Request for a "Player Council", Resurrected DDF, Streamer Representation to Dev track, Focused Feedback or Similar Directed Community Engagement

Hydrino

Hydrino
Dear all,

I am still a fan and love having been part of the Elite journey since 1984. I respect the difficulty of game development and 'trying to please everyone'.

I want this to be taken as constructive by FD and not just salt and whining. I realize it's their game and the shareholders company to run.

Having said that:
Can FD at least try a standing "Player Council" of some type, or regular like clockwork Focused Feedback Forums, Resurrecting the DDF within FD overall roadmap based on internal technical and other R&D, or something similar? Even if it is just the top Streamers that FD already made a special group of and granted a bit more access. I would be happy if they were consulting 'representing the player base" (and please I hope someone at FD producer level watches Yamiks, even if they can't acknowledge it because of language and presentation).

There have been various sporadic attempts at direct engagement with players on the direction of ED's development after V1.0 shipped. But not recently. There seems a long-running disconnect between what big chunks of the community want and what FD think they want and deliver after "secret road-mapping and design". This could be greatly affecting sales and profit. The DDF may have had limited utility because the basic target was known and the design docs and roadmap were clear and the community agreed whole-heartedly with it. The DDF did give major impetus to free-flight travel, which I think most would agree was a major win. But after the DDF was ghosted we got a lot of complaints about undiscussed headline features like CQC, PP, Engineers, etc. Odyssey seems similarly full of major design misses like Apex travel time, Genetic quick-reaction mini-game, UI total inconsistent redesign and function, lack of weapon variety, lack of cost balancing, no VR support, no ship interiors, 'fade to black' teleportation to ground, need of skimmer-tech SRV given massive amount of new scatter-rock and auto-landing where we couldn't land, etc.

FD seems to have gone from amazing Kickstarter interaction with the super-fans straight to AAA publisher practices, and for unknown and mysterious reasons. The sporadic attempts to re-engage at the DDF level with some designer/producer interaction are only sporadic and seem to have vanished after Sandro's last Focused Feedback post. And that was itself a random pop-up and focused exclusively on fixing past implementations like PP, iirc.

I'm puzzled by this because of FD's track record of innovation on the tech side (Procedural Generation in Elite, bezier curves and landable planets with accurate system orbital mechanics in Frontier Elite II, 10,000 character crowds in Planet Coaster, etc.). Where is the innovation on the CM side?

Maybe this would flop, and it's a bad idea. Maybe FD have good reasons they don't do it (herding cats anyone?). But a few other Devs with rabid followings have tried it and continue it (EVE Online...). And my impressions of the Odyssey Alpha for whatever reason, made me want to post something like this and see if it gets any traction in the community.

07 to FDevs and fellow CMDRs
 

Alec Turner

Alec Turner
While I'm always very wary of any kind of special group of people with privileged access to FD who get a closer line of communication with them than everyone else, there are many aspects of Odyssey which have left me really wishing FD would have consulted with the players about some of the development work they were about to embark on. As a trivial example lets take the recent genetic sampler mini-game fiasco. What really makes me weep is the thought that some developer will have spent their unbelievably valuable time developing that when, a 5 minute consultation with any one of hundreds (probably thousands) of experienced players would have elicited the immediate response "god no, that's a terrible idea". They could have saved so much wasted time and come up with a far better solution ... rather than simply having to admit they were wrong after the fact, remove it again and not have time to replace it with a better alternative. A much larger example would be the UI changes - and specifically the galaxy map. Again, I think any experienced user of the galaxy map would have immediately rejected the redesign and pointed out all the ways that the old galaxy map is better.
 

The Wallet Inspector

The Wallet Inspector
Hydrino said:
Even if it is just the top Streamers that FD already made a special group of and granted a bit more access. I would be happy if they were consulting 'representing the player base"
Click to expand...
I'm sure there's a lot of great ideas in there and FDEV should take note but, I can't see how the streamers represent the playerbase, unless you mean something else by this? I'm all in favour of them doing more feedback sessions with the community but see no need to give streamers (who have their own gig and are primarily clout chasers looking for subs and ad revenue) any more influence on the discourse than they already have.
 

