Dear D3, please hire a PR/Logistics professional.

Pylgrim

After the latest news-delivering snafu in a long string (the free alliance slots for new alliances) it has become painfully obvious that you guys need a person in charge of coordinating PR and the logistics of events and player-base interaction. In your news-posts, thread posts and blogs you always come out extremely savvy on all the things game-design and market-handling matters, which makes it obvious that you are are a small studio comprised of developers that have some business insight. However, all this knowledge and experience becomes moot when the delivery is so atrocious that causes a huge backlash of bad feelings and righteous anger among your userbase time after time.

I am pretty sure that most of the controversial measures and "features" introduced in the past have a solid foundation and will prove worthy for the long life of the game. However you never seem to take into consideration the human element, the ways in which people who LOVE your product and/or features of it will react when you mess with it. This includes little things like thinking that people who purchased alliance slots in the past few weeks will feel utterly betrayed. Little things like including in that news delivery measures to minimise those feelings of betrayal, instead of a mere apathetic and patronising "if you feel that you should get a refund, YOU should go through the trouble of whining to us and then we'll see if we deign considering compensation." Little things like not letting big calendar events pass with but the most token reference when EVERY other game out there is doing something big, attracting new players and making happy the ones they already have. Many, many more little things like these you don't do, that may not be enough by themselves to cause people to quit, but that slowly build up this pervasive opinion that you are a careless, greedy corporation instead of the more accurate realisation that you are just extremely clumsy when it comes to communicating these things.

These are the kind of things we were expecting to see when we asked for a community manager. But although David "Hi-Fi" has been doing his best, I am sure, his role seems to be nothing more relevant than being an obsequious-speaking sock-puppet for D3. I intend no offence to him with this. But the way they have shaped his role is ineffectual and irrelevant. What we need is someone allowed to keep his or her finger on the pulse of the community and then speak to the Devs on its behalf, not the other way around. Someone with the people skills to realise when an intended feature (or removal of a feature) is going to cause grief to the player-base and who is capable of negotiating with the Devs on how to alleviate the impact and deliver the news in ways that pre-emptively address people's concerns. Someone that can remain aware of the users expectations (e.g. seasonal events) and help the developers come up with ways to address those expectations.

I don't know how cash-strapped D3 may be to hire a capable PR professional to fill in this role, but I assure you that it's going to be a completely worthy investment towards user retention.

Lystrata

+ so much to this post. Valid points.

Particularly:

Pylgrim wrote:

However you never seem to take into consideration the human element, the ways in which people who LOVE your product and/or features of it will react when you mess with it. This includes little things like thinking that people who purchased alliance slots in the past few weeks will feel utterly betrayed. Little things like including in that news delivery measures to minimise those feelings of betrayal, instead of a mere apathetic and patronising "if you feel that you should get a refund, YOU should go through the trouble of whining to us and then we'll see if we deign considering compensation."

The fact that they made an announcement about a change, then over an hour later, and after multiple complaints, updated with 'by the way, anyone who this affects from the last week can get in touch - anyone else, we've decided you already reaped the benefits', pretty much demonstrates a lack of player, in-game operations and PR awareness.

I think part of the problem here, though, is they got someone entirely new to the game to be their so-called 'CM'. I didn't understand then, and I don't understand now, how you can possibly open dialogue between devs and the player base, through a channel that doesn't actually know or understand the game. What the player base really needs is someone who can foresee how changes are going to affect people at each stage of the game - beginner, transitioner, vet. Or, at the very least, someone who can keep these different stages in mind.

Having said that, I don't think this is entirely David's 'fault', either, or know how much it would change even with an experienced player in a CM role - given that atm all it seems the CM is expected to do is post notes about blog updates, interviews and facebook statuses. I really can't work out what else the role entails. Which, as Pylgrim said, is nothing personal about David. If that's the role, that's the role, but... it's a pointless one, and not what a forum - or a player base - needs.

Flare808

I was also confused at them saying that people had to send tickets to CS to get refunds if they bought slots in the last week. Either they have the capability to timestamp when people bought slots and should automatically just send refunds or they have to take the person on their word.

