General / Off-Topic Forum posters angry with developers

Mr_Foxhound · Sep 29, 2017

Dan Diplo said:
As a newcomer to this forum I've been pretty appalled by some of the disrespectful, rude and downright ignorant comments that have been directed at the devs. People have every right to criticise a product they have purchased and helped fund. But it's possible to do this in a civil and constructive fashion. I've seen the devs called "incompetent", "lazy", "money-grabbing" etc. and that is simply rude. Most developers work long, long hours and do so not for the money but for the love of their craft. They work to tight deadlines, tough budgets and a million other factors that most of you don't realise (yes, I work in the industry, though not in game development).

Let me tell you something: David Braben and Ian Bell fitted the entire original Elite into 32Kb of machine code (in other words, the amount of code was HALF the size of the logo on this forum). Braben coded Frontier in 250,000 lines of 68000 assembly language. He helped design the Raspberry Pi. It's fair to say he's a programming genius. Even if he doesn't code much now you can bet any team he fronts is comprised of talent.

So, criticise, make suggestions, say you hate it - but don't denigrate the people who make it based on some YouTube-level understanding of what is involved in game development.

i dunno incompetent describes pretty much all the failures of ED pretty well

incompetent
ɪnˈkɒmpɪt(ə)nt/
adjective

1.
not having or showing the necessary skills to do something successfully.
a forgetful and utterly incompetent assistant

synonyms:

inept, unskilful, unskilled, inexpert, amateurish, unprofessional, lacking ability, bungling, blundering, clumsy, unproficient, inadequate, substandard, inferior, ineffective, deficient, inefficient, ineffectual, no good, not good enough, wanting, lacking, leaving much to be desired; More

[/COLOR]

jasonbarron · Sep 29, 2017

I think the OP is off the mark with a false premise. I'd say that this has been one of the smoothest transitions on the forum following a major expansion to ED I've seen yet. He makes the assumption that 1--the only comments welcome are positivity & 2--that constructive criticism and/or disappointment being expressed is "anger" or toxic. I haven't seen much of either of those latter two sentiments flooding the forum.

Red Anders said:
I think you may have misinterpreted what I mean here. I'm not suggesting that they should actively engage with the idiot contingent. I'm suggesting that they should accept their existence, accept that they are idiots and not use that as a reason to withdraw completely from communication with people other than the idiot contingent, which is what the guy whose twitter diatribe was linked said he did.

He said (paraphrasing) some gamers are idiots so now I don't talk to people other than those in the industry. As I said, it's not especially heartening to know that his personal frustration with idiots seems to be front and centre in his decision making, ahead of any desire to continue engagement with the proportion of gamers (customers) who do not fall within that category.

Probably also worth noting what I actually said was that if he isn't required to deal with idiots and those with no real understanding of the intricacies of his job role by his employer, he is lucky. I didn't say he should have to deal with idiots. I said he is fortunate to have the option not to.

Now if you'll excuse me I need to get back to dealing with the 75% or so of the people I deal with in my job who are idiots.

I understood and agree with your point.

Cmdr Eagleboy · Sep 29, 2017

Mr_Foxhound said:
i dunno incompetent describes pretty much all the failures of ED pretty well

To make such bold claim you will need to back it with some strong evidence. Also some better Internet copy/paste skills.

jasonbarron said:
I think the OP is off the mark with a false premise. I'd say that this has been one of the smoothest transitions on the forum following a major expansion to ED I've seen yet. He makes the assumption that 1--the only comments welcome are positivity & 2--that constructive criticism and/or disappointment being expressed is "anger" or toxic. I haven't seen much of either of those flooding the forum.

I think it was posted in more general way than 2.4 response. I agree that naysayers haven't been able to poison 2.4 party. But they have tried really hard.

who? · Sep 29, 2017

sleutelbos said:
Genre also seems to play a role: Noone seriously tells Rockstar "GTA5 was great, why not do it again in GTA6 but make it like a whole planet with hundreds of cities?". Mostly because people understand that is just plain stupid to ask. But in space games there seems to be absolutely no limit whatsoever as to what people consider reasonable expectations. There are armies of space/sci-fi gamers here, on NMS, SC, whatnot forums, who all seriously expect to be able to land on hundreds to hundreds of millions of planets. Be able to order different beverages in dozens of bars in hundreds of cities on each planet, go scuba diving and find amazing sea creatures in undiscovered underwater caves, tame them and sell them on black market animal auctions for people running their own alien zoo. And it has to happen soon, or one of the other games will surely have done so by then.

