Communications Impasse

jobob

acescracked wrote:

The forum has become a bastion of negativity. How can you blame any of the devs for not wanting to take time away from any task to come read threads in the General sub forum.

Has it, though? I read these forums almost every day, and I see TONS of helpful posts, great suggestions, and members offering valuable tips and feedback to other members. I see posts thanking the developers, and genuine excitement about new features.

Is there more negativity than any other video game forum I frequent? Yes. Is there less communication from the developer than other other video game forum I frequent? Yes. I do not think that is a coincidence. As David said, I understand that they are a small development team, but I've seen small teams be pros at giving feedback.

While I'm not going to release anyone from being accountable for their actual posts, I do feel like the negativity on this forum is also partially on the developers and the people who manage the forum. So while I understand that it might be "unpleasant" for them to come read threads, it's also important... and them NOT being here only contributes to the negativity.

It really isn't just you. This whole forum has an army of armchair game developers and producers. You guys should all band together, quit your day jobs and start a mobile gaming company. I'll free to play the tinykitty outta it!

...I don't get statements like this. Why mock him or the "army of armchair game developers?" There are people on these forums who genuinely like this game and want to make it better. That's valuable, and that should be appreciated by everyone- the player base and the developers alike- not mocked. Why add to this "bastion of negativity?"

jobob

Linkster79 wrote:

"David wrote:

Moore"]

A couple of folks have mentioned Blizzard as an example for providing an ideal forum environment. Activision Blizzard is a multi-billion dollar company with a staff of employees who do nothing else but maintain the forums. Neither D3 Go! or Demiurge can compete at that level. We are small companies with limited staff doing the best we can within our means.

Activision Blizzard also has a much bigger community and many more IP's to manage, it's all relative to scale. I appreciate that D3 Go! is doing their best within their means but sometimes, especially in business the best needs to be better. Has your organisation considered some sort of continuous improvement program or 5S?

"David wrote:

Moore"]
We always have to prioritize when and where we can focus our attention at any given time.

Does this mean that interacting with the forum is usually low down on the priority list?

"David wrote:

Moore"]
We try to communicate as much as we can and we know it isn't often enough for many. We're always striving to improve on that front.

If possible may you please expand on what strategies for improvement are in place?

"David wrote:

Moore"]
That said, D3 Go! also strives to make the forums a friendly place to hang out where anyone can feel welcome. Insults and trolling and hostile negativity offered in a nonconstructive manner are not welcome. We reserve the right to remove posts or lock threads where we feel it is needed.

Thanks everyone, as always, for providing your thoughts.

Personally I don't think this last part was really necessary. I read this as being passive aggressive, if that was nit the intention then I apologise, tone of words are hard to gauge when written down.

Come on, man. This is the kind of post that is absolutely going to get the opposite of what you want.

The staff posts a genuine response (one of the first in recent memory) and you pick it apart. You are punishing them for doing the thing that they've been asked to do. You should try to reinforce this behavior, not doing the opposite.

Fightmastermpq

jobob wrote:

Linkster79 wrote:

"David wrote:

Moore"]

A couple of folks have mentioned Blizzard as an example for providing an ideal forum environment. Activision Blizzard is a multi-billion dollar company with a staff of employees who do nothing else but maintain the forums. Neither D3 Go! or Demiurge can compete at that level. We are small companies with limited staff doing the best we can within our means.

Activision Blizzard also has a much bigger community and many more IP's to manage, it's all relative to scale. I appreciate that D3 Go! is doing their best within their means but sometimes, especially in business the best needs to be better. Has your organisation considered some sort of continuous improvement program or 5S?

"David wrote:

Moore"]
We always have to prioritize when and where we can focus our attention at any given time.

Does this mean that interacting with the forum is usually low down on the priority list?

"David wrote:

Moore"]
We try to communicate as much as we can and we know it isn't often enough for many. We're always striving to improve on that front.

If possible may you please expand on what strategies for improvement are in place?

"David wrote:

Moore"]
That said, D3 Go! also strives to make the forums a friendly place to hang out where anyone can feel welcome. Insults and trolling and hostile negativity offered in a nonconstructive manner are not welcome. We reserve the right to remove posts or lock threads where we feel it is needed.

Thanks everyone, as always, for providing your thoughts.

Personally I don't think this last part was really necessary. I read this as being passive aggressive, if that was nit the intention then I apologise, tone of words are hard to gauge when written down.

Come on, man. This is the kind of post that is absolutely going to get the opposite of what you want.

The staff posts a genuine response (one of the first in recent memory) and you pick it apart. You are punishing them for doing the thing that they've been asked to do. You should try to reinforce this behavior, not doing the opposite.

Just downvote it and move on dude.

BassMuffinFIve

"David wrote:

Moore"]I'd like to wade in here with a few points.

The publishers and developers of this game find the forums very helpful. We get a ton of great feedback from you (very engaged players) that has often helped guide our decisions and led to many improvements in the game. If we don't have community forums, allowing you to comment on what is currently on your mind, then we lose that valuable feedback. We don't want to lose that. That's why we've had forums for the past three years and plan on continuing to provide them.