I haven't read the entire thread on the alliance moving to 20 members, and I'm sure someone has already mentioned it, but why not have a sliding scale of the level of refund? To only refund those in the last week is still unfair. Those who expanded only 2 weeks ago could not have made their HP back in that time frame. Possibly have 1 week be the 100% refund, XX weeks at 75%, XX weeks at 50%, and so forth.

I also agree that there needs to be more holiday tie ins. It would boost player engagement and hook more people. The same old grind doesn't retain as many players. 2 other games I play are Madden Mobile and Star Wars Commander. Both have timed Halloween events that made me want to play more before the event ended. A simple "Trick or Treat" Heroic token would have been nice to send to everyone. Even a Halloween skin or title screen for MPQ would have been simple enough to design and implement.

Unknown

Wow, I'm speechless by the OP's post.

I was about to post another "Seriously, IceIX ? chapter 2" but you made it much better. Thanks for that !

yogi_

I think there are some very relevant points here and I think David is doing a good job, but we're still getting a "don't shoot the messenger" vibe and hardly any different from before. Yes, links to your blog about the newest character who may or may not be any good are all good and well, but it's sort of filler. I don't even think hiring anyone else would do the trick, though you could actually do worse than bringing some forumers onto your books who can actually translate the messages you are wanting to put across.

A lot of this comes back to the direction from the top (the infamous "this too shall pass" blog post from your head guy - which I can't find at this second) and can be seen through things like:

- the completely botched handling of True Healing (and how healing is still handled across the game),
- what I am picking up in the expanding alliance thread,
- the often dismissive tone of some of the recent QA that often made you sound like politicians (4 answers of "yeah.... we're really only designing new characters; 3rd powers or adjusting things, well... kinda, we'll get to it eventually, probably".
- the length of time it's taken for some of your past balancing,
- the poor structure of the anniversary week in terms of it's half week of events, its' hugely inequitable giving out of stuff and yes the annoucement of 4* Thor was interesting and all, but to make it a main selling point of your celebrations... meh, maybe it's exciting that you got to use it first, but to the main playerbase, it's just another character... that only the people in the top 100 alliances are going to experience in any forseeable future.
- a whole bunch of random stealth changes to the game which were never noted, eg. what's that, you're stopping boosts and throwing TU's at us? but wait, now boosts are back, even though your past talk was pretty much not,
- the obvious decision you took a few months ago to drastically cut back on your giving out of 3* covers and how hard it is now (in comparison) to get them,
- why the recent flood of new characters? is your budget really relying on that flow of associated income? (that's not a good long term sign),
- some new characters and the seeming overreach of trying to do too much fancy stuff with them, when the current lot are already struggling (invisible tiles, cocoon tiles, web tiles come to mind first),
- seriously, I know what you are getting at with TU's but they're still not gelling into the game how they should be and for the most part character TU abilities almost instantly are level to 3 only - I want my opponents dead, not messing around trying to get enough of those icons to activate a single time ability,
- token and cover handling - what am i really supposed to do with my 847th M.Storm cover? how long do you intend rotating characters in and out of heroic tokens before it just becomes ridiculous?
- total lack of any logic or disclosure about the mish-mash of different characters appearing or not appearing, duplicated or not duplicated at various ranks,
- the ridiculous and hugely unfun grind that trying to get a decent rank in anything has now become (remember your justification for explaining True Healing?),
- various alliance concerns which many others know more about than me,
- I'm sure there are numerous other things.

There is a trend here and I think the reason we are getting the messages we are getting is because that's all they have to say.

There's just something.... not there. There's a sort of.... lack of cohesion from the game - a consistent, clear and open story about what you are trying to do.

Is there any long term strategy other than just pushing out new characters, a sometimes new story and sometimes a random new feature that may or may not have needed more time or a different execution? So much of the time, it just seems like patching on top of patching and hoping that it holds together. It's like you're trying to overreach and do a bit of everything with varying results (reminds me of a description I read of Moonstone), rather than a slightly smaller number of things really well.

***
I know it's not going to happen, but I'd actually like to see you work with the community to start a brand new foundation with MPQ2 and then transition everyone over.

Unknown

Calling David a sock puppet?

Them's fighting words.

Unknown

How do you know David is not the PR guy they hired?

Unknown

Dear Demiurge / D3P,
Please hire some proper software engineers.
Thanks,
A player of your bug-ridden game

Ludaa

According to the statistics they released, we're lucky they interact with such a small percentage of users at all.