Good point, the genre will definitely have a bearing. (Though I don't doubt that if Rockstar were to ask what people wanted for GTA6 it'd start an absolute shipstorm of a debate/argument/fight.)

The GTA games benefit from limited scope. They're built around a city (or city & environs), and set in the current day which determines which buildings/vehicles/activities players can reasonably expect. In a sci-fi setting, 'the sky's the limit'. And with the scale of space-travelling games, people expect the detail that SC has promised across the scale that ED has delivered. Little wonder both games are disappointing in different ways ("Why is SC progress so slow? Why so few locations?" / "Why is ED so shallow/repetitive?")

Miss Anne Thrope · Sep 29, 2017

Re the OP and link.

Gamers aren't toxic, people are.
I worked in the gaming industry, a paid position, for a viral game company. I lasted 3 years before i decided to move in a different direction. It was the best and worst job of my life. I had to deal with armchair devs, pebkac's, and the actual dev team. All of these people were equally toxic to some degree.

Most gamers know nothing of design docs, balancing, meshes, textures and they definatly do not speak many (if any) languages or even understand what a script is or how it functions. They do not know that they do not know (unconsciously incompetent) and can appear to act like children in their behaviors towards devs.
Game devs usually come from a different code based background, often the lead dev will hire young inexperienced staff on the cheap. As a whole coders lean towards the naive and far far left politically as the conferences they frequent offer little diversity within the population as a whole.

The cycle of new devs being full of naive hope that they can dialogue with the community in a mature manner, only to be shot down by some of their customers who have no understanding of the industry, has always been and always will be. Civilized times have passed, as we move further into the post petroleum era peoples behaviors will only get worse.

Some game companies do have workarounds for the issue that the vast majority of humanity is vile. They have in-house testing servers, the devs play with and observe on these, people from the community, who have been invited for one reason or another, usually either paragons of humanity or known exploiters (having the tables turned by being exploited by the devs who are observing them exploiting on the in house server so they can patch that). This is usually kept secret and when a person from the community is picked to join the in-house server they sign a very scary NDA. You tell anyone about the server, lifetime ban and court action in $$$.

Marklar_ · Sep 29, 2017

Good read.

I'm not a game developer, but I'm a programmer by trade and I understand what the challenges are and how ridiculous requests from naive people can be about how X should be easy and Y wouldn't have happened if the programmers weren't so stupid. I can't imagine having to try to explain things to the toxic know-it-alls who infest game boards and social media. He's right, there is a segment of the gaming community that is so hostile, unreasonable, and clueless that no developer would want to give them ammunition by explaining what's really going on. And that's unfortunate, because it leaves the rest of us in the dark.

I actually don't see as much of that on this forum, probably due to the fact that the hardcore fans of this game tend to be older and the mods are generally on top of things. But if you look at the subreddits on this game, it's a cesspool.

two quiet suns · Sep 29, 2017

Cmdr Eagleboy said:
I think it was posted in more general way than 2.4 response. I agree that naysayers haven't been able to poison 2.4 party. But they have tried really hard.

Yes this has nothing to do with now, more to do with the general overarching problems of game development, I dare say this shouldnt even be in this forum but it seemed so pertinent and as generating some interesting discussion and points.

Thanks everyone, all your input is welcome on either side of the fence. Discourse is a big bit of being human and the need to say your piece also.

kilon · Sep 29, 2017

The truth is that a large "toxic community" is actually justified

You can examine it in superficial way like "troll" and "keyboard warriors" but you will be lying only to yourself if you consider them the majority of the toxic community. They are not. Far from it.

I read the term " toxic community" for the first time when I was playing HON ( Hereoes of Newerth ). Think of it like LOL but 10 times harder. Talking about a Moba , 5vs5 rpg themed pure pvp.

No boost out of combat, no interdictions , no safe ways to play. You made a one second mistake you are dead and the other team gains a big advantage in gold income.

