ANNOUNCEMENT New Lead Community Manager - Arthur Tolmie

Darth Montu

D
Lord Bigdog said:
Does or do community managers even work? The Elite forums are burning up and you guys never step in and touch base with your player base. Must be easiest job in the world. Sitting in your office/home playing planet zoo instead? Manager of what community? What defines your community? Who is your community? Do you know the answer to these questions? The community is the people in the world that have bought your game in which keeps you the community managers employed. Do you realize this? When frontier came out with fleet carriers online at the height (which was the highest), through Steam you had like around 21,000 players, I don't know what player numbers through Frontier website were or Xbox or PS4, but I'm sure those were high numbers too. You look at Elite Steam online players today it's like 4k to 5k and those numbers are declining each week and probably frontier, Xbox and PS4 numbers are way down. Maybe if you managed your community you would understand better of what is going on in Elite? People complain on the forums because they care, like or can see the full potential of this game. Instead FDev rather stay quiet and push away said players. Why? We players play other games as you do too, and we see how other development companies treat their player base and how updates and patches get delivered. Not just delivered but does it fix said problem and does it cause other issues etc..how stable is the game etc.. players know how things should be. I am one of those players that like this game and see the potential but I am not happy and before any one says how long I've been playing Elite, started 1984 and been playing this version of Elite like 4 something years with over 4,000 hours of playing time. Any Community Managers here? Where are you guys? Hello?
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They are somewhere on Twitter, ignoring the forums, leaving them for the mods to wrangle...
 

Old Duck

Old Duck
Lord Bigdog said:
Does or do community managers even work? The Elite forums are burning up and you guys never step in and touch base with your player base. Must be easiest job in the world. Sitting in your office/home playing planet zoo instead? Manager of what community? What defines your community? Who is your community? Do you know the answer to these questions? The community is the people in the world that have bought your game in which keeps you the community managers employed. Do you realize this? When frontier came out with fleet carriers online at the height (which was the highest), through Steam you had like around 21,000 players, I don't know what player numbers through Frontier website were or Xbox or PS4, but I'm sure those were high numbers too. You look at Elite Steam online players today it's like 4k to 5k and those numbers are declining each week and probably frontier, Xbox and PS4 numbers are way down. Maybe if you managed your community you would understand better of what is going on in Elite? People complain on the forums because they care, like or can see the full potential of this game. Instead FDev rather stay quiet and push away said players. Why? We players play other games as you do too, and we see how other development companies treat their player base and how updates and patches get delivered. Not just delivered but does it fix said problem and does it cause other issues etc..how stable is the game etc.. players know how things should be. I am one of those players that like this game and see the potential but I am not happy and before any one says how long I've been playing Elite, started 1984 and been playing this version of Elite like 4 something years with over 4,000 hours of playing time. Any Community Managers here? Where are you guys? Hello?
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The fact that ED has so many community managers and so little community management does seem oxymoronic to me...

And yet Frontier doesn't have enough writers to maintain CGs and Galnet... I'd say that being David Braben "must be easiest job in the world. Sitting in his office/home playing planet zoo instead" of managing his company... :(
 

Vetinari

V
Could we have an update on how many systems/percentage of galaxy discovered and timeframe to fully explore at our current rate? We used to get these but havent heard for a while and was interesting to some of us.
 

Hydrino

Hydrino
Old Duck said:
The fact that ED has so many community managers and so little community management does seem oxymoronic to me...

And yet Frontier doesn't have enough writers to maintain CGs and Galnet... I'd say that being David Braben "must be easiest job in the world. Sitting in his office/home playing planet zoo instead" of managing his company... :(
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Just a guess, but it seems maybe CM team takes care of GalNet and community goals? If so, we now know some of what they've been doing.

But yeah, CM team seems to interact on forums very little [I know it can be a salty place], and with no game shows this year I'm curious how they spend that freed-up time. With remote work I can see getting answers about EDO could take more time, but surely not weeks (and the office is open again). I'd personally like to see more feedback on the purpose-named Suggestions thread, you know where FD says "put your suggestions", including categorizing and logging them all and maybe locking duplicates. The newsletters don't seem to need much time, considering what Saggitarius Eye has produced in comparison. We don't get interesting game stats very often or other tidbits from CM team (maybe an automated page on the Community site with % galaxy explored and some other like that... maybe put that on in-game dashboard or Codex so people could stop asking on the forums?).

