Yesterday I attended the Expo, and had the occasion to have brief chats with Sandro, Lloyd, and Steve -- and yes, I’ve also taken a selfie with Lord Braben himself, I’m somewhat ashamed to confess. I’m writing this as a sort of feedback letter to FDev as a whole, but also as a testimony to the rest of the community. You might not share my opinions, but I am just presenting them as they are. I am a relatively new player (PS4 cohort – those wide-eyed enthusiasts), and to be honest this is the first gaming convention/event I ever attend, so I have little to compare it with, and I won’t comment much on the organization of the event itself.
While I understand that the you are not our friends -- we are your customers, and you are our service providers, and it is therefore your job to be nice to us -- I think it is only fair to acknowledge the enormous amount of time (and energy) you all have spent in organizing this event and in interacting with guests (I’ve seen most of you standing around surrounded by groups of people from 11:00 to about 20:30, when I left). What I understood at the Expo is that your passion for the game, and your willingness to improve it, is genuine: (tbh, if I was working on a game during office hours I would most definitely not want to also play it in my free time, but many of you seemed to suggest that you do just that). I think that this event was -- on balance -- a good idea, and that your openness to the community is admirable -- and I say this as someone who (if I was in your place) would probably hate this kind of event, and dread to be surrounded and questioned for hours by eager spaceship nerds obsessed with the minutiae of a videogame.
While there’s a lot in the game I would like to see changed or tweaked (from small QOL improvements to major features) the impression I am left with after this event is that these shortcomings and occasional poor design choices are not due to carelessness, incompetence, or lack of interest (as some people want to suggest). I think that the stuff we have been shown are all steps in the right direction (especially the dialling down of RNG. Sandro, Steve, really: less RNG will both make the game better and the community happier – it’s a win-win situation), and I hope that along the way there will be the occasion to add more minor tweaks.
I could go on writing a few pages detailing what these minor tweaks could look like, but I am more interested in highlighting a more general point here. I hope the experience of this Expo will push you further towards the realization that the majority of the community is composed by passionate but ultimately reasonable people. These might very well be people with strongly-worded complaints and detailed suggestions about how to improve things, but still we are talking about individuals who love the game and are ready to be treated like the adults they are. In practical terms, this means that it would much better to tell us more -- even if the more in question is: “this is very hard”, “I don’t know when this will be ready”, “no, we can’t work on this” and so on -- than it is to keep a cautious silence due to the fear of over-promising or disappointing us. Silence, mostly, breeds toxic speculations, and time and again your community mangers have had to chime into threads here or on Reddit to quench absolutely arbitrary speculations. In a recent livestream Sandro promised a higher degree of interaction and exchange with the community while designing improvements and new features. Please do that, keep people in the loop, even when you hit a wall, and you’ll be surprised how the general tone of the conversation will improve. More than that, I think that it is in your best interest to tap into the hive-mind of the community to extract interesting design options (or spotting unwanted unexpected consequences) you would not have otherwise thought of. And this goes from listening to committed explorers to hardcore PvPers through spreadsheet-happy alien-hunters. We all realize that to create a game is hard work, and that Elite is an incredibly complex system (as someone who works in science reporting, I was really impressed with Anthony’s talk about the Stellar Forge, and the mix of physics and coding that is behind Elite’s galaxy) where every change in a given domain can easily end up having unexpected repercussions in others, but when the development process is hidden behind a wall of non-committal silence it is natural that doubt and second-guessing start to develop. A more “participatory” process would be both fairer to your fans and make the life of your community mangers much easier.
Finally, a few random comments:
As I mentioned above I am a new-ish PS4 player, without the Alpha/Beta backer pedigree many other have, but myself and the other admins of the PS Discord server and subreddit have put a lot of work and passion over the last few months in making sure that the PS4 community can hope to catch up with the already-established ones on PC and Xbox. We do this because we love the game: while we are well aware that there are much more important and urgent things in life than having a texture bug fixed, we also want to help you making Elite ever better since, for better or worse, it is now part of our lives too. Keep talking to us and we’ll keep helping you (i.e. relentlessly opening bug report tickets
).
See you next time,
CMDR WilfridSephiroth (Brett please change my Forum name already!)