The source of toxicity was isolated into the ranking system. It sucked, big time. Every game was a throw of dice. Your teammates and enemies could have been anything between terrible to far better than you , in a game that had a ranking system to protect you against such scenarios. The cause of the problem was that ranking was raised by wins and not true skill. The result was high rank players that sucked big time because they played with friends that were really good and essentially they were leeching wins and higher ranks that they did not deserve personally. Also a match could take from 20 minutes to 1 hour and a half, the norm being one hour . 1 hour of a game that could ruin your day instead of entertain you. Leaving was not an option unless you wanted to be marked as a leaver by the game and make you unable to join future games for considerable amount of time.

So at the time I thought this was purely a HON problem, until I started playing SMITE , LOL , HOTS (heroes of the storm) and Dota 2. Same exact problem. Smaller toxic communities because those games were more forgiving when it comes to mistakes.

My conclusion has been, that the ranking system is badly designed to attract players that love to get kills and win matches, mostly experienced ones and maybe because finding people of similar skill can result to much longer queues which is something most players don't desire.

So it's no surprise that ELITE has practically no toxic community mostly because it hardly has any PVP.

I am saying all that being cool headed and also a developer.

I had some very reasonable discussions with "toxic" players, most of them were just reasonably annoyed players with much less patience than me. Even when toxicity was targeted at me. Even when I was the source of toxicity. Sure you get the occasional troll or the player that has serious emotional issues but to my experience they do not make more than 10% of the toxic community.

RexKraemer · Sep 29, 2017

two quiet suns said:
Thanks everyone, all your input is welcome on either side of the fence. Discourse is a big bit of being human and the need to say your piece also.

Yes, thanks to everyone, a good discussion!

I have learned that we will not change the community (or people or environment or the devs or who-/whatever). There will always be toxic components and we are lost if we focus on the toxic parts. If we are in need of some change we have to change ourself, our perception of things. Like Crimson Kaim has written above. Still it is easier said than done. Maybe its never done and always a path to go up.

verminstar · Sep 29, 2017

This has come about because frontier threw a silent tantrum and of course things got so much worse...only a complete fool would believe there to be a different outcome. In that respect, it's not the players at fault at all...it's frontiers apparent inability to manage it and their response afterwards.

Im not even salty anymore, but I am indifferent to the problems the game is having because I see those problems as being self inflicted by frontier themselves. Until they change my mind with a stunning speech in October, then I don't personally see a long term future here fer me...that's not being salty, that's expressing a personal opinion.

If it had been a dev asking fer calm in the op, my reply would be exactly the same. They are the architects because if there had been effective communication, this almost certainly wouldn't be happening in the first place ^

Cmdr Eagleboy · Sep 29, 2017

kilon said:
The truth is that a large "toxic community" is actually justified

Point is it's not. They basically automatically invalidate any shred of constructive criticism just because being 'angry'.

Nothing justifies being a jerk.

kilon · Sep 29, 2017

Cmdr Eagleboy said:
Point is it's not. They basically automatically invalidate any shred of constructive criticism just because being 'angry'.

Nothing justifies being a jerk.

Problem is that you live in a world that is not as black and white as you would want
which means the definition of a "jerk" can be extremely dependant on personal values, ethics and personality standards.

Especially in this age obsessed with political correctness and political incorrectness too.

So no, my point is not invalidated by an extremely long shot. I am not saying I could not be wrong.

but it will take a ton more than a single word that can mean anything to convince me.

Mr_Foxhound · Sep 29, 2017

Cmdr Eagleboy said:
To make such bold claim you will need to back it with some strong evidence. Also some better Internet copy/paste skills.

I think it was posted in more general way than 2.4 response. I agree that naysayers haven't been able to poison 2.4 party. But they have tried really hard.

Marklar_ · Sep 29, 2017

Cmdr Eagleboy said:
Nothing justifies being a jerk.

Well, unless you're this guy:

Cmdr Eagleboy · Sep 29, 2017

kilon said:
Problem is that you live in a world that is not as black and white as you would want
which means the definition of a "jerk" can be extremely dependant on personal values, ethics and personality standards.

Especially in this age obsessed with political correctness and political incorrectness too.

