Communications Impasse

Vhailorx

I have a real dilemma with respect to expressing player feedback on this forum.

Last week I posted a topic reminding demiurge that we players would like additional feedback on boss rush. That thread was quickly locked. Today Hifi has clarified that demi has no plans to comment on Boss Rush, but may incorporate our feedback into future runs. He also locked the Boss Rush thread.

From a PM exchange with HiFi after he locked my thread last week, I understand that he is concerned that all Boss Rush discussion devolves into negativity and flames. While one might dispute the details of that statement, it would absurd to suggest that HiFi doesn't have a point.

This presents a dilemma for those of us who would like to continue to request (via polite, if pointed, commentary) that demi make some comment on Boss Rush. As I said to HiFi via PM

I don't want to be rude or attack anyone personally, but I think [Boss Rush] remains relevant and I don't want to let it get lost in the shuffle of new announcements. The boss rush event was a really clear example of several longstanding systemic problems with mpq (poor dev communication in advance of significant changes, mis-matched expectations of difficulty between devs and players, tensions between game modes that are difficult and game mechanics that punish losses harshly, etc).

This is a mobile match-3 game, so I don't want to overstate the importance of this issue, but i think that to the extent anything in mpq is important, it's important that the devs substantively address the relative failure of a much-hyped event during a much-anticipated celebration. I think that as a single player i have relatively influence over the game, and voicing my concerns on the forums is one if the very few tools available to me.

If I can't persistently (but politely) press demi for feedback after such an event, then how are the forums different from the marvel.com interviews/press releases? How can I continue to express my concerns in a way that won't get shut down immediately?

.

This is a legitimate question about topics beyond 'just' this Boss Rush event. How can the community express continued critique in a manner that doesn't descend into the sort of negativity that requires HiFi to shut everything down? And how can HiFi distinguish between'valid' commentary and trolling?

TeamStewie

Don't call us, we'll call you.

zonatahunt

My main issue is that as a paying customer I feel like when they screw the pooch in the manner that they did with Boss a Rush, that they should feel obligated to comment on piss-poor merchandise. Is it the Galaxy phone that's been bursting into flames and burning their customers? Whichever company it is, imagine if they just sold their merch, watched their phones catch fire in people's pockets, and simply shrugged their shoulders and walked away. That's essentially the attitude these companies are taking. They produced a product, it stunk horrifically bad, customers spent money in preparation for it and during it, and they just don't care or have enough respect for us to manage addressing our concerns.

Even more, with the prices they charge for a digital product, and we pay (I feel like a total tool now too)...the response to such a horrible event should have been swift and apologetic.
[*snip*]
This is exactly the kind of response that can, and will get warnings and result in locked threads.
Please don't be that person.

Vhailorx

TeamStewie wrote:

Don't call us, we'll call you.

Maybe, but I what I want to avoid is "Don't call us, we'll call you AND we'll cut your phone line too."

And Zonatahunt: I think that is exactly the sort of vitriol that we need to avoid if we want to get a response. I think comparison is to exploding smartphones is a bit over the top. MPQ's ability to hurt its customers is basically limited to the potential for predatory pricing in any freemium game model. That can be bad, but it's a far cry from actual flames. and to say demi has ruined the game is also a bit silly when all of us are still playing it. The game is fun, and good, AND it has several problems. These things are not mutually exclusive.

I am sure that demi wanted Boss Rush to be awesome. There are even some players who enjoyed it. But a lot of us didn't. and it seems to me that (1) players should be able to ask for comment on a big event like this, and (2) the devs would be well served by offering some comment (even if we don't all like what they say, they can splinter the playerbase which is currently more or less united in its frustration over the total lack of comment).

zonatahunt

V, I'm simply an upset and shunned customer. If I had my own business and ran it the way they did I'd be out of business very quickly. Simply put, even though I've paid them for their product I feel stolen from. That's all I have to say on the issue. There is a time to find positives, but as a direct result of their complete disregard for their player base, this us not the time to hold their hands and sing Cumbaya.

Anyways, no more from me on this.

DrDevilDinosaur

I think locking or hiding threads also isn't very good. I haven't been here long but it seems to me like they only want people here to say good things and your not allowed to say if anything is annoying or whatever. what good reason is there to lock the thread just because one person with the power decided they don't want to post in that thread anymore? I think players still wanted to post and there should be some way for them to discuss this still. i like it much more when the devs treat their players like human beings. even sometimes when they make a bad design, they can say yeah, we agree, that was bad sorry" and try to do it better next time. even talk about wha t they are going to do next early on the forum and get feedback from the real players.

Moon Roach

I find it ironic (and perversely amusing) that the only way of commenting on that thread now is by voting up Hi-fi's post.

an1979

I would like to hear developers comment about errors that plagued that event - that is the fact that the game many times was only giving 1/3 or 2/3 of rightfully won points.

