Why has the Community Manager virtually abandoned the forums?

Status
Thread Closed: Not open for further replies.
Op, we can't know what the community manager has to do with his time day in day out, he probably has a vast range of responsibilities and is either preparing stuff for later reveals to the community or doing other work that is a necessary part of his job that we simply do not know about. Given all of the console releases since season 2 hit, he's probably been busy preparing stuff for those respective communities and ensuring that they feel welcomed and fostered into the Elite community family.
 

Zac Antonaci

Head of Communications
Frontier
When FDev originally introduced the role of a Community Manager we got lots of interaction on the forums. I believe the idea was to allow the developers to get on with developing the game, rather than wasting time on the forums answering questions:


However these days he seems to spend most of his time (preparing for?) making YouTube streams (which I personally have no interest in), rather than posting on the forums answering serious questions about the game :-( . e.g. In the last month he made 35 posts, but 14+ of them were to do with his YouTube videos, so that's less than 5 posts per week about non-video stuff.

So now it is almost impossible to get an answer out of FDev about important issues (e.g. 1, 2).

Am I the only one who wishes he'd spend a bit less time doing (IMHO boring) YouTube streams, and instead answer some serious questions on the forums?

Is there any chance FDev could ask him to allocate a bit more time to the forums? It seems like his role has changed from "Community Manager" to "YouTube PR Manager".

edit:
P.S. Contrary to some speculation, this post is not an attack on Ed, who I have no complaints about (he seems a great guy). It's about how FDev assigns his time, which currently seems 99% YouTube, 1% forums (at best). Also this post is NOT about the beige planet issue, that is just a clear example of the lack of communication from FDev over the past year.

Hey Chris,

First of all, I would like to just like to reiterate that singling out an individual within Frontier directly and questioning their work isn't something we support. It doesn't matter if that person is in the design team, art team or the community team. Every member of Frontier are dedicated to making great games that the players will enjoy and sharing a passion for those games with the community. I think we need to respect that first and foremost and targeting individuals leads to some rather unpleasant topics and posts.

However, in light of the question you've asked I thought I would clarify a few things on who the community team are and how they work. When Ed joined the company a long time ago he was indeed the community and social media manager. Over time that team has grown considerably, as has our awesome community. Today the team consists of Ed (who actually leads the team), Paige, Bo, Dale and Brett and they work across all games that Frontier release. It's important to remember that the community for Elite Dangerous doesn't just reside in the forums. There are the forums, Reddit, other social platforms, Xbox Hub, PlayStation 4, content creators, groups, events (like Lavecon or Elite Meets) and much much MUCH more.

Streaming is an important part of supporting the community. Whether that be somewhere for people who want to take part to join in some CQC action with friends, post launch Q&A livestreams or running through an upcoming update with the developers. These are all very important activities. It doesn't mean that all the other platforms aren't important also though. In terms of the forums there are thousands of Frontier posts each month. From the QA forums (where perhaps the first question you asked might be best answered), answering questions or posting up headline information.

It's true that not every post can be answered but I can promise you that they are read and that information is compiled in a way that then feeds into the development teams working on the game.

I can only tell you that on a personal note the entire community team are super passionate about Frontier and the community, they work tirelessly to support as many Commanders as they can and create fun engaging content.

In answer to your two examples…

1. The OP here seems to suggest that Brett has already responded initially. In terms of 2.4, It would be best to check in with the QA forum really but I don’t believe there’s an update at the moment.

2. Adding two SRVs for Multicrew is certainly something that has been requested by the community previously and it's been passed on to the dev teams. While I wouldn't imagine its implementation to come in the immediate future, it's certainly a nice idea and something that the dev team are aware of for consideration among other great community suggestions and requests.

Hope that helps.

Zac
 
Harsh on Ed..... he tells us what he is allowed to. I imagined it would be even worse if all he did was come on here and say no comment. I find him entertaining on the you tube streams but i do agree that the rate of streams seems to have dropped, before christmas it felt like he was on every two weeks with either Sandro or Adam.

Theres deffo something in this thread 'The beige planets' issue mentioned is a good example, we got a "Its being worked on" but that was a long time ago, why not say "heres and update, this is what the problem is, this is what were doing about it" etc even just the odd "hi guys, we havent forgot about this but theres nothing to update you with just yet" it would be better then silience, ive said before i'd rather a "no & this why" then silence.