Not sure if you are serious about DB, but I am sure he has many more management responsibilities today than in the past. The company is now public, has multiple 'live service' games all still being developed, unannounced titles, about outgrown their new building, they have publisher-author relationships now, the pandemic I am sure required a lot of key decisions and maybe even spending. But as his original game and passion for years, would def be nice to see him a bit more around ED.
 

Quantis Trap

Quantis Trap
One thing is for sure. Frontier developments with all their hundreds of personnel sure don't seem to be as productive as the much smaller Hello Games team which is behind No Man's Sky (link to discussion in this forum)!
 

Hydrino

Hydrino
CMDR QUANTIS TRAP said:
One thing is for sure. Frontier developments with all their hundreds of personnel sure don't seem to be as productive as the much smaller Hello Games team which is behind No Man's Sky (link to discussion in this forum)!
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I always give this comparison a rating of a low-probability Maybe, with caveats.

You can't fly through asteroids that are popping in on the screen like raindrops in ED, but that's a NMS staple. BGS anyone? FD had multiple years of quarterly releases as well, that basically just stopped for EDO focus.

The approach and team size makes a difference. Also, more people can actually decrease the speed of development. There is more overhead just to keep everyone on the same page. Ideal software team size for maximum productivity is 10 or less. But the skill set and output of teams of 25 vs 100 may be very different due to narrower focus each member of the larger team can have.

Results of EDO release may give another adjustment to the comparison though.
 

AlSki

AlSki
1602179645116.png

:)
 

VR Jay Le Chardon

VR Jay Le Chardon
alski said:
View attachment 190793
:)
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BRILLIANT!!!

That is good on so many levels:
  • Good to see him getting some R&R! I appreciate that they must have been putting in a lot of work behind the scenes to make everything that has came to fruition lately like VR + Galnet + CG's + Major ongoing narrative
  • It's only a few posts above this one that our CM's were AWOL, yet heres our new lead CM engaging with the community through discord
    • Possibly even has you on his pals list there or was it just a shared server? It's hard to say from that screenshot?
  • When he's gaming it has to be a good sign for the players of Elite that the new lead CM is playing our game.
    • (there had been an apparent favouritism towards planet zoo)
 

kris_Ghoststar

kris_Ghoststar
I think it's cool that the any of the team actually play the game. I know a lot who couldn't care less about the players. The fact that they are making that effort means something. Hopefully they will give us PS4 players some love too
 

Rubbernuke

Rubbernuke
@Arthur Tolmie

While the BGS has its own issues with the tick, Powerplay has issues as well:
https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteWinters/comments/j553z1
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteWinters/comments/j553z1/request_for_fairness_in_light_of_bulldozer_bug/


While I get Powerplay is far down the list for any help, there are still many player groups who do engage with Powerplay week in, week out and having this sort of problem kills those communities stone dead and cements discord between players. Months of progress can be lost, leading to more players leaving because all the work they do is for nothing.

The bug has been logged, but at the same time Powerplay never stops, every cycle that passes with this problem makes exploitation ever more damaging (this on top of the continual exploitation that already exists) and some damage can be permanent and irreversible with the current way the feature works.

If you (FD) want Powerplay to have any sort of future then please, please, please sort these things out- otherwise it just leads to recrimination (as you can see from that thread). Powerplay has been eroded by several bugs that ruined powers, please do not make things even worse yet again.

Beyond that, the communities that do play Powerplay want some indication of where this is going too- its infuriating that FD had a plan that would eliminate many of these issues two years ago and were waiting for development time to enact them. Is Odyssey that time?
 

VR Jay Le Chardon

VR Jay Le Chardon
@Arthur Tolmie I can understand @Rubbernuke's concerns, while I no longer powerplay, having previously maintained rank 5 for twenty weeks, I can attest to the amount of work that goes into the acquisition and retention of systems by the playergroups that do participate in powerplay. As such I can understand how utterly galling and frustrating it is when a bug undoes significant amounts of hard work, ergo, this needs fixing, and the sooner the better as it is essentially an exploit that for which the damage it has done increases with time elapsed.
 
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