Vetinari

V
You do realise you posted this in the Frontier Official Forums dont you? Its not like they need someone special to feedback, all they got to do is ask and people will respond.

Different communities exist on different forums and different formats, why should one get more special treatment than another? Especially ones not regulated by Frontier?
 

LeoBartlet

LeoBartlet
Oh wow a player FSS thread and a player council thread in as many days.

mSFXk2a.gif
 

LeoBartlet

LeoBartlet
Hydrino said:
Can FD at least try a standing "Player Council" of some type, or regular like clockwork Focused Feedback Forums, Resurrecting the DDF within FD overall roadmap based on internal technical and other R&D, or something similar? Even if it is just the top Streamers that FD already made a special group of and granted a bit more access. I would be happy if they were consulting 'representing the player base" (and please I hope someone at FD producer level watches Yamiks, even if they can't acknowledge it because of language and presentation).
Click to expand...

Do streamers have some greater understanding of what makes the game good/bad/indifferent just because they have people watch them play the game?
 

Bigmaec

Bigmaec
LeoBartlet said:
I launched a successful campaign last week to have Alpha phase 3 delayed last week so @Bigmaec and some other rando could enjoy phase 2 longer and Frontier listened by delaying it for 30 minutes.

That makes me something of an influenza so I stand ready to be the voice of the community in the council of elders.

@frontier You've still not sent me my stream deck.
Click to expand...
I support this notion and have to add Leo has extensive management experience from the various threads thread management thread.
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
Alec Turner said:
While I'm always very wary of any kind of special group of people with privileged access to FD who get a closer line of communication with them than everyone else, there are many aspects of Odyssey which have left me really wishing FD would have consulted with the players about some of the development work they were about to embark on. As a trivial example lets take the recent genetic sampler mini-game fiasco. What really makes me weep is the thought that some developer will have spent their unbelievably valuable time developing that when, a 5 minute consultation with any one of hundreds (probably thousands) of experienced players would have elicited the immediate response "god no, that's a terrible idea". They could have saved so much wasted time and come up with a far better solution ... rather than simply having to admit they were wrong after the fact, remove it again and not have time to replace it with a better alternative. A much larger example would be the UI changes - and specifically the galaxy map. Again, I think any experienced user of the galaxy map would have immediately rejected the redesign and pointed out all the ways that the old galaxy map is better.
Click to expand...
I think the problem with both the genetic sampler mini-game and the new galaxy map is that the ways they're a problem don't necessarily come out from a text description of them, or even a mockup of the user interface. (And while I didn't particularly like it and I'm glad Frontier have decided it's also unnecessary to the process, equally, it's only the third biggest problem with their exobiology implementation, in my opinion)

You'd need a very detailed mockup and description to notice that e.g. the galaxy map doesn't let you do partial searches, or select without routing, etc. by which point they've probably already implemented most of it and might as well just throw it out to Alpha anyway to get wider feedback. Conversely, if they'd released the sampler mini-game without the "go back if you fail", at half the speed, and with the post-hotfix sensitivity - again, not really obvious from a brief description or mockup - it'd still have been superfluous and people wouldn't have liked it much, but other Alpha 3 problems would have got a lot more attention instead.

Similarly, going back a bit - when they did the mining revamp, the really obvious problem with the new mining tools (horrendous inefficiency compared with the lasers) was ... well, I thought it was really obvious from the preview video, but it didn't really get onto the community radar generally until people got to try them out personally in Beta. And then it took Frontier years to really fix that up.
 

Greasetrap42

Greasetrap42
Vetinari said:
You do realise you posted this in the Frontier Official Forums dont you? Its not like they need someone special to feedback, all they got to do is ask and people will respond.
Click to expand...

And maybe they do. If I was a FD employee I would definitely post using an anonymous account to get some feedback on ideas.
 
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