Listen, I'm no fan of the drama Llama posturing in every other thread about "OMG, FD nerfed hourly mining income from 6 billion a minute to a mere 5 billion, I'm so never going to play this game that I bought a week ago on sale so I could get a fleet carrier within an hour", but there is something to be said about the utter lack of community engagement from the so-called "community managers" of this company.
I don't know, perhaps the job description for that gig includes "under no circumstance communicate with the community you're managing", in which case I guess it's as it should be, all I can say is that I'd take that gig no matter what the pay.
Easiest job I'd have ever had. Don't spend even five minutes on it.
Sure beats every community relations job I ever had where "people are mad at us" wasn't an excuse to curl up under a blanket and think happy thoughts until it all passed.
Hey, FD, need a new one? I'm absolutely ready to take on the responsibility of never touching a keyboard and getting paid for it!
Amen brother! I'd actually started a thread that was "pushing back" against the "billions per hour" brigade...
Being an Elite Dangerous fan, the Youtube algorithm's often pepper my suggested videos with Elite related content, one of the most recent ones was 500m cr/hr mining?!?!?!? (I'm not going to post a link to the video) While I didn't watch it for a couple of reasons, not least of which is that I'm...
forums.frontier.co.uk
Community Management without engagement, which FDev seem to be attempting, is a bizarre concept... In any such role the expectation is to liaise between the customer and the company, which
@zarrazee elaborates on:
A very keen observation. +1.
If I was a CM at FDev, I wouldn't bother addressing/answering most of the issues that are raised here too. I would
- log the perceived issue
- monitor how much discussion went on about it
- raise it at the next monthly review meeting
- report back to the community when appropriate
I think many people expect non-stop communications and instant/ongoing feedback from companies. Businesses don't work like that.
I think you've nailed the expectations of a community manager, but it is just unfortunate they seem to only do the first three bullet points, as they rarely report back.
If the reason they do not report back is they have nothing to report arising from the first three actions, why do them in the first place? By having 3 salaried guys on this games community management team Frontier are making it appear that are wanting to engage with us, that would include listening to our feedback, and by listening to feedback creates an expectation that they are intending to act on the feedback. The "radio silence" however, negates any perception of listening to or acting on feedback.
I'm not expecting instant and or continuous updates from the company, but I do expect them to acknowledge when feedback has been received, and that they reply to it at an appropriate time, within a reasonable timescale. The last message Tim Smith put in the Odessy thread is a good example of an acknowledgement...
Hi Alec,
We’re still reading everything, rest assured!
We don’t have any more details at the moment on how that split would work yet, however we’ve heard the questions and the feedback. We’ll be sharing more information closer to release.
To reiterate (it’s a long thread, things easily get lost!) you will still be able to play the base game and Horizons with VR, that isn’t changing.
Cheers,
Tim
...which, in the middle sentence highlighted in orange, is basically saying "we hear you, we'll get back to you on this one". A lot of threads do not even get this level of acknowledgement, and I believe that even a non-committal "we hear you - we'll get back to you" would have dampened a lot of the dumpster fires that have been burning in this forum.
I think this is spot on. Imagine delving into the untamed wilds of 'dangerous discussion' as the CM or a FD dev, just seeing oceans of 'X is a joke' or 'OMG Frontier 5 YEARS and Y is still unbalanced!!'. And in the threads, noone seems to agree on anything, so you can't get any coherent feedback from the community anyways.
But from a player perspective, this silence from FD fuels this atmosphere in the first place. It's a negative feedback loop, as you say.
There is a lot of those types of posts, not to mention the "oh ma gawd dey nerfed mi bilyons per hour gameplay loop" threads, but there are a lot of valid threads/concerns/questions getting ignored. And that silence from FDev reprenentation of any form is deafening, and creates an awkward atmosphere, one in which distrust and resentment thrive, which does as
@Defacto said, seed the negative feedback loop.
I've been around here since 2015 - I'm very passionate for the game, and as such I want to find some hope / good will, so I was willing to double check the dev tracker that AgonyAunt (a former moderator) linked to:
I generally disable the Twitter one as it picks up on devs private twitter accounts. It does mean you miss the official twitter stuff, but i can live without those.
Elite: Dangerous Developer Tracker tracks post across multiple social platforms to help you stay up to date with all the latest Elite: Dangerous updates
elitedevtracker.com
Last ED related post was 8 hours ago.
Disabling the twitter filter, and scrolling back through the last couple of days shows the only Elite related posts as being by CMDR's Luna & Appollo of Support, as awesome as the folks in support are, and I really mean that - o7 "support wing", its not our CM's or our a developer, and fixing game crashes, or very kindly commiserating with someone on the loss of their cat, or suggesting filing a
bug tracker* report via reddit posts doesn't address concerns raised in this forum. The closest we have to an elite post is a newsletter/stream schedule announcing that Bruce Garrido will be on the Loose Screws podcast this week.
*bug tracker - we have to vote for bugs and only if they are sufficiently popular will we maybe get them fixed? - Really? But that's another rant.
I can see things from the point of view that this forum is "a tough crowd", and may intimidate some people who are tasked with managing it, but I think it is also reasonable to assume that the mere fact we are all still here indicates our passion for this game, and as such we are waiting to and wanting to be won over.
TLDR - Even if a CM chimed in on threads that had gained sufficient traction, at say 20 pages of a thread, and said we've heard your complaints / concerns / suggestions, and we'll consider it, it would be far better than the total radio silence. Even better would be if they could discuss "community feedback" and get back to us with the outcome of the discussion, even if it wasn't the outcome we hoped for, but "picking up on the conversation three weeks ago about "glump, glop and gloop", we've discussed it internally and it was decided to keep it as is, for [REASON]. Maybe not what you hoped for at least you know..." is a whole lot better than being seemingly ignored.
This would mean they aren't responding to very post like a receptionist and get to study the forum like an anthropologist and see what genuinely is buzzing through the community, but nip any concerns in the bud before the unravel into full riots.
As for the comments that the forum is too hostile, a couple of things to say, there are three CM's - I'm sure they can provide each other moral support, anyone who is abusive to the CM's is out of line, and deserves moderation intervention, and our moderation team are, enthusiastic. Finally, more participation with the community would win over the hearts and minds of the community, making this less of a scary place for a FDev employee to enter - that's the flip side of a negative feedback loop, the loop can be broken and reversed into a positive feedback one where they communicate with us, we are nice to them therefore they communicate more, we are nice again so on and so forth.