"A Few Times In Recent Weeks" [Dev Post Frequency]

Keegan

TheWerebison wrote:

Personally, I believe they do read a good bit of our stuff, but when they make some changes and not others, and don't give any of the reasons as to WHY, it appears as though they're just doing their own thing regardless of player feedback. It almost doesn't really matter if they actually DO listen to us or not, the impression they are giving the playerbase is that they don't care about feedback.

...that is because "Why" is just about the worst question one can ask someone to find out an answer.

The answer, the correct answer, to a "Why" question is entirely subjective to the person asking the question. If you do not get the answer to "Why" that you were expecting or that makes sense to you in the frame of the question that you asked, then you consider the question to have not been answered correctly. This is why "Why" questions are taught to be be avoided like the plague in journalism: why will never get you concrete information, only arguable abstract reasons.

A better question to ask instead of "Why did you do this?" would be "What were you trying to achieve?" That will have concrete answers every time.

TheWerebison

Keegan wrote:

TheWerebison wrote:

Personally, I believe they do read a good bit of our stuff, but when they make some changes and not others, and don't give any of the reasons as to WHY, it appears as though they're just doing their own thing regardless of player feedback. It almost doesn't really matter if they actually DO listen to us or not, the impression they are giving the playerbase is that they don't care about feedback.

...that is because "Why" is just about the worst question one can ask someone to find out an answer.

The answer, the correct answer, to a "Why" question is entirely subjective to the person asking the question. If you do not get the answer to "Why" that you were expecting or that makes sense to you in the frame of the question that you asked, then you consider the question to have not been answered correctly. This is why "Why" questions are taught to be be avoided like the plague in journalism: why will never get you concrete information, only arguable abstract reasons.

A better question to ask instead of "Why did you do this?" would be "What were you trying to achieve?" That will have concrete answers every time.

Duly noted.

Anyway, the point was that they don't share any of that info. Without proper communication, we are left to our own best guesses and conspiracy theories as to the purpose of their changes. It is fuel for the doomsayers.

Blahahah

I remember when the first Galactus thing happened.
Then I remember everyone posting really smart ideas on how to beat the system

And then the devs listened, so well in fact that pretty much all of it got patched out and the entire thing got adjusted.


I remember when we had teams of people who could spit out massive amounts of webtiles and people were wanting to cheese the system with devour TU.
And then the devs listened, so well in fact that devour does a significant amount of damage but no longer insta-gibs.


The devs don't look down on us as though we are children, in fact its the opposite and they take actual constructive conversation quite seriously.
However, we look down on them as though they are incompetent, and that is where the lapse is.

We don't need to know "why" things are how they are, honestly. We don't know the future. Maybe there's a reason we won't know until it happens.

TheWerebison

I guess. I don't put much stock in faith.

Blahahah

TheWerebison wrote:

I guess. I don't put much stock in faith.

Take it from someone who sees things in the macro sense:
The way things are leaves a lot of open room to expand and gives breathing room. Because the characters are made how they are, in the way they are made, we can have fun characters and new mechanics enter without the blatant risk of making something beyond broken by accident.

Demiurge_[bagman]

Hello all,

I'll be trying to improve forum communication from Demiurge. A bit.

Communicating well takes time & effort, and frankly we're not good at it. We know it.

We've tried more communication in the past and it hasn't always gone well. As a result the devs now shy away from posting. Regardless, I'm going to try again. If you can't tell, I'm not a PR person.

The ground rules:

Please be patient, I don't know everything and I can't share everything. I can't make any promises about what I can share or how often we'll have new info. My skin is very thin. If the thread devolves I disengage.

Thanks for your suggestions, thoughts, and demands for a better game. We want a better game, too. Thank you for playing MPQ.

mohio

And the endless stream of questions that get asked every few days begins now...

Let's try and be patient forum-goers. After all, demanding more will likely only lead to less. I for one am grateful for bagman's (great name btw!) honesty in this post. I look forward to whatever insights you are allowed and have time to provide us. My sincere thanks (in advance) and welcome to the forum!

adamdivine

Thanks for coming on this thread!! There will always be negativity, but we have lots of people on this forum with great ideas/questions. Communication from the Devs is always appreciated! I hope you stick it out.

adamdivine

Also, maybe a separate thread is warranted. May be easier to see what has been answered and what has not. Also, I feel like quickly saying no to suggestions that are not being considered will make the thread more productive. That way questions that already have an answer can be moderated away to avoid clutter.

Dragon_Nexus

Demiurge_[bagman] wrote:

We've tried more communication in the past and it hasn't always gone well. As a result the devs now shy away from posting.

Understandable. Difficult to manage a community when the vocal minority screams at you.

However, I at least find it relatively easy to sift through the people who simply want to vent without adding anything constructive. They're entitled to do so, of course, but they'd not be worth spending time on if your job is to read the community posts and feedback to the developers.

The issue we tend to have is there's a serious disconnect between what the players are experiencing and how the developers seem to feel the game plays like. We've gotten frustrated and angry before because of this disconnect, Galactus Round 1 being the most obvious example of this issue.

