Greetings Commanders,
I want to speak directly about the lack of official streams and reduced communications from our social channels
The whole team are excited to share all of the upcoming content for this year including new updates, content expansions and the next major phase in the ongoing narrative following the Azimuth Saga finale. Beyond this, we also look forward to sharing our new streaming format when the series returns as a weekly show. Changes will include new segments, year-round Twitch Drop campaigns and studio-quality production once we move back into the office.
Bought on release, played for a few months in 2015, and didn't come back until this past December. I have no "history", per se, with all of the pain/drama/annoyance of these releases over the years so I can't add my 1.75 cents WRT that. I would like to say the following about the parts of Arthur's comments (my emphasis in red and green):
1) Perhaps this is my age showing, but who gives a flying flak cannon about twitch, streaming, and shows (aka the stuff in red above)? I know the cool thing for the newest generation of gamers isn't to actually game, but to watch other people play the game, watch other people discuss the game, and generally do anything
other than playing the game. However, that's always seemed like the Fortnite and COD crowd to me, not a niche game like
Space Trucker Elite Dangerous. I guess I had ED players pegged as the kind of people that, you know, actually play the game. Those people desire the stuff in green. So let's have more stuff in green and less stuff in red.
2) If the answer to #1 is that "Yes, most ED players actually play the game", then why are (apparently) limited resources being funneled into this social presence? Who's using it?
"But Kakamage, the resources to do the stuff in red have NOTHING to do with the resources to improve the game itself!" Ok, I can understand that. I'd then counter that the 37 pages of people asking for more CM investment kind of point to where those resources could be employed. When a commenter in the first few pages wondered what CMs do all day and said it certainly couldn't be just meetings, one of the CMs responded with an itemized list
of a ton of social media crap. Let's use the Spongebob Patrick meme and take all that effort to execute social media crap and put it over here, where here is <insert more CM community involvement that's NOT social media crap>. Don't ask me what that is; ask the 37 pages of people clamoring for more CM involvement. Just don't make it be the garbage in red.
3) I am effectively a noob but learning and enjoying playing so far as I work towards my dream explorer build. I then plan to take said build and go explore for a very long time. I might like it and I might not. I really just want to get a staggering number of first discoveries and see the weird and crazy stuff out in the black. Going by community sentiment, I might as well just uninstall the game tonight, because this game is dead.
It would be easy to brush that off as vocal-minority-doom-and-gloom if information flow was
better existent. Humans and our meat-electricity brains don't operate well in a vacuum; we fill it with literally anything and make suppositions on sometimes zero information. I don't know nor care if the issue is the CMs, Devs, and/or Corporate Management. It's probably all three. But comms
have to be better. Delete the corporate-speak. For a second, pretend like the gamers the play your game are actual people just truly desiring to know when their favorite game is going to get even better, despite that fact that we're all probably just psychotic, ravenous human manifestations of a 4-alarm dumpster fire. You don't speak corporate-speak to a dumpster fire. You employ water, sand, CO2, or AFFF (only if there's grease/oils, of course).
4) Since I don't like bringing problems without bringing solutions, if you want an example of a studio and CMs that (in my humble and totally not biased opinion) are absolutely crushing it, take a look at Satisfactory. Coffee Stain studios, and their amazing also-niche game, manage to deal with their ravenous fans approximately 124.3x better than this studio does. When fans have stupid ideas or want stupid stuff, they say no. Hell, Jace (one of their CMs) just put out a video where he explained 6 things that would NEVER be implemented into Satisfactory regardless of community clamor. Imagine that here! If it's interesting or possible, they take it on board. Sometimes they actually put it in the game. Sometimes they punt it. Either way, they communicate what they're doing. So, just copy what Coffee Stain is doing. No excuses. Just do it. You're a professional company with the resources and ability, right? You just lack the gumption to execute.
Ok I wrote way too much that no one is going to read at the end of a 37-page thread. I think I need to go reevaluate my life.
o7
