Elite Dangerous Community Schedule W/C 28 June 2021

[Ahkoli]

How many rounds have the devs put in their foot at this point? Or have they gone straight for the headshots now?

 

[Ahkoli]

In the theme of transparancy between all of us, things like this are genuinely a bit hard to read - I won't lie.

A lot of us in Community Management come from development and dev team roles - several of us with over a decade worth of experience.
Despite your opinions here in this post, I'd like to reassure you that we do know and love the game (we dedicate our lives to it at this point), we do hear and understand what people believe is potentially needed for a greater experience, but that's not for us to then personally sign off as CMs. We can only take hold of it and relay back, keeping in line with how development works, stakeholder wishes, priorities for the wider players - many factors with how a game is developed and how a development team functions. This takes time and careful handling - we ALL want to get it right for you.

We aren't content creators, so wouldn't expect for our roles as CMs to be imagined in line with their awesome work, or us assumed to carry less clout than them if they were the "negotiating buffer". If they spent their time being that buffer (as we do, believe it or not), I can't imagine how they'd have a chance to then be the incredible content creators they are, in all fairness. That would make them CMs.
They're unique and a force in their own right and we cherish (and are hugely grateful for) any amount of time they choose to commit to Elite Dangerous.

We communicate daily with development teams and we read a vast array of comments, feedback, DMs on all platforms, tackle any immediate and nasty issues we see, whilst aligning that with our dev side work - we're not lying to anyone if their particular issue isn't fixed in the update they wish, it's not our decision to make, it's collective and aligned with all core functioning teams and the development cycle at that time.
Decisions on development are made out of our hands as CMs, but these decisions when based on gameplay changes, additions and suchlike, could be better communicated to you, we've spoken out about that fact, we do know it's a source of frustration for you all and we truly are aiming on working harder in this area as we move forward.
We understand why it's a huge deal for you, seriously. We want to do better at this. We're not going to hide that fact.

I hope this at least gives a bit of personal insight from my side of things really.
There's a lot of misconception about the team currently and if I can help settle anyone's frustrations right now, then I'll try and be as human as possible about it.
Thanks for your time, as always.

To be frank - I don't believe you. Devs that care don't put out content that is more broken in full release than it was in Alpha.

 

[DerHug]

I personally think i get quite well informed lately and I am sure we'll get an info on the dev stream too, might be devs busy with update 5? Would understand. The mostly open and frequent communication is quite unique if I compare this to most games I played and play. Real heads up here to the community team how they handle this recently

To be honest I find it's really time that some get way less salty and act a little more grown up... All this I demand, they owe me, they betrayed us etc... I mean come on
yeah odyssey was no perfect launch like 99% of the games I played and being salty over this for a while is one thing but crying over every little bit there is - like the dev stream or post stuff.. Oh my haven't seen so much crying on a forum since GOA put down theirs when they managed DAOC if anyone was there

The fixes so far have been good, nice update hopefully incoming this week... So can we stop the doom is everywhere for a while?

 

[Ahkoli]

can we stop the doom is everywhere for a while?

No.

 

[Scoob101]

I hope this at least gives a bit of personal insight from my side of things really.
There's a lot of misconception about the team currently and if I can help settle anyone's frustrations right now, then I'll try and be as human as possible about it.

Thanks for being so open with us, there's a lot of people here including me that believe you are part of the solution and not part of the problem.

If you can get us an answer for the dev post on::

• The long term view on current-gen console support
• What comes after update 5 and prior to the console release.

You would make a lot of people slightly less grumpy ;-)

 

[sallymorganmoore]

To be frank - I don't believe you. Devs that care don't put out content that is more broken in full release than it was in Alpha.

Totally respect you'll believe what you want to believe, everyone's entitled to based off their own experiences, but it doesn't mean what they believe is factually true.
I just wanted to have at least some small voice among you all in this to say that neither I nor the rest of the CM team or devs openly set out to maliciously lie to anyone. It's up to progress now and how we work together moving forward with those still wanting to stay a part of Elite, to gain trust back.

 

[sallymorganmoore]

Thanks for being so open with us, there's a lot of people here including me that believe you are part of the solution and not part of the problem.

If you can get us an answer for the dev post on::

• The long term view on current-gen console support
• What comes after update 5 and prior to the console release.