ClydeFrog76

What I enjoyed most about him locking the thread was the bit where he said no additional statements would be made regarding the matter. I don't remember seeing any.

The thread devolved into pure vitriol because we were totally ignored. That's on them, not us.

kidicarus

OP sounds like an entitled millennial. I got the same impression from that reminder thread as well.

From groot- we had about 8 or 9 people getting 3 covers, a whole bunch of us getting 2 covers (including myself) and as far as I could gather, most people who played got at least 1 cover. Sounds like an ok distribution of 4 star covers to me. Yep - it was hair pulling frustrating and I kinda gave up in the middle of round 7 (but I realised at the end I could have made it if didn't) but I got a whole bunch of stuff out of the event - tokens, iso, HP and covers - it's all good and no explanation required.

I'd just like to thank Hi-Fi for the good work he does for this community, both on the boards and behind the scenes.

chaos01

zonatahunt wrote:

I love this game...but I DETEST the people running the show. I wish another company would buy them out so that this group of designers can go ruin a different game.

I think the Devs and HIFI haven't made themselves any friends by lacking in communication.

I think that even if we had the return of the community Q&A where we would post questions upvote and regularly the top 10-20 would be answered they would go a long way to rebuild a fractured relationship.

I also think that with anonymous posting here and on other platforms society has opened a can of worms for people that 'troll'. Until people figure out how to control themselves when they aren't speaking to someone's face we will always have locked threads because of name calling and flaming.

halirin

However the memory of Boss Rush makes you feel, I would strongly recommend that you try getting over it. This is a game. It's a game based on events that are fundamentally temporary. If there's a bad event, then it will eventually end and there will be new events. If the events are all bad, then that's a sign that you should stop playing. But it really doesn't make sense to be so worked up about getting an extra "we heard you and we care."

Tarouza

Apparently this too shall pass wasnt passing quickly enough for david's/d3's taste and they dont want to acknowledge how they completely conned on us what boss rush was going to be, plus they still had no answer for screwing people with missing points and refuse to acknowledge it so they had to silence people by locking the thread

Vhailorx

halirin wrote:

However the memory of Boss Rush makes you feel, I would strongly recommend that you try getting over it. This is a game. It's a game based on events that are fundamentally temporary. If there's a bad event, then it will eventually end and there will be new events. If the events are all bad, then that's a sign that you should stop playing. But it really doesn't make sense to be so worked up about getting an extra "we heard you and we care."

Why? Why should players not advocate for change in the game? We basically have two levers to pull when it comes to the game, we can spend/not spend, and we can make public comments on the game. Why willingly ignore one of those tools?

It's not coincidence that the devs have made some big, player-friendly changes after prolonged player outcry (e.g. dropping PVP progs from 1.3k to 1k after everyone flipped out because of the new MMR, introducing Shield Rank and CLs once it became clear all the vets were unanimously frustrated by the lack of iso in the game).

And re: getting over it: did you not read the sentence in my post where I said this is just a mobile game and it's not worth making too big a deal of this. What is there to get over? I have an opinion (that I think is shared by many other players) and I want to express that opinion without the thread getting locked.

Dragon_Nexus

While this place does get hostile when things go wrong, I feel compelled to point out this place isn't hostile when things are good. This place is only hostile when there's a reason for it.

The devs have long since been warey to venture into these forums due to the hostility, but they seem to fail to understand the hostility is caused by a lack of communication. We ask "Hey, what's going on with this thing that feels broken?" and we get nothing but silence because everyone's too afraid to step in and deal with the backlash. But because of that the frustration grows and grows so that when someone DOES finally say something, usually a short "We're aware of the issue and are grateful for your feedback, we'll get back to you" hand wave message, the forum explodes because we feel like we're just being fobbed off.

Communication in almost all things in life is key. These things need to be headed off at the pass, if you don't want things to turn hostile you need to control the narrative. If you fail to do so, people will make up their own narrative and soon the favourable narrative becomes the one people will parrot. Then when you step in you're already too late, you're saying something counter to the established truth, so we assume the devs are lying...even if they're not.

If we had more communication, if we had dedicated liason staff who relayed messages between the devs and the forums and back again, someone who offered Q&As and got elbow deep into the community to at least sound empathetic to our concerns and then relay those concerns back to the devs, all the while letting us know how progress was going, then a lot of these issues wouldn't happen.

It might very well be that David or someone similar does actually read the forum, pass the messages on and the devs are aware...but again that's not communicated to us. We don't KNOW that's happening. If they have community liasons already, I'd ask what they're paying them for because they don't liase with us in a reliable manner. I understand it's not a fun job, but it IS their job afterall. I work retail and I sure as hell can't say to my boss "Customers are being horrible today, I'm going out the back until my shift is over."