'Community' is a bigger environment then just the people on the forum, i do think there needs to be more info given out and more updates one way or another (good or bad) and less silence but that silience comes from Frontier & to single out Ed for me is too much

keep up the good work Ed
 
Hey Chris,

First of all, I would like to just like to reiterate that singling out an individual within Frontier directly and questioning their work isn't something we support. It doesn't matter if that person is in the design team, art team or the community team. Every member of Frontier are dedicated to making great games that the players will enjoy and sharing a passion for those games with the community. I think we need to respect that first and foremost and targeting individuals leads to some rather unpleasant topics and posts.

However, in light of the question you've asked I thought I would clarify a few things on who the community team are and how they work. When Ed joined the company a long time ago he was indeed the community and social media manager. Over time that team has grown considerably, as has our awesome community. Today the team consists of Ed (who actually leads the team), Paige, Bo, Dale and Brett and they work across all games that Frontier release. It's important to remember that the community for Elite Dangerous doesn't just reside in the forums. There are the forums, Reddit, other social platforms, Xbox Hub, PlayStation 4, content creators, groups, events (like Lavecon or Elite Meets) and much much MUCH more.

Streaming is an important part of supporting the community. Whether that be somewhere for people who want to take part to join in some CQC action with friends, post launch Q&A livestreams or running through an upcoming update with the developers. These are all very important activities. It doesn't mean that all the other platforms aren't important also though. In terms of the forums there are thousands of Frontier posts each month. From the QA forums (where perhaps the first question you asked might be best answered), answering questions or posting up headline information.

It's true that not every post can be answered but I can promise you that they are read and that information is compiled in a way that then feeds into the development teams working on the game.

I can only tell you that on a personal note the entire community team are super passionate about Frontier and the community, they work tirelessly to support as many Commanders as they can and create fun engaging content.

In answer to your two examples…

1. The OP here seems to suggest that Brett has already responded initially. In terms of 2.4, It would be best to check in with the QA forum really but I don’t believe there’s an update at the moment.

2. Adding two SRVs for Multicrew is certainly something that has been requested by the community previously and it's been passed on to the dev teams. While I wouldn't imagine its implementation to come in the immediate future, it's certainly a nice idea and something that the dev team are aware of for consideration among other great community suggestions and requests.

Hope that helps.

Zac

Thanks :)
One place FD falls short regularly, is server updates to fix ,usually, 1 item. You never ever give us that info. Last time I found out on Reddit,there after it got posted here in various threads. How about a thread in the update/patch forum?
All the best.
 
Hey Chris,

First of all, I would like to just like to reiterate that singling out an individual within Frontier directly and questioning their work isn't something we support. It doesn't matter if that person is in the design team, art team or the community team. Every member of Frontier are dedicated to making great games that the players will enjoy and sharing a passion for those games with the community. I think we need to respect that first and foremost and targeting individuals leads to some rather unpleasant topics and posts.

However, in light of the question you've asked I thought I would clarify a few things on who the community team are and how they work. When Ed joined the company a long time ago he was indeed the community and social media manager. Over time that team has grown considerably, as has our awesome community. Today the team consists of Ed (who actually leads the team), Paige, Bo, Dale and Brett and they work across all games that Frontier release. It's important to remember that the community for Elite Dangerous doesn't just reside in the forums. There are the forums, Reddit, other social platforms, Xbox Hub, PlayStation 4, content creators, groups, events (like Lavecon or Elite Meets) and much much MUCH more.

Streaming is an important part of supporting the community. Whether that be somewhere for people who want to take part to join in some CQC action with friends, post launch Q&A livestreams or running through an upcoming update with the developers. These are all very important activities. It doesn't mean that all the other platforms aren't important also though. In terms of the forums there are thousands of Frontier posts each month. From the QA forums (where perhaps the first question you asked might be best answered), answering questions or posting up headline information.

It's true that not every post can be answered but I can promise you that they are read and that information is compiled in a way that then feeds into the development teams working on the game.

I can only tell you that on a personal note the entire community team are super passionate about Frontier and the community, they work tirelessly to support as many Commanders as they can and create fun engaging content.

In answer to your two examples…

1. The OP here seems to suggest that Brett has already responded initially. In terms of 2.4, It would be best to check in with the QA forum really but I don’t believe there’s an update at the moment.