You would make a lot of people slightly less grumpy ;-)

Thanks Scoob. We're all head down working on this today so I see you.

 

[Phoenix_Dfire]

If you're seriously saying that making PP open only is just tweaking a few formulae then I fear you have been overdoing the space-kale again, that's just crazy talk. I'm sure fdev are aware that any re-opening of the PP can'o'worms will commit them to months of tweaks and balances, and we know how well the last 're-balance' went ... ending in a "more next year" fade to black ....

The way that Sandro proposed the changes was quite simple;-

1. You wouldn't be able to buy powerplay cargo in solo or pvt and if you did buy them and then flip to pvt/solo, the cargo would simply disappear (and you'd be out of pocket).
2. Same for Powerplay Bounty Vouchers, you could only earn them in open but if you flipped to pvt/solo before cashing them in they were lost.

It wasn't a huge amount of work, compared to some of the proposals, and probably easier to implement than the 'Weighted'* idea that I think is the more preferred option.


* Where Open Only players contribute more to the Powerplay Background Simulation (PPBS).

 

[DerHug]

No.

OK.
Need a hug?

 

[Ahkoli]

Totally respect you'll believe what you want to believe, everyone's entitled to based off their own experiences, but it doesn't mean what they believe is factually true.
I just wanted to have at least some small voice among you all in this to say that neither I nor the rest of the CM team or devs openly set out to maliciously lie to anyone. It's up to progress now and how we work together moving forward with those still wanting to stay a part of Elite, to gain trust back.

That's fine, and I get it. I'm not going to believe that they actually care, and that they're doing anything more than just a job at this point. They've lost my trust, and won't gain it back. I preordered Odyssey. I played the alpha. This taught me a valuable lesson. Never, ever preorder. The alpha apparently did NOTHING. Honestly? I want my money back, but I've already put too many hours into it to get a refund. I played the alpha as much as I could, too much, I guess.

 

[Ahkoli]

OK.
Need a hug?

No. I want a game whose content updates are not more broken in release than they were in alpha.

 

[CMDR M Kozak]

Totally respect you'll believe what you want to believe, everyone's entitled to based off their own experiences, but it doesn't mean what they believe is factually true.
I just wanted to have at least some small voice among you all in this to say that neither I nor the rest of the CM team or devs openly set out to maliciously lie to anyone. It's up to progress now and how we work together moving forward with those still wanting to stay a part of Elite, to gain trust back.

Sally,
What each of us believe is based on how things have been going. I dont think anyone here have any bad blood to any one in particular, but history between FD and players are bad because of reasons: Intransparency, double speak, doing 180 degrees on "promises" made.

What I hope to see from this new level of communication and transparency, can start with performance of Odyssey. The min and recommended specs - what was the target framerate? How could it be such a surprise to FD that performance in some places are so bad that it incurs motion sickness? ... and that on machines that are FAR FAR beyond recommended. Now, I dont expect my 120 fps to return on planets... but 35 ? And nobody knew?

Start there.

 

[CMDR Von Abrahart]

No. I want a game whose content updates are not more broken in release than they were in alpha.

You should take a break from games. Go for a walk, eat a salad, go visit some friends, take a deep breath, sit by the ocean.

 

[Scoob101]

What I hope to see from this new level of communication and transparency, can start with performance of Odyssey. The min and recommended specs - what was the target framerate? How could it be such a surprise to FD that performance in some places are so bad that it incurs motion sickness? ... and that on machines that are FAR FAR beyond recommended. Now, I dont expect my 120 fps to return on planets... but 35 ? And nobody knew?

Start there.

Come on. That's not in any way a realistic expectation. Nobody is going to start a conversation where the player base gets to start scrutinising why a certain past decision was made.

 

[sallymorganmoore]

That's fine, and I get it. I'm not going to believe that they actually care, and that they're doing anything more than just a job at this point. They've lost my trust, and won't gain it back. I preordered Odyssey. I played the alpha. This taught me a valuable lesson. Never, ever preorder. The alpha apparently did NOTHING. Honestly? I want my money back, but I've already put too many hours into it to get a refund. I played the alpha as much as I could, too much, I guess.

And in spite of how you feel (which I'm genuinely really sorry that it is such a way), thanks so much for still being here and present in the forums and community, sharing your thoughts.