The Boss Rush event is a time where things really needed to be communicated. I'm sure everyone on the dev team is expecting a repeat of IceIX's famous statement from anniversary 2 to repeat, and you know it probably would. But I'd ask why lessons weren't apparently learned from that event since BR had pretty much every failing Galactus 1 had. Primarily that 2Supposed to lose" mentality that ground you into the dirt.

So Devs, please...stop being afraid of the forum, get your butts in here and TALK to us. Yes we might get annoyed, but most of us annoyed people still really like the game and are only frustrated because we want it to get better! I don't enjoy complaining about Boss Rush, I can see how it could be improved without a lot of work involved. It's a great idea on paper, it just needs tweaking. The community is full of great ideas on how to fix things when they go wrong, swallow your pride, put your hands up, say "Yup, we screwed up. How can we make it better?" and then we can all have schwarma together.

JamesV

Vhailorx, I think there are three issues at work here.

1. Inconsistent dev communication creates confusion. I completely understand how this happens (only so many hours in a day, i imagine things have to go through publishing/marketing/legal/whatever*, and that the nature of the game means there's not exactly dormant months. This isn't a game in which you patch on day 30 and then you patch again on day 90. The nature of it creates a continuous dev cycle so sometimes they have time to communicate and sometimes they don't. But then there is also inconsistency at what level each communication is at. Sometimes new features get in-depth posts with follow ups and questions and answers and sometimes they are announcements. So the community never knows when they will receive communication and what form that will take.

2. The expectation that this forum is two-way communication and not one-way. On some level this is tied to the above because sometimes it is two-way. But in general, communication from devs on games is 1 way: here is our product, here is our patch, here is our event, etc. The player base then responds but usually there's never direct back and forth. This is because most of that communication is via press release, blog post, support articles, etc. Static 1-way information.** The nature of a forum, though, implies that the communication is back and forth. In reality, it's not, which creates disappointment or a feeling of neglect.

3. Negative reactions breed negative reactions and emotional reactions, left to feed themselves, will almost always suffocate criticism. It's impossible to have a critical discussion of an event in the middle of the event if the event is going bad (or honestly if the event is going good). Even if a handful of people are doing that they are going to get drowned out.

Because people are never sure when or how communication will come (thus a base level of agitation), because the nature of a forum implies that communication is a back and forth exchange (creating false expectations), and because it's always an uphill battle against emotional posts (and once something has died down why would you reignite it?) I completely understand why things like Boss Rush end up with a "we hear you. thank you." and move on.

All that said, I think a lot of this could be eased with some minor differences in approach that would help build a better environment for communication.

1. Be consistent with how information is shared. We see this with the monthly tread and to some degree with patch note threads and how new characters are revealed. Anything that's informative should have a base template that's followed that breaks down to here's the feature/event, here's how it works, and a pre-emptive FAQ. You won't cover everything. Each things going to be different, but a base line goes a long way. Additionally be very upfront on if there will be more communication, even if it's as simple as "We will touch base before Day 1 is over to answer a few more questions". Create the understanding that unless you are saying so, no one should expect it.

2. I appreciated the monthly Q&As before but a lot of times we saw the same questions each month. Replace that with periodic State of the Unions that do not cover anything that is upcoming, but allows very controlled "ask us questions about X". Additionally, use these to shed some light on what -- from a design/creative standpoint was the goal of controversial stuff. In the past there's been a few things like this (like the blog post that gets referenced all the time about smarter AI and what that would mean for the game). I admit the Q&A part of this might put some extra strain on the mods as they keep negativity in check in regards to dredging up negative moments, but that is why they should be decently spread out.

3. And this one may be entirely out of anyone's control because of the nature of the beast, but some words have already become tainted because of negative experiences (see: "fun" and many people's reaction to the phrase) so not only avoid them, but run into the opposite direction. "We've designed this event to be a true test, pushing the limits of your roster". A lot of times the seeds of the negativity fire that eventually kills the potential for discussion/criticism are set off before anything even starts.

* Without knowing D3/Demiurge's structure, it's important to realize that there may also be barriers to said communication. I don't think David and the Devs actively sit there going "yes, yes if only we could give them less communication". Who knows what policies are in place, who knows how often David gets to meet with them, etc. Different places, different rules.


** I realize that devs for other companies (or representatives of the devs) may communicate via the comment sections of a blog post or the like, but the nature of things like blogs are still designed for I say, You say, not We Say.

babinro

Vhailorx wrote:

This is a legitimate question about topics beyond 'just' this Boss Rush event. How can the community express continued critique in a manner that doesn't descend into the sort of negativity that requires HiFi to shut everything down? And how can HiFi distinguish between'valid' commentary and trolling?