A couple of folks have mentioned Blizzard as an example for providing an ideal forum environment. Activision Blizzard is a multi-billion dollar company with a staff of employees who do nothing else but maintain the forums. Neither D3 Go! or Demiurge can compete at that level. We are small companies with limited staff doing the best we can within our means. We always have to prioritize when and where we can focus our attention at any given time.

We try to communicate as much as we can and we know it isn't often enough for many. We're always striving to improve on that front. Even if we aren't actively commenting, both D3 Go! and Demiurge team members are reading your comments on a daily basis. In addition to daily emails and numerous conference calls with the teams, part of my job is to gather up important forum user comments into a weekly community sentiment report which gets sent around. If there's a hot topic in the community chances are good it is being discussed among the devs and pubs.

That said, D3 Go! also strives to make the forums a friendly place to hang out where anyone can feel welcome. Insults and trolling and hostile negativity offered in a nonconstructive manner are not welcome. We reserve the right to remove posts or lock threads where we feel it is needed.

Thanks everyone, as always, for providing your thoughts.

Great post! Please let this be the Post that starts the communication between devs and players again. End the silence!

That being said, David, is there any way you can look into what happened with the Devil Dinosaur PvP event? Myself and several others got zero iso from playing this (during the double iso anniversary), and after opening several tickets, all I have gotten is the run around. Not even a "sorry". This is the exact kind of thing that needs to be addressed and solved. Communication is a great start, but action is even better, and that is where you guys are really really really struggling. Boss Rush, for example. I guess you could say you guys "communicated", if posting a nothing statement is considered communication. But where was the action?

I will say here what I said to the CS rep who "helped" me with my ticket. Acknowledging an issue does not equal solving it.

Thanks!

Linkster79

jobob wrote:

Come on, man. This is the kind of post that is absolutely going to get the opposite of what you want.

The staff posts a genuine response (one of the first in recent memory) and you pick it apart. You are punishing them for doing the thing that they've been asked to do. You should try to reinforce this behavior, not doing the opposite.

Genuine questions, helpful feedback, no bad language and no trolling or flaming. Are we not allowed to post in this manner?

I got a forum warning last time I tried to make a constructive post and expect another this time.

broll

BassMuffinFIve wrote:

Communication is a great start, but action is even better, and that is where you guys are really really really struggling. Boss Rush, for example. I guess you could say you guys "communicated", if posting a nothing statement is considered communication. But where was the action?

I would argue that it was communicated, but it wasn't communicated well. They told us it was coming, but gave very few details which let expectations run wild. I think had they said up front that it was not an alliance team up, and that the difficult would be hard and you should expect to lose more often then win it would have softened it somewhat.

That being said the expect to lose part was the other biggest part and this was more frustrating because there was a major blow-up about the same thing with the same event last year. This makes it feel like we aren't being listened to when they seemed to ignore the feedback/backlash that happen previously.

So in summary, what needs to happen to take communication to the next level:
- Improve communication (better clarity, sooner, more frequent, ex.)
- Listen to our feedback (especially when there is a chronic outcry) and if you can't/choose not to at least explain why.

BlackSheep101

Linkster79 wrote:

jobob wrote:

Come on, man. This is the kind of post that is absolutely going to get the opposite of what you want.

The staff posts a genuine response (one of the first in recent memory) and you pick it apart. You are punishing them for doing the thing that they've been asked to do. You should try to reinforce this behavior, not doing the opposite.

Genuine questions, helpful feedback, no bad language and no trolling or flaming. Are we not allowed to post in this manner?

I got a forum warning last time I tried to make a constructive post and expect another this time.

Criticizing David for reinforcing their policy of maintaining a non-threatening community environment was obnoxious and ungracious. I was initially moved to say something, but then saw it was you who posted it and went, "Oh, Linkster's being Linkster." That you really see nothing wrong with your post is telling.

_RiO_

BlackSheep101 wrote:

Criticizing David for reinforcing their policy of maintaining a non-threatening community environment was obnoxious and ungracious.

It came off quite ungracious, but I'd honestly have to agree with the core sentiment of it:
The developer and/or publisher should divert more of their attention towards communicating with the playerbase and towards fallout mitigation.

If things go south during a high-profile event; do something about it. Announce that you're aware of the problems but for fairness' sake don't want to intervene in a running event. Toss all players that committed playtime to the event an additional free bone as an apology immediately afterwards. (But maybe don't announce that part beforehand or you'd get people jumping into events just to claim the bonus apology.)

This doesn't need to take a lot of time.
Quite frankly; if they can manage to attach a crapload of metrics and data harvesting to the game itself, they should be able to instrument the forum boards as well and have reporting/notification tools when certain threads 'go hot'. Outsource to a cloud service that does semantic keyword extraction and look for key turns of phrase that indicate things going sour. Prioritise on those and boom; you know where to focus your attention.

This is a one-time investment, big-time payoff in the long run.

chaos01 wrote:

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.

That goes both ways though.