 

[EidLeWeise]

The elephant in the room is Frontier putting on public display employees who are not fully engaged with its community for whatever reason. . It would have been much cheaper and more effective for fdev to sub contract an intermediary group of well known content creators to act as a negotiating buffer group.

Thats communication, these people understand the community, they understand the game, and know what is needed.

If ANY dev or CM cannot keep a promise then that promise should not be spoken of.

The content creators are the public coffee lounge of your community , alienating them is serving only to damage frontier’s image and confidence. When they start to stream competitor games that provide the features that this community have pleaded for, it’s the star of the very steep slippery slope of players actually starting to play these competitor games.

How much further would you like to see your share value drop.?

Take decisive action immediately and publish your intentions publicly by someone that your community trusts and respects.

Speaking as a Content Creator there is no way in hell I would like to act as a Community Manager on a full time basis! I've not got the temperament and would insult far to many of our community that I'd be fired within the week

That said when Lave Radio have a Frontier Representative on, we'll frequently canvas questions from the community, filter out the inappropriate ones. I.E. if we were ever lucky enough to get some one on one time with Dav, we'd not ask him a load of UI questions, neither would we critique Frontier's Image to him. It's not his job.

I am in semi regular communication with Frontier, and I was lucky enough to get what some members of the community have said was a bribe (I.e. the Terrarium, which I am doing my best not to kill!!!) However I've never been a 'shill' for Frontier, nor have they ever asked me to be. I've been accused of being a white knight, I've been accused of going out of my way to criticize the game (sometimes even in the same episode!).

If I can feed anything back to the community from the 'benefit' of my peek behind Frontier's curtains it's that they are so aware of what 'we' want. They might not be able to say it, even behind closed doors but you can tell from the eye rolls when someone brings up <insert pet feature here> for the 50th time that they both know about it, and in an ideal world (if it's a good idea!) would even want to implement it RIGHT NOW. However (and I now slip my Developer hat on) no company, even with infinite resources can implement everything right now, everything has to get prioritised, and (as has happened with my day job today) gets re-prioritised on a weekly (if not daily) basis! Knowledge has to be transferred from the people with it (In my work Business Analysts) to the Developers, and even then there can be 3 or 4 people working on one tiny bit. I.E. one person might focus on the database interactions, one person on important and exporting the data to templates, one person on the UI and one person who creates the glue to stick it all together. It'll come to no one's surprise that mistakes can be made!!! They're not made maliciously or even stupidly, sometimes it can be as innocent as a false assumption, or miss-reading a point from a 20 page document. Heck sometimes the use case itself can be wrong!!!

In the theme of transparancy between all of us, things like this are genuinely a bit hard to read - I won't lie.

A lot of us in Community Management come from development and dev team roles - several of us with over a decade worth of experience.
Despite your opinions here in this post, I'd like to reassure you that we do know and love the game (we dedicate our lives to it at this point), we do hear and understand what people believe is potentially needed for a greater experience, but that's not for us to then personally sign off as CMs. We can only take hold of it and relay back, keeping in line with how development works, stakeholder wishes, priorities for the wider players - many factors with how a game is developed and how a development team functions. This takes time and careful handling - we ALL want to get it right for you.

We aren't content creators, so wouldn't expect for our roles as CMs to be imagined in line with their awesome work, or us assumed to carry less clout than them if they were the "negotiating buffer". If they spent their time being that buffer (as we do, believe it or not), I can't imagine how they'd have a chance to then be the incredible content creators they are, in all fairness. That would make them CMs.
They're unique and a force in their own right and we cherish (and are hugely grateful for) any amount of time they choose to commit to Elite Dangerous.

We communicate daily with development teams and we read a vast array of comments, feedback, DMs on all platforms, tackle any immediate and nasty issues we see, whilst aligning that with our dev side work - we're not lying to anyone if their particular issue isn't fixed in the update they wish, it's not our decision to make, it's collective and aligned with all core functioning teams and the development cycle at that time.
Decisions on development are made out of our hands as CMs, but these decisions when based on gameplay changes, additions and suchlike, could be better communicated to you, we've spoken out about that fact, we do know it's a source of frustration for you all and we truly are aiming on working harder in this area as we move forward.
We understand why it's a huge deal for you, seriously. We want to do better at this. We're not going to hide that fact.

I hope this at least gives a bit of personal insight from my side of things really.
There's a lot of misconception about the team currently and if I can help settle anyone's frustrations right now, then I'll try and be as human as possible about it.
Thanks for your time, as always.