Unknown

Or they could shut down the forum. Hmmm... Which would be cheaper for them? Look, they're not the biggest part of the problem. It's nick picky ppl. Ppl complain they don't communicate, then they complain when they do communicate. All I can say is you're lucky I'm not in charge. The only communication I would have is in game. I would not waste resources hiring a PR person for the few ppl that need their hand held all the time BC the game does revolve around there special wants and needs.

Unknown

stephen43084 wrote:

Or they could shut down the forum. Hmmm... Which would be cheaper for them? Look, they're not the biggest part of the problem. It's nick picky ppl. Ppl complain they don't communicate, then they complain when they do communicate. All I can say is you're lucky I'm not in charge. The only communication I would have is in game. I would not waste resources hiring a PR person for the few ppl that need their hand held all the time BC the game does revolve around there special wants and needs.

Take it easy Stephen.

It wouldn't take that much time to communicate better.

Unknown

stephen43084 wrote:

Or they could shut down the forum. Hmmm... Which would be cheaper for them? Look, they're not the biggest part of the problem. It's nick picky ppl. Ppl complain they don't communicate, then they complain when they do communicate. All I can say is you're lucky I'm not in charge. The only communication I would have is in game. I would not waste resources hiring a PR person for the few ppl that need their hand held all the time BC the game does revolve around there special wants and needs.

You are probably right. You don't need to communicate nearly as much when you don't screw up 90% of the time. I wouldn't mind seeing someone new take over for a little while. Start a kickstarter to buy the rights and I will donate.

Zen808

Just be glad they didn't hire Stealth Clown.

Pylgrim

stephen43084 wrote:

Or they could shut down the forum. Hmmm... Which would be cheaper for them? Look, they're not the biggest part of the problem. It's nick picky ppl. Ppl complain they don't communicate, then they complain when they do communicate. All I can say is you're lucky I'm not in charge. The only communication I would have is in game. I would not waste resources hiring a PR person for the few ppl that need their hand held all the time BC the game does revolve around there special wants and needs.

Man, I sincerely hope you never get to represent any company to its users, because would it crash and burn!

Paintsville wrote:

stephen43084 wrote:

You are probably right. You don't need to communicate nearly as much when you don't screw up 90% of the time. I wouldn't mind seeing someone new take over for a little while. Start a kickstarter to buy the rights and I will donate.

See, I actually don't think they're doing a bad job. For example, this latest controversy over alliance slots? I believe that they are right in predicting it will increase user interaction with the game and will be beneficial for its long-term continuous existence. The problem lay in the implementation and delivering of the news. In the lack of consideration for the affected subset of users (and they KNEW there would be a subset that would be affected).

I other words, I believe they are quite good at processing numbers and statistics but absolutely clueless about human nature.

Unknown

Pylgrim wrote:

stephen43084 wrote:

Or they could shut down the forum. Hmmm... Which would be cheaper for them? Look, they're not the biggest part of the problem. It's nick picky ppl. Ppl complain they don't communicate, then they complain when they do communicate. All I can say is you're lucky I'm not in charge. The only communication I would have is in game. I would not waste resources hiring a PR person for the few ppl that need their hand held all the time BC the game does revolve around there special wants and needs.

Man, I sincerely hope you never get to represent any company to its users, because would it crash and burn!

Paintsville wrote:

stephen43084 wrote:

You are probably right. You don't need to communicate nearly as much when you don't screw up 90% of the time. I wouldn't mind seeing someone new take over for a little while. Start a kickstarter to buy the rights and I will donate.

See, I actually don't think they're doing a bad job. For example, this latest controversy over alliance slots? I believe that they are right in predicting it will increase user interaction with the game and will be beneficial for its long-term continuous existence. The problem lay in the implementation and delivering of the news. In the lack of consideration for the affected subset of users (and they KNEW there would be a subset that would be affected).

I other words, I believe they are quite good at processing numbers and statistics but absolutely clueless about human nature.

Agreed on all points. I was just giving some anti-snark.

