the updates for you all on Odyssey will come formally separate.
Why?
Community management functions should not be separate teams, or act like separate teams. Being unique in this way is not good.
You are the voice, the PR board, the interface between the development pipe line internal customers/process and the external customer, the community, as well as their most potent tool, the influencer. And I bring up influencers specifically because they all showed off that terrarium box and it
infuriated me. (That gameplay isn't even worth doing because its just credits and codex I believe. plz fix.) You had time and budget to arrange that but you cannot server hack fix the engineer progression or say something about why it can't be fixed quickly or what the workarounds are?
There should not be two channels of communication for any particular game. In this case it only serves to focus frustration on one team, and sabotages anything the other team is doing because community, by and large, is going to will see "Fdev" as a singular entity and be focused on new things and issues after major releases. Its your job as CMs to figure out what those issues are and digest them for the decision makers internally. The issue tracker does not do your job for you.
I'm trying to stay respectful here but I just don't have will to say it differently, running the same ole newsletters and live streams is a waste of your time when there are progression stoppers and broken mechanics which ignorant people fall into every day. It is simply a waste of your hours when there are far more important statements to be making and information to collate. Even if those statements are as non committal as "we hear you about this invite not working and its number ? on our list to dev." Saying nothing gives us free rein to assume the worse. Saying "ok we get it, the Gal map needs help" or "data shows Odyssey engineering costs and progression is too fast/slow" instills confidence that someone cares. Doesn't have to amount to anything in the near term.
Do you know why we keep quoting old Braben interviews? "Valuing player time" comes to mind. Its because there are so few authoritative statements that are newer! It doesn't look like you are even featuring Odyssey gameplay in your streams scheduled above? Why not?! Don't make me guess. There are progression stoppers in the game and you are playing CQC and not FPS CZs. What conclusions am I suppose to draw from that?!
Even in your segregation from Odyssey news, you end up communicating a lot about it and its discouraging. I suggest a change of strategy. Talk, talk a lot, sympathize, be available, build a rapport, be honest, earn trust, persuade, and you'll be surprised just how understanding the silent majority can be. Or don't and then I suggest you say nothing and do nothing because hosting streams that I never had an interest to watch is a great use of resources during a crisis. /s
I wanted to make an entire slide show and write up about how the UX flow on Gal map works and whats wrong with it with a lot of diagrams on how to do a better with cutouts of the existing one. But
I DO NOT TRUST FDEV to take advantage of such an intensive volunteer effort. Heck, I still don't know if it will be fixed ever! I trust the CM reading this to appreciate such a presentation should it be of sufficient quality, but I have no reason to believe it will go beyond that, and that's on you CM. I'm sorry. I might still do it just to see how it comes out but, eh its not my day job.
Sunlight is a the best disinfectant, unless your bosses fear it. In that case, message received as usual.
may have something tagged onto a PC update lol