Plenty of companies that produce and/or exploit digital media also capitalize on the ethereal nature of the internet by providing bad service and then ignoring complaints or even outright squelching them on the central support forum that is under their control; endlessly stretching out the time it takes to reply to support requests; collecting tons of non-disclosed data on customers and selling that to third parties; etc. All in the comfort that no-one is going to drive up to their storefront to give them a piece of their mind, and all in the comfort that a lawsuit is basically out of reach for nine tenths of their potential customer base around the world.

I'm not saying D3Go is that kind of company, I'm saying that the internet is just as much an enabler for trolls as it is for companies that are like that.

Though, what D3Go should take note of and be worried about, is that continued lack of communication and antagonistic replies to situations that run out of control due to this lack of communication are feeding the image that they are such a company and that at some point or other this is going to reach a critical tipping point where their publicly held reputation will turn unsalvagable.

kidicarus

jobob wrote:

kidicarus wrote:

A few thoughts:...

Don't know why you'd want to respond to my post in a PM.

Did you just post his PM? I don't think that's cool to post PMs from other people.

I'd rather not waste time arguing with a troll in PMs is my reasoning. He raised some points and rather than address them without the PM and look like a total loony, I provided context.

Unless there's a disclaimer that a message is only for the intended recipient, as far as I'm concerned its fair game. After all, he is happy to post his own PM to david which presents him in a positive light and puts David in a somewhat unfair position, I don't see the harm in posting a PM which is also somewhat less flattering.

DFiPL

"David wrote:

Moore"]I'd like to wade in here with a few points.

The publishers and developers of this game find the forums very helpful. We get a ton of great feedback from you (very engaged players) that has often helped guide our decisions and led to many improvements in the game. If we don't have community forums, allowing you to comment on what is currently on your mind, then we lose that valuable feedback. We don't want to lose that. That's why we've had forums for the past three years and plan on continuing to provide them.

David, two things.

First, thanks for taking the time to chime in.

Second, I bolded the thing that I think was (unconsciously) the most revealing part of your post.

The forums provide the community with the ability to give feedback, but there's seldom much in the way of a timely response beyond "Hey we've got your feedback we'll look at tweaking something in the future."

All of the quality-of-life changes in recent months? Fantastic! There also wasn't much official communication about them until nearly right before they happened. Which, by itself, isn't necessarily the worst thing. You don't want to get hopes up and then have to delay implementation and so on.

But when there's poor communication on new event rollouts, in terms of basic things like "how this works," and then the event itself either doesn't align with the expectations the community developed based on what information it DID have, or the event seems fundamentally broken in some way and the response from the developers is nearly always "thanks for the feedback, but we're not actually going to say anything else," then what you have are these long stretches of negative feedback loops where the players get angrier and angrier, punctuated by occasional bright spots of 'holy heck THIS is awesome!'

But the reason for the negative feedback loops is that there's no communication coming from the developers to the players, no sense that "yes we recognize that this is a source of major frustration and we're looking into ways to make it right."

The forums are valuable for the devs because they can glean feedback from the playerbase that way, but I can't help but think the tenor of that feedback - and possibly its constructiveness - might be positively altered by better and timelier communication from the developers.

And please don't take that as a personal attack, David, because you and the other community managers have been top shelf. But the developers are kind of throwing you to the wolves a little bit because there's plenty of take but not a lot of 'give' on the feedback back-and-forth. You end up facing the sharpened knives because the developers don't give you anything beyond the most boilerplate responses when, in the words of Deadpool, "**** goes sideways in the most colossal way imaginable."

jobob

kidicarus wrote:

I'd rather not waste time arguing with a troll in PMs is my reasoning. He raised some points and rather than address them without the PM and look like a total loony, I provided context.

Unless there's a disclaimer that a message is only for the intended recipient, as far as I'm concerned its fair game. After all, he is happy to post his own PM to david which presents him in a positive light and puts David in a somewhat unfair position, I don't see the harm in posting a PM which is also somewhat less flattering.

If it's not worth your time, ignore the PM. Or if you feel the need to discuss it and add context, you can do what Vhailorx said and just mention that it's a response to a PM... I think we are smart enough to follow. And note that Vhailorx only posted HIS PM, not David's, which is completely different.

And if you want to claim that Vhailorx is stubborn and extremely verbose, I won't fight you, lol... But he is about as far from a troll as you can get. Everything he posts is genuine and trying to help. The "troll" insult isn't really fair.

And no, there was no disclaimer in his PM. I just see it as a point of etiquette. PRIVATE messages seem that the privacy part is implied.

Punisher5784

"David wrote:

Moore"]
In addition to daily emails and numerous conference calls with the teams, part of my job is to gather up important forum user comments into a weekly community sentiment report which gets sent around. If there's a hot topic in the community chances are good it is being discussed among the devs and pubs.

I am curious if any of my posts made the weekly report for a meeting. When I came back from retirement was there a resounding "oh no Punisher is back"

Regardless, this is cool to hear. I enjoy when a player posts something on the forums and then we actually see the change made, such as the time a player made a post about Luke Cage's animation and the change was made fairly quickly. This is a great example that the devs do read our posts even if it does not always feel like it.