I understand, and I think most of us do, that you cannot say "We're going to fix something!" as a guarantee because then the comminuty gets annoyed when it doesn't happen. Even vague hints are often taken as direct confirmation. So I understand that aspect of it. However, silence communicates as well. It communicates that you don't care. Now,. whether or not you DO care isn't relevent in this post, the point is people will *assume* you don't. When there's a lack of communication, people will construct their own narrative which means when you finally do speak you'll say something that's contrary to the constructed narrative and come across as liars, despite telling the truth.

Openness and honesty and frequent posting, even if it's just casual chat with the community, will help a lot. Put the effort in to ingraciate yourselves with us, we're not all terrifying swear machines frantically googling your addresses so we can throw poo at your houses. We get frustrated because we LIKE this game and we really want it to get even better. I wouldn't have poured 3050 hours into this over 2.5 years if I didn't enjoy it. IceIX, for all that he used to frustrate me with his attitude sometimes, at least communicated frequently, letting us know what was happening and then relying our responses to the devs. Since he left it feels like we've been left adrift.

Pylgrim

Demiurge_[bagman] wrote:

Hello all,

I'll be trying to improve forum communication from Demiurge. A bit.

Communicating well takes time & effort, and frankly we're not good at it. We know it.

We've tried more communication in the past and it hasn't always gone well. As a result the devs now shy away from posting. Regardless, I'm going to try again. If you can't tell, I'm not a PR person.

The ground rules:

Please be patient, I don't know everything and I can't share everything. I can't make any promises about what I can share or how often we'll have new info. My skin is very thin. If the thread devolves I disengage.

Thanks for your suggestions, thoughts, and demands for a better game. We want a better game, too. Thank you for playing MPQ.

Oh my God, thanks for this. We really want to hear from you guys. If it's not too much to ask, can we get a new thread and sticky it maybe call it "Developer's Talk" or something like that where we can engage you instead fishing around random threads? Your ground rules sound good and in a dedicated thread we could have the mods keep an eye open to delete the messages of the rude people preferably before you see them.

an1979

So the fire got big enough that they had send someone to sprinkle some spring water into it?
Have ratings in Google Play shop plummeted or what?

Cthulhu

haha no. We have more eyes on the project and are reviewing what is working and not working. We have been very busy though with the civil war event and all those characters. I hope to have an update soon, or someone on here to have an update soon.

cthulhu

Ludaa

Cthulhu wrote:

haha no. We have more eyes on the project and are reviewing what is working and not working. We have been very busy though with the civil war event and all those characters. I hope to have an update soon, or someone on here to have an update soon.

cthulhu

New characters will not make this game better, unfortunately. The "updates soon" line is entering eye roll territory too, fyi.

Dekliko1978

Cthulhu wrote:

haha no. We have more eyes on the project and are reviewing what is working and not working. We have been very busy though with the civil war event and all those characters. I hope to have an update soon, or someone on here to have an update soon.

cthulhu

Then please stop being busy adding more and more characters or hire more staff.

A lot of the problems originate from the rate of introduction of new charactes. ISO problems, reward structure, roster slots and to some degree even scaling would all be less of a problem if players could keep up. I consider myself a fairly hardcore player (in a top alliance) with multiple hours a day spend on this game, spending some money on a regular basis and I still have absolutely 0% chance of keeping up or even coming close to that point.

On the other hand I also hope that I will never reach a maxed roster, because then there would be no reason to play at all, but running behind even when playing more than is healthy is clearly not the way to go either.

I do enjoy that you are trying new content and introduce new(or better said the 4th/5th version of the same character) characters especially when it ties in with movies and Netflix and such, but then please also make some time free in your development team to adress the clear faults in the game now.

Probably like many players here on the forums I would happily donate my free time and resources to communicate, test and discuss ways to improve this game. Because even with all it clear flaws I still enjoy playing it (even after 850 days played).

mpqr7

I highly appreciate communication from the reds! I may sometimes get upset at certain aspects of the game, but I will never get upset at a red directly. Don't be scared of us.. we won't bite We're actually very nice people, normally

Pylgrim

mpqr7 wrote:

I highly appreciate communication from the reds! I may sometimes get upset at certain aspects of the game, but I will never get upset at a red directly. Don't be scared of us.. we won't bite We're actually very nice people, normally

I think that the problem is not with us a as whole, even including some of our snarkier and more negative members, but rather that there's always in these communities one or two really rotten grapes. I wouldn't be surprised if what stopped communication from Will and Miles back in the day was some shithead sending them PMs threatening them and their families.

Anyway, bumping this back to remind Mr. Bagman of his resolution to keep an open channel with us.

billsrule7

Demiurge_[bagman] wrote:

Hello all,

I'll be trying to improve forum communication from Demiurge. A bit.

Communicating well takes time & effort, and frankly we're not good at it. We know it.

We've tried more communication in the past and it hasn't always gone well. As a result the devs now shy away from posting. Regardless, I'm going to try again. If you can't tell, I'm not a PR person.

The ground rules:

Please be patient, I don't know everything and I can't share everything. I can't make any promises about what I can share or how often we'll have new info. My skin is very thin. If the thread devolves I disengage.

Thanks for your suggestions, thoughts, and demands for a better game. We want a better game, too. Thank you for playing MPQ.

Hi Bagman,

Just wanted to check in and see if we might be able to get some updates. It has been a little bit since we heard from you and would love to get some feedback on issues / problems / suggestions we're making. Thanks so much!!