salt :p

Fascinating.
 
OP reddit is right over there and waiting for you with open arms. If you need psychological support to keep playing elite, errr.. go get some there!

If you reread your own post though, the problem you're getting dismayed by is actually a symptom of not having the solutions you provide.

From my own musing, its just fact that frontier don't provide the wind to hold up the sails of the common level of passion of internet connected game players, older or otherwise. They simply dont, but we're all here with expectations to be doped up (and milked) at a completely different level.

Up to you how you handle it.

I can recalibrate myself easy enough, but when you see the game, which frontier have boldly defined as a "games as a service" and damage it with updates, being powerless to maintain what was logged into yesterday is really frustrating. Go try and discard some limpets, or try to fly somewhere outside the bubble and see what happens. Its the most irrational feeling ever, but you can't help but think you like the game more than frontier does.
 
This one is hilarious :ROFLMAO:

I'm a little bit of a dev myself, and if I was told I could make up for my perceive lack of engagement by talking to my customers, I would flip them a 🐦 instead.
Devs working in the gaming industry don't build what they want, nor what their customers want. Yet they do take the blame for everything that makes it to production. No wonder they are behind closed doors and you never see them around here.
Well that's why they have community managers. Thing is, if you look at http://www.elitedevtracker.com and filter for twitter you'll either get praise for the game or completely unrelated posts. If you filter for the forums you'll usually get 5-7 posts per week, even when the forums are burning.
Don't get me wrong, I am sure the CM team is doing a pretty good job at the stuff they are being told to do, like creating live streams and hype the game in social media. They also seem like very nice people. I'd just wish they would communicate more about the actual game (and the problems that come with it).
 
I think one of the changes in the recent years was opening the game up to a wider type of audience which is, of course, good for revenue and the funding of the game. Ironically it is also bad for the community because the floodgates to the greater internet have also been opened which attracted a lot of those people who think gaming is where you notice an inconvenience in a game you are playing and then write a hate letter or an entitled rant saying how much this or that is not conform with all the other games where devs are but a gamer's slave delivering whatever they want.
It's drama and outrage instead of constructive criticism. Thinking of game devs either as oppressors or slaves creating content for them instead of people working on that game we all play, and that stance is, as infantile as it might be, quite widespread.
No! We can't just tell them what we don't like, but we have to weave in words like "pathetic" and "lousy" and "incompetent" to give our words more weight and have some flag to wave around...

There is a light and a dark side on the internet, and there is a immature side stuck in some kind of teenager rebellion which mistakes entertainment for politics and those cool people creating games for politicians who represent some shady agenda while in reality they just like to make games. You're totally entitled to not like something and also to say that, but if you do so, stay on topic and treat a game like a game.
Also this behavior seems to be that common, that forums usually don't even bother to treat an insult like an insult and thus a violation of the ToS. Insult any forum user, and a moderator will react. Insult a game dev and it will ignite a 200 pages discussion. Game devs are people and also forum users. But no, it's more diplomatic to not react because that could be seen as an act to silence critics... who are not critics but angry immature idiots who like their infant riots and fake dramas.

EDIT: totally forgot to react to the points in OPs post. :D
Yeah, I think communcating more openly and more frequently would be a very good thing. Though opening up can also have the exact opposite effect, more communication from Frontier might really help keeping the kids in check and would be appreciated by the adults as well.
 
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