While I understand that the you are not our friends -- we are your customers, and you are our service providers, and it is therefore your job to be nice to us -- I think it is only fair to acknowledge the enormous amount of time (and energy) you all have spent in organizing this event and in interacting with guests (I’ve seen most of you standing around surrounded by groups of people from 11:00 to about 20:30, when I left). What I understood at the Expo is that your passion for the game, and your willingness to improve it, is genuine: (tbh, if I was working on a game during office hours I would most definitely not want to also play it in my free time, but many of you seemed to suggest that you do just that). I think that this event was -- on balance -- a good idea, and that your openness to the community is admirable -- and I say this as someone who (if I was in your place) would probably hate this kind of event, and dread to be surrounded and questioned for hours by eager spaceship nerds obsessed with the minutiae of a videogame.
While there’s a lot in the game I would like to see changed or tweaked (from small QOL improvements to major features) the impression I am left with after this event is that these shortcomings and occasional poor design choices are not due to carelessness, incompetence, or lack of interest (as some people want to suggest). I think that the stuff we have been shown are all steps in the right direction (especially the dialling down of RNG. Sandro, Steve, really: less RNG will both make the game better and the community happier – it’s a win-win situation), and I hope that along the way there will be the occasion to add more minor tweaks.
I could go on writing a few pages detailing what these minor tweaks could look like, but I am more interested in highlighting a more general point here. I hope the experience of this Expo will push you further towards the realization that the majority of the community is composed by passionate but ultimately reasonable people. These might very well be people with strongly-worded complaints and detailed suggestions about how to improve things, but still we are talking about individuals who love the game and are ready to be treated like the adults they are. In practical terms, this means that it would much better to tell us more -- even if the more in question is: “this is very hard”, “I don’t know when this will be ready”, “no, we can’t work on this” and so on -- than it is to keep a cautious silence due to the fear of over-promising or disappointing us. Silence, mostly, breeds toxic speculations, and time and again your community mangers have had to chime into threads here or on Reddit to quench absolutely arbitrary speculations. In a recent livestream Sandro promised a higher degree of interaction and exchange with the community while designing improvements and new features. Please do that, keep people in the loop, even when you hit a wall, and you’ll be surprised how the general tone of the conversation will improve. More than that, I think that it is in your best interest to tap into the hive-mind of the community to extract interesting design options (or spotting unwanted unexpected consequences) you would not have otherwise thought of. And this goes from listening to committed explorers to hardcore PvPers through spreadsheet-happy alien-hunters. We all realize that to create a game is hard work, and that Elite is an incredibly complex system (as someone who works in science reporting, I was really impressed with Anthony’s talk about the Stellar Forge, and the mix of physics and coding that is behind Elite’s galaxy) where every change in a given domain can easily end up having unexpected repercussions in others, but when the development process is hidden behind a wall of non-committal silence it is natural that doubt and second-guessing start to develop. A more “participatory” process would be both fairer to your fans and make the life of your community mangers much easier.
Finally, a few random comments:
- Ed, you are objectively really good at your job. While not exactly an imposing presence (sorry), your showmanship is undeniable. One of those people who are just at ease in the spotlight. I'm sorry we didn't have the chance to say hi, but you were one busy bee. You must have been absolutely knackered last night.
- Sandro, you look much better in person than on video. Are you working out much? Thanks for the “No ETAs, No Guarantees” audio sample. You know I’m gonna meme the core out of that.
- Lloyd, it’s been a real pleasure to have a chat with you about PS4 development (and bugs). You seem a genuinely nice guy, and as I told you when there your frequent participation to forum discussions is really, really appreciated. Keep it up!
- Steve, thanks for taking the time to chat to us late after the show, while it’s been hard to get much out of you in terms of extra details about the new engineering, your matter-of-factual and open approach is really what the game needs.
- Finally, a huge thanks to Michael Gapper: you're a star (you know why).
As I mentioned above I am a new-ish PS4 player, without the Alpha/Beta backer pedigree many other have, but myself and the other admins of the PS Discord server and subreddit have put a lot of work and passion over the last few months in making sure that the PS4 community can hope to catch up with the already-established ones on PC and Xbox. We do this because we love the game: while we are well aware that there are much more important and urgent things in life than having a texture bug fixed, we also want to help you making Elite ever better since, for better or worse, it is now part of our lives too. Keep talking to us and we’ll keep helping you (i.e. relentlessly opening bug report tickets
).See you next time,
CMDR WilfridSephiroth (Brett please change my Forum name already!)
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