I don't think there's a way around this by nature of forum communities.

Step 1) Devs release or do something players don't like

Step 2) Player swarm the forums...perhaps their initial critique is somewhat civil but as the voices get louder then people get angrier and turn criticism into verbal attacks and insults.

Step 3) Any response that's not exactly what the player base wants to hear (IE: massive forgiveness rewards plus immediate action) results in the D3/Demi post being seen as fuel to the fire which leads to shut down.

I hated the Boss Rush as much as anyone but the fact that they responded to concerns and told us how they were going to handle it SHOULD have been enough. Obviously we would have LIKED to have more but we aren't entitled to it. I like to think that if players remained purely constructive, patient and civil in their feedback that we would get through those situations without locked threads.

JHawkInc

babinro wrote:

I hated the Boss Rush as much as anyone but the fact that they responded to concerns and told us how they were going to handle it SHOULD have been enough. Obviously we would have LIKED to have more but we aren't entitled to it. I like to think that if players remained purely constructive, patient and civil in their feedback that we would get through those situations without locked threads.

That's the problem, though. They didn't respond to concerns. They acknowledged that concerns existed. They thanked us for those concerns. But they didn't actually respond to them. If we expected them to drive over and talk about the situation, they basically drove by, saw us standing outside, and gave a thumbs up without rolling the window down or slowing down the car.

The players certainly aren't entitled to everything they want, but the devs aren't entitled to our money, either. And when one side steps up and says "we want this business transaction to be more agreeable for the both of us, let's talk about stuff" and the other side basically ignores them and operates as if no one said anything, it's a little hard to foster the type of civil feedback you're talking about.

kidicarus

A few thoughts:

(1) Are only millenials entitled? Why do you use "entitled" as shorthand for an opinion with which you do not agree? This seems like a lazy insult.

(2) 8 or 9 people from Groot made it through round 8? You must have ad 30-40 or more players reach that level in prior boss fights. Scoring was down significantly across the board. And this is just one example of the devs trying to make the game significantly harder than it has been in the past without changing the mechanics that punish losses. Right or wrong, that seems like a significant enough change to the game that it is worthy of some comment from the devs (to say nothing of the various scoring bugs that affected some people).

(3) It's great that you are happy with what you got from the event and don't want an explanation (objectively, I think Boss Rush actually offered significantly less iso and fewer tokens than normal pve events. But some very small percentage of players like you and me finished round 7 and got two peggy covers. So we basically traded a lot of stuff for an extra 4* cover). But what does that have to do with my opinion? If you think the event was good and I think it was bad, then great, we should have a discussion about why we each feel that way. But Demi/d3 are just shutting the whole topic down. That seems stupid to me.

(4) Look through my posts and you will see that I go out of my way to thank HiFi for his work on the boards at just about every opportunity. I try very hard to be polite, even when leveling strong criticism against the devs. So I guess we agree on that part of your post. But thanks for setting up a strawman of me as a whiny, entitled millenial who just wants to attack the mean devs!

Don't know why you'd want to respond to my post in a PM. Yes calling you entitled is lazy short hand.

But - there's already 42 pages of feedback. Don't think anyone has anything new to add.

Your earlier thread telling devs to hurry up and give a response was pretty lame. They said they were collating feedback - that sounds like a fair comment to me.

I don't really understand what you're trying to achieve by opening another new thread to complain about the 42 page thread and your previous thread getting closed.

El Satanno

kidicarus wrote:

But - there's already 42 pages of feedback. Don't think anyone has anything new to add.

Your earlier thread telling devs to hurry up and give a response was pretty lame. They said they were collating feedback - that sounds like a fair comment to me.

I don't really understand what you're trying to achieve by opening another new thread to complain about the 42 page thread and your previous thread getting closed.

How much time do you think they need to collate feedback, then? Especially if, as you have suggested, no one has anything new to add? I'm not all worked up over it by any means but I can empathize with the frustration. It's been what, almost two weeks now, and we haven't received anything substantial. You say entitled, I (and OP, apparently) say reconfirming expectations. If nothing else, this new thread serves as a forget-me-not.

rc35

Vhailorx wrote:

We basically have two levers to pull when it comes to the game, we can spend/not spend, and we can make public comments on the game.

I'm using both levers (and I hope I'm not alone): as a result of Boss Rush & the poor communication around it, I'm not putting any more money into this game until I feel the devs have demonstrated that they deserve it (they haven't yet), and posting on the forum like this.
(And to make my position clear, I think Boss Rush could work as an event IF it gets heavily tweaked in the right ways, and I'll be happy to start putting some money into the game again IF I feel better disposed towards the devs.)