... stay silent and pretend like everythin's fine despite your servers are burning, a good chunk of the content of Ch4 is delayed and your LEP customers are still waiting for exclusive content?
Like, the "we don't talk" policy for whatever reason you also don't state in detail is not going to help the already sceptical community. I know that alot of my playmates and me included are already expecting something is going to go down the hill. We don't know what it is but we certainly know that something is going to happen that isn't really contributing to our entertainment. We also know that we won't get any relevant data anymore on issues. A clean and stable launch of a patch? These days are long over, apparently.
The reputation of FD is decreasing slowly. Not in a doomsday kind of sensr but the overall reactions seem to have shifted slightly but clearly towards the negative feedback section.
Ofcourse, there are positive sides as well and many of them worth mentioning, however, I repeat myself: the ratio between positive and negative feedback has shifted throughout the years.
It takes works just to *maintain* the same level of enjoyment and even more to increase it.
Gone are the days of dev updates, sneak peeks, official statements and quick balancing patches and bug fixes in less than 24 hours.
Despite being promised so much the ongoing strategy in case of a promise is broken to just *silence* and smile the issue away is not going to work. Ofcourse you are saving the direct negativity aimed towards your dev team and it is true that customers mostly react to negative properties of a product and rarely compliment positives unless they are really outstanding like the sound design of Elite (seriously, the sound design is an example of how it should be done in games and is the reference for my personal projects).
But outstanding are your silence and huge issues as well.
What could possibly happen when the servers go up again after 9 hour downtime with a patch upgrade that got anmounced on all kinds of social media for months. What could possibly happen...?
OFCOURSE all players are trying to connect at the same time and the results are clear. Overwhelmed by the heavy load, the servers either crashed or refused to accept any incoming connections.
There are countless solutions to this but I guess a simple login queue would do or atleast a message that too many players are online right now.
This doesn't solve the problem that players can't connect but atleast it would be an official (indirect) statement rather than a "we are working on it" forum post that says absolutely nothing.
But no, even that is missing. We know that there are issues, thanks captain launcher and twitter, you've always been helpful.
The reasoning behind the silence according to FD is that throughout the years they had "negative" experience when posting official statements. But again this is obvious. Especially when your official statement is claiming that you break promises or delay an update.
Asking for our understanding won't help either. Even airports claim why a flight is delayed most of the time (atleast the airports I usually depart from).
There is nothing to understand in the first place. "We are working on it" what could there be to potentionally understand here? We don't even know what the official issue is that causes all the trouble and mess so how can you expect us to understand when you are not saying anything?
And after all that silence you won't achieve what you are aiming for. Quite the contrary, the silence is another reason to make a forum thread about it.
If it really is your fear of negative featback then I suggest taking courses for life management and communication. Some just don't put messages in nice boxes with a cute sticker on it but instead deliver the critique directly without any room for interpretation. And while studies show that it's more effective to establish a 1:1 - 2:1 positive:negative feedback communication, I personally find this nonesense and require a basic minimum of resilience when it comes to communcation and feedback. Even if I'd personally follow the study's advice doesn't mean others will so there is no way to avoid it.
So open your communication channels, despite it being long overdue it's better to (re)start late than never.
It work during your kickstarter and release as well and we can better understand your decisions of why you changed your plans if you are actually giving us details to understand. The more the better. Background information eliminates possible interpretation and as long as there is no counter fact for any assumption people will believe assumptions and other theories which you have to deal with.
Like, the "we don't talk" policy for whatever reason you also don't state in detail is not going to help the already sceptical community. I know that alot of my playmates and me included are already expecting something is going to go down the hill. We don't know what it is but we certainly know that something is going to happen that isn't really contributing to our entertainment. We also know that we won't get any relevant data anymore on issues. A clean and stable launch of a patch? These days are long over, apparently.
The reputation of FD is decreasing slowly. Not in a doomsday kind of sensr but the overall reactions seem to have shifted slightly but clearly towards the negative feedback section.
Ofcourse, there are positive sides as well and many of them worth mentioning, however, I repeat myself: the ratio between positive and negative feedback has shifted throughout the years.
It takes works just to *maintain* the same level of enjoyment and even more to increase it.
Gone are the days of dev updates, sneak peeks, official statements and quick balancing patches and bug fixes in less than 24 hours.
Despite being promised so much the ongoing strategy in case of a promise is broken to just *silence* and smile the issue away is not going to work. Ofcourse you are saving the direct negativity aimed towards your dev team and it is true that customers mostly react to negative properties of a product and rarely compliment positives unless they are really outstanding like the sound design of Elite (seriously, the sound design is an example of how it should be done in games and is the reference for my personal projects).
But outstanding are your silence and huge issues as well.
What could possibly happen when the servers go up again after 9 hour downtime with a patch upgrade that got anmounced on all kinds of social media for months. What could possibly happen...?
OFCOURSE all players are trying to connect at the same time and the results are clear. Overwhelmed by the heavy load, the servers either crashed or refused to accept any incoming connections.
There are countless solutions to this but I guess a simple login queue would do or atleast a message that too many players are online right now.
This doesn't solve the problem that players can't connect but atleast it would be an official (indirect) statement rather than a "we are working on it" forum post that says absolutely nothing.
But no, even that is missing. We know that there are issues, thanks captain launcher and twitter, you've always been helpful.
The reasoning behind the silence according to FD is that throughout the years they had "negative" experience when posting official statements. But again this is obvious. Especially when your official statement is claiming that you break promises or delay an update.
Asking for our understanding won't help either. Even airports claim why a flight is delayed most of the time (atleast the airports I usually depart from).
There is nothing to understand in the first place. "We are working on it" what could there be to potentionally understand here? We don't even know what the official issue is that causes all the trouble and mess so how can you expect us to understand when you are not saying anything?
And after all that silence you won't achieve what you are aiming for. Quite the contrary, the silence is another reason to make a forum thread about it.
If it really is your fear of negative featback then I suggest taking courses for life management and communication. Some just don't put messages in nice boxes with a cute sticker on it but instead deliver the critique directly without any room for interpretation. And while studies show that it's more effective to establish a 1:1 - 2:1 positive:negative feedback communication, I personally find this nonesense and require a basic minimum of resilience when it comes to communcation and feedback. Even if I'd personally follow the study's advice doesn't mean others will so there is no way to avoid it.
So open your communication channels, despite it being long overdue it's better to (re)start late than never.
It work during your kickstarter and release as well and we can better understand your decisions of why you changed your plans if you are actually giving us details to understand. The more the better. Background information eliminates possible interpretation and as long as there is no counter fact for any assumption people will believe assumptions and other theories which you have to deal with.