So no, my point is not invalidated by an extremely long shot. I am not saying I could not be wrong.

but it will take a ton more than a single word that can mean anything to convince me.

No one is obsessed with PC. PC is there because people not like other people being jerks to them. Period.

You can twist it as you want - people who can't express them at least without threads won't get listened to.

There are other ways to collect feedback.

Mr_Foxhound said:
well lets take examples from 2.4

That's not strong evidence, that's bugs. Every game have them. ED is well made game, considering it's complexity.

Agony_Aunt · Sep 29, 2017

Mr_Foxhound said:
i dunno incompetent describes pretty much all the failures of ED pretty well

incompetent
ɪnˈkɒmpɪt(ə)nt/
adjective

1.
not having or showing the necessary skills to do something successfully.
a forgetful and utterly incompetent assistant

synonyms: inept, unskilful, unskilled, inexpert, amateurish, unprofessional, lacking ability, bungling, blundering, clumsy, unproficient, inadequate, substandard, inferior, ineffective, deficient, inefficient, ineffectual, no good, not good enough, wanting, lacking, leaving much to be desired; More

[/COLOR]

And i still don't get people who will swear blind that FD are incompetent but still play the game. Or if not playing the game, hanging around the forums of a dev they think are incompetent. Its just mind boggling.

Move on, there is more to life than hanging around on forums telling devs they are crap. Girls (or boys), sunshine, flowers, or games you actually like.

Jenner · Sep 29, 2017

Agony_Aunt said:
And i still don't get people who will swear blind that FD are incompetent but still play the game. Or if not playing the game, hanging around the forums of a dev they think are incompetent. Its just mind boggling.

Move on, there is more to life than hanging around on forums telling devs they are crap. Girls (or boys), sunshine, flowers, or games you actually like.

^
He's right you know.

Marklar_ · Sep 29, 2017

Cmdr Eagleboy said:
No one is obsessed with PC. PC is there because people not like other people being jerks to them. Period.

These days people tend to bring up PC as a way of saying that other people are too sensitive, and therefore they should be able to be as nasty and offensive as they want to. These same people also tend to complain that other people are saying mean things about them. SMH.

Starkiller_ · Sep 29, 2017

Cmdr Eagleboy said:
No one is obsessed with PC. PC is there because people not like other people being jerks to them. Period.

You can twist it as you want - people who can't express them at least without threads won't get listened to.

There are other ways to collect feedback.

That's not strong evidence, that's bugs. Every game have them. ED is well made game, considering it's complexity.

Ok let's list;

1.3 Powerplay - Static, not thought through, bad mechanics.
1.4 CQC - Cheaters, Disconnected from main game, low rewards, no agency
2.0 Horizons - Little to do, landing on planets is bland, little to no content.
2.1 Engineers - Not thought through, stupid RNG crafting system full of issues, boring content for collecting materials.
2.2 SLF - Gimmick
2.3 - Multicrew, dead on arrival
2.4 Little to no non Thargoid related content added.

Ian Skippy · Sep 29, 2017

Agony_Aunt said:
And i still don't get people who will swear blind that FD are incompetent but still play the game. Or if not playing the game, hanging around the forums of a dev they think are incompetent. Its just mind boggling.

Move on, there is more to life than hanging around on forums telling devs they are crap. Girls (or boys), sunshine, flowers, or games you actually like.

But what about the potential? We're just hanging around because of the potential!

Starkiller_ said:
Ok let's list;

1.3 Powerplay - Static, not thought through, bad mechanics.
1.4 CQC - Cheaters, Disconnected from main game, low rewards, no agency
2.0 Horizons - Little to do, landing on planets is bland, little to no content.
2.1 Engineers - Not thought through, stupid RNG crafting system full of issues, boring content for collecting materials.
2.2 SLF - Gimmick
2.3 - Multicrew, dead on arrival
2.4 Little to no non Thargoid related content added.

I can do that too: make a list of words and than put bad words behind it! Look, I will describe your kitchen:

1) Sink -terrible
2) Plates -no thought behind it
3) Table -little point to it
4) Forks -bad, very stupid
5) Spoons -little to no spoon content

General / Off-Topic Forum posters angry with developers

I wish I was English like my hero Tj.