Sally, Arf, Bruce, Zac, and our dark and brooding lord of destruction Paul, you guys do one hell of a job and for that I salute you. I also feel for you because it seems like you're thrown to the wolves to be mauled by the community without even a bone to give us. I know that you'd love to tell us ALL the shiny things you know (apart from Arf, because he he likes cackling from his thrown and occasionally throwing Sith Lightning about) but I ALSO know that whilst you'd love to tell us all, actually you DO NOT want to tell us all, and we do not want to know all. I.E. You can not say that you've seen concept art of someone walking around a base reviving people because if you did and the feature did not pan out for one reason or another the community would lynch you for it!

I personally feel the #1 thing the community is looking for just now is hope... though how you give that to us in an acceptable manner I've no idea. You've already told us that Elite is still having new development and features being worked on. You've told us that you're working on hundreds of bug fixes and optimizations. I don't know what you can do differently though (and I am sorry to say this) but I do agree with some of my fellow content creators that Star Citizen and Microsoft Flight Simulator are not just communicating their upcoming features better but also helping us understand their development better. I.E. Star Citizen have recently had an hour long video about the AI behind their equivalent of the BGS and it was in so much depth that as as a ML developer was struggling to keep up. Another week we had a lovely chat where a CM and concept artist just chatted whilst the concept artist explained how he would make the scope of a gun. Even Kay talking planet tech and showing slides is not as transparent as this is. The closest I think would be the Thargon Swarm video that you guys did. David Braben and Ian Bell made a generation of Techies, most of whom love Elite Dangerous. Out Nerd Us! I double dare you!!! We'll lap it up!!!

I know that you guys are planning on bringing dev's out explaining stuff to us more. whilst things are in 'firefighting' mode if I could suggest explaining some of the optimisation issues that are being worked on, and why (in very technical details) they're not just something you can roll your face over and punch the "fix it" button

Sincerely and with Love, Cmdr Eid LeWeise (Lave Radio)

 

[CMDR M Kozak]

Come on. That's not in any way a realistic expectation. Nobody is going to start a conversation where the player base gets to start scrutinising why a certain past decision was made.

I think its pretty realistic to ask for target framerates.

 

[dj_wylie]

@sallymorganmoore my initial response to this thread was querying for clarification on the dev stream. However I note it has since taken a turn for the worse and I thought I should add a further contribution. I think its very obvious that you and the other CMs do indeed care for the game and for the community. I can tell that you get the communties fustrations with communications and are actually trying to make things better. I also really appreciate everything you guys do, i can imagine it is not an easy job. There is a portion of the community that is getting overly salty, dont let them get to you. Keep doing what you guys are doing. And please let that mean furthering the open and honest communication that has been recently discussed. Best of luck with the dev update, I have my fingers crossed that you guys pull it out of the bag. The community really needs some positivity at the moment

 

[CMDR Disco Cat]

That's fine, and I get it. I'm not going to believe that they actually care, and that they're doing anything more than just a job at this point. They've lost my trust, and won't gain it back. I preordered Odyssey. I played the alpha. This taught me a valuable lesson. Never, ever preorder. The alpha apparently did NOTHING. Honestly? I want my money back, but I've already put too many hours into it to get a refund. I played the alpha as much as I could, too much, I guess.

I'm claiming "the devs don't care" statement cannot be true, plain and simple.

Development is a creative job, and I know no creative person or group not caring about how people will receive their work. Especially when their invest months or years of their life on a creative project (cause games are that : collective and interactive creative projects).

You're free to believe what you want, I only know a few indie developers, and some who work for bigger studios, and they may be lying to me...

Yet I know, as a intranet web developer myself, that I truly care about what people's feedback is regarding my apps, and I want them to like using them, for me to be proud of my work. And I just can't see game developers being any different.

We won't know why they didn't delay the release some more, but I'm positive the devs aren't the ones making the final decision anyway.

I'll finish on the preorder thing : you should totally not preorder any game if you're unsure you'll like the game/update/dlc.

 

[Para Handy]

...... to gain trust back.

That is a very interesting remark and I hope you don't get in hot water for voicing it.

Company communication on the forum is much improved these days, however that was low hanging fruit to say the least.

The improvements are much appreciated, thanks.