Unknown

You're not going to PR your way out of something like alliance which was a P2W mechanism from start and either you continue the P2W path or at some point you got to say 'well that turned out to be a very bad idea'. When Sentry invariably gets nerfed people will complain too, though these issues are design issue not communication issue. You're not going to design a game breaking character and then somehow convince people who pumped resources if not significant $ that it's all in the interest of the game to fix this stuff especially since games don't give out refunds. If there was a law that required you to refund money for a significant change on any major design we might see gaming companies (not just D3) being more responsible with design but since no such law exists there's always this tendency of 'make stuff overpowered at first and then balance it later after the money comes in'.

I think the communication from D3 is generally somewhat lacking, but it doesn't change the underyling design issues. Anybody can say they're aware of some issue and it doesn't matter until the issue is actually addressed.

Finally, I think people throw around the 'buggy' term way too much. A buggy game is one where you have to shut down with the task manager instead of using the game's quit function. The worst I've seen from this game would be a random crash in the middle of a game or some weird graphics glitch with some abilities (there seems to be one that superimposes a tile with a special tile together recently) but nothing that makes playing impossible.

Pylgrim

Phantron wrote:

You're not going to PR your way out of something like alliance which was a P2W mechanism from start and either you continue the P2W path or at some point you got to say 'well that turned out to be a very bad idea'. When Sentry invariably gets nerfed people will complain too, though these issues are design issue not communication issue. You're not going to design a game breaking character and then somehow convince people who pumped resources if not significant $ that it's all in the interest of the game to fix this stuff especially since games don't give out refunds. If there was a law that required you to refund money for a significant change on any major design we might see gaming companies (not just D3) being more responsible with design but since no such law exists there's always this tendency of 'make stuff overpowered at first and then balance it later after the money comes in'.

I think the communication from D3 is generally somewhat lacking, but it doesn't change the underyling design issues. Anybody can say they're aware of some issue and it doesn't matter until the issue is actually addressed.

Finally, I think people throw around the 'buggy' term way too much. A buggy game is one where you have to shut down with the task manager instead of using the game's quit function. The worst I've seen from this game would be a random crash in the middle of a game or some weird graphics glitch with some abilities (there seems to be one that superimposes a tile with a special tile together recently) but nothing that makes playing impossible.

I have played Magic the Gathering for over a decade and I've been a faithful follower of their design and development journals through that time. They are a competent, game-savvy, decades-tested team of professionals with a designing and playtesting infrastructure perfected over the years. And they still manage to create a card or two that end being completely busted in a given format every other year.

My point being that mistakes, mis-assessments, and oversights WILL happen. No matter how big your playtesting team is, no matter ho much time do you spend testing, you will never be able to emulate accurately the conditions in which a game will be experienced when played over a long time by literal millions of people. For us, nowadays, it may boggle the mind to wonder how didn't they notice that Sentry was broken but it may have not seem that bad in playtesting for reasons. We'll never know. The important part, then, if mistakes cannot be entirely avoided, is to be gracious, humble and properly understanding of the playerbase's feelings and how to make reparations in a timely manner. Basically everything that Alliance slots announcement is not.

Unknown

Pylgrim wrote:

I have played Magic the Gathering for over a decade and I've been a faithful follower of their design and development journals through that time. They are a competent, game-savvy, decades-tested team of professionals with a designing and playtesting infrastructure perfected over the years. And they still manage to create a card or two that end being completely busted in a given format every other year.

My point being that mistakes, mis-assessments, and oversights WILL happen. No matter how big your playtesting team is, no matter ho much time do you spend testing, you will never be able to emulate accurately the conditions in which a game will be experienced when played over a long time by literal millions of people. For us, nowadays, it may boggle the mind to wonder how didn't they notice that Sentry was broken but it may have not seem that bad in playtesting for reasons. We'll never know. The important part, then, if mistakes cannot be entirely avoided, is to be gracious, humble and properly understanding of the playerbase's feelings and how to make reparations in a timely manner. Basically everything that Alliance slots announcement is not.

MTG learned a lot from its mistakes. This is a bunch of guys who started thinking Healing Salve is about as good as Ancestral Recall, and now they can be considered the golden standard for balance in everything game related. Part of it, of course, is because you can't easily take back MTG cards so you can't just make say a 1G for 4/4 and then say don't worry we'll change it to 3/3 later if that was too good. I don't think being polite/humble means anything. I'm sure there's plenty of hate mail when they banned Jace from one of the format too. You don't hear much trashing about MTG because MTG very rarely has to resort to such drastic measures which effectively wiped out people's investment in whatever the overpowered card that was banned (and usually 4 copies of it!).