2. Adding two SRVs for Multicrew is certainly something that has been requested by the community previously and it's been passed on to the dev teams. While I wouldn't imagine its implementation to come in the immediate future, it's certainly a nice idea and something that the dev team are aware of for consideration among other great community suggestions and requests.

Hope that helps.

Zac

What he said...

In all seriousness, I'm actually extremely busy at work. As Zac says, It's not just prepping and hosting streams (I wish that was it). I'm genuinely very passionate about this community, the company and the games we make.

PS - don't forget to tune in to Thursday's stream... we're playing some CQC on PS4 :p
 
Last edited:
Zac, thank you for posting. However:

In answer to your two examples…

1. The OP here seems to suggest that Brett has already responded initially. In terms of 2.4, It would be best to check in with the QA forum really but I don’t believe there’s an update at the moment.

To date Brett has never talked about the beige/terrain issue, not to the best of my knowledge and this is a topic I have very passionately followed since 2.2.

Michael Brookes is the dev who initially talked to the community about it, followed by Anthony Ross, over five months ago. These are the pertinent Frontier posts:

My apologies for not responding sooner, this issue has been on my list to chase up for a while. The reason for the difference being observed on the rocky worlds is the change to the new material system - in theory this is more accurate as it uses the chemical properties to determine the colour (obviously I'm simplifying a bit here!), however the problem is that those colours were based on Earth standard colouration for those materials, and most of those are beige/brown rather than the colours you might observe in the myriad of other possible conditions. We're currently working on a more flexible material system, and this will necessitate a fresh balance pass on these. That's not going to be in 2.3 though.

Michael

I suspect it was part of the same change. We've had a few changes so far that will change the planets topography - usually in small amounts, but it will vary.

Michael

There were some changes done which will have affected the geology in some certain circumstances. These were only done as otherwise it was producing terrain that would crash in some cases or have other bad bugs like being able to fly through the terrain. It would result in players being kicked to the main menu, so the issues had to be addressed.
Rocky ice planets were a prime example of some particular combinations of geological data causing rifts too sharp and severe for sensible physics data to be produced. Sometimes the rift would be so sharp, unfortunate sawtoothing artefacts would be produced.
There were cases where overlapping large craters were not being handled quite right, causing drops sheer enough to look wrong and also cause bad physics data again. Sometimes the crater would get filled with very incorrect roughness - fixing this was a scientific accuracy concern.


The thread in example one of the OP's post is a request by the community for an update on the beige/terrain situation. Please?

Thanks Zac.
 
Michael Brookes is the dev who initially talked to the community about it, followed by Anthony Ross, over five months ago. These are the pertinent Frontier posts:


[...]

The thread in example one of the OP's post is a request by the community for an update on the beige/terrain situation. Please?

Thanks Zac.

Clearly the solution is to BRING BACK THE BEARD! [yesnod]
 
What he said...

In all seriousness, I'm actually extremely busy at work. As Zay says, It's not just prepping and hosting streams (I wish that was it). I'm genuinely very passionate about this community, the company and the games we make.

PS - don't forget to tune in to Thursday's stream... we're playing some CQC on PS4 :p

We have been looking at the new offices for the Community Managers today, have you seen them?

It would seem they were still carrying paperwork around and delivering leaflets way back in 2017, at least we got spaceships now instead of satchels :)
 
We have been looking at the new offices for the Community Managers today, have you seen them?

It would seem they were still carrying paperwork around and delivering leaflets way back in 2017, at least we got spaceships now instead of satchels :)

You see that top floor? Yeah... that's for me.
 

verminstar

Banned
Zac, thank you for posting. However:



To date Brett has never talked about the beige/terrain issue, not to the best of my knowledge and this is a topic I have very passionately followed since 2.2.

Michael Brookes is the dev who initially talked to the community about it, followed by Anthony Ross, over five months ago. These are the pertinent Frontier posts:








The thread in example one of the OP's post is a request by the community for an update on the beige/terrain situation. Please?

Thanks Zac.

This right here ^

Fair play to you guys fer answering but the questions being asked elsewhere on the forums have gone unanswered fer the better part of a year. A little word now and then would mean threads like this don't exist at all...but they do exist and fer a very good reason which still hasn't been answered.

Bu all means, the fact ye replied at all is very much appreciated and I'm genuinely glad to see that...but...it's still not actually telling us anything new or answering any of the questions that have multiple mega thread histories.

One hopes that ye can at least understand the frustration here?
 
Status
Thread Closed: Not open for further replies.
Back
Top Bottom