It's kind of puzzling since MTG guys don't mind sharing their design philosophy with other people and a lot of what they do applies to almost any game. For example read up on their article about card drawing and their philosophy around such a vital part of the game and replace card drawing with 'AP generation' and you can copy almost everything verbatim. Balance is a hard problem, but there's no need to reinvent the wheel. For Sentry you can pretty much look at their article about how losing life as a cost to activate abilities isn't a big deal if there aren't burn decks around and that is pretty much exactly the same thing here, except that MPQ has no such thing as a 'burn' character that can possibly punish Sentry's self-damage, which is hardly surprising since Sentry has one of the most HP amongst characters in the game, while the shockland archtype is equivalent of a character with the least amount of HP.

Unknown

stephen, take a chill pill bro.

Phantron wrote:

I think the communication from D3 is generally somewhat lacking...

What? Hi-Fi and IceIX are doing a good job communicating lately. I don't understand. Do you (or other people who think like this) want a direct free to call line to devs so that you can bug them non-stop? They have other things to do you know. Like designing new characters, fixing bugs, funbalancing weak and OP characters, designing new events, new game modes etc etc.

@sorcered
This is not a buggy game. What bugs have been bugging you recently? There are probably still some bugs present as with most video games but it is in no condition to call it "bug-ridden".

Unknown

KevinMark wrote:

stephen, take a chill pill bro.

Phantron wrote:

I think the communication from D3 is generally somewhat lacking...

What? Hi-Fi and IceIX are doing a good job communicating lately. I don't understand. Do you (or other people who think like this) want a direct free to call line to devs so that you can bug them non-stop? They have other things to do you know. Like designing new characters, fixing bugs, funbalancing weak and OP characters, designing new events, new game modes etc etc.

@sorcered
This is not a buggy game. What bugs have been bugging you recently? There are probably still some bugs present as with most video games but it is in no condition to call it "bug-ridden".

Doing their job isn't an excuse to not have communication. For example I'd expect to hear something important like Sentry going to be nerfed from an official channel as opposed to some guy who attended a comic con heard this somewhere. I don't particularly care about the PR stuff like the Q&A session but I do expect some kind of timeline for any major changes that are upcoming, and if there are no major changes coming anytime soon then it'd help to know why. "Work is hard" is not an excuse for having characters that should never have made it past testing, like Sentry, and since the damage is done, I do expect to know the expected timeline things will get fixed.

Lystrata

KevinMark wrote:

What? Hi-Fi and IceIX are doing a good job communicating lately. I don't understand. Do you (or other people who think like this) want a direct free to call line to devs so that you can bug them non-stop? They have other things to do you know. Like designing new characters, fixing bugs, funbalancing weak and OP characters, designing new events, new game modes etc etc.

@sorcered
This is not a buggy game. What bugs have been bugging you recently? There are probably still some bugs present as with most video games but it is in no condition to call it "bug-ridden".

#1: There has certainly been more communication, which is a positive thing. But the majority of it is updates about FB statuses or the like. I can find that myself. Sure, it's nice to be alerted to it, but a forum is the 'hub' of interaction with (typically paying) players, so to speak. I am more than happy for devs to be off doing their job. No, I don't want a 'direct free call line' or any other such patronising idea.

What I would like, is if when they make announcements about things that actually affect the game / player base, they showed they'd considered the consequences for all players. A company showing that it thinks about the consequences of its actions isn't really an outrageous demand. Really.

For instance, the alliance slot thing would've been much less troublesome if they'd said upfront - "Sure, we know this is going to be a pain for players who've paid for slots, and while we feel that this will benefit the game overall, here's some measure of compensation for people who already invested in this." Rather than an announcement, a waiting period of complaints, then a back-peddling 'er, yeah, this might negatively affect some of you, get in touch and we'll see what happens.'

And this actually has nothing to do with harassing the devs. In fact, if you read the title of the thread, you'd see that devs aren't even mentioned. So I don't know where you're coming up with that from.


#2 - I agree, this really isn't a buggy game. The game itself I've got very few complaints with, as it were. It's merely how changes are handled and presented to the players that I take issue with.