Community and Communication

As nobody will be able to deny, we do have quite the mixed track record when it comes to communication between Uber Entertainment and this very community. While I certainly wouldn't call it a disaster, we've seen our fair share of animosity and backlash.

I just finished watching this video and wanted to point it out to everyone, especially to the folks at Uber:

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In my opinion, it discusses a very interesting approach to communicating with and gathering feedback from an online community. Especially the latter part about external communication might be of particular interest. Either way, I'd like to encourage you to spend the time and actually watch it all the way through.

While not necessarily applicable to Uber Entertainment in general and PA in particular, Valve certainly knows what they're doing and taking a leaf out of their book might not be the worst idea.

very interesting, thanks for linking.

That was a really great video thought we do need to keep in mind that it mostly focuses on communication in the short run up to a big content release.

It did make me realize that PA had a good chance of adapting TF2's model almost completely because of the way things like the Stretch goals were structured. The things like Improved Naval and all that weren't really "vital" to the core functionality of the game, instead they were more like additional modules. It's easy to see how things like Naval and Water planets would have made a great content pack to the core PA Game some months after release. Unfortunately only hindsight is 20/20 but I think we might still see this type of things show up down the road, especially for the things that haven't received a lot of focus yet like Gas Giants/Orbital and what not.

Mike

I haven't watched the video yet, but I'd honestly say that valve have some of the worst PR around.
They make real good games and all but wow, do they like to keep their fans in the dark regarding just about everything.

if you watch the video you may understand why.

I think it's all about context, as I said, the video focuses on Marketing/PR/Communication in regards to Big Content Updates over anything else. In that Context I think it is difficult to argue with the results but the biggest things to take away is that Valve is using these opportunities not only to market the upcoming update but also to get ideas for the future as well. I think as long as you keep the context of the video in mind it's a great watch.

Marketing/PR/Communiction is regards to other aspects of the development cycle is a whole different beast.

Mike

It's a pretty interesting idea, I wonder what sort of content updates for PA would have though, new commanders, maybe new unit skins?

Offline mode, molding marketplace, ladder, etc...

Interesting video, thanks for the link.

At first it seems about creating hype around something via carefull use of social engienering. Even microsoft did something for Vista: Create a lot of hype & ship only very limited amounts so you can say "it sold out".
It seems cheap to me: If your points are not convincing on thier own, why make them seem bigger?
But the speaker does raise a valid point of "getting more value out of it". Haven't considered looking at the whole marketing/communication thing this way.

It is of mixed value for PA as it is right now.
On the one hand it is hard to apply right now. Because they told the big things they want to add beforehand. People are not asking wheter there could be a unit cannon or what this unti cannon wreck could be for.
They ask when the unit cannon will be there? When will the new orbital/naval/land/air units arrive? When will X arrive, not what will arrive at point X?
But it is impossible to predict the day something will be ready, wich leaves me only one answer: They had it (mostly) ready all along. They created a buffer of updates where they would start the advertisement of one Update when already having started polishing on it/started working on the next.
So it is basically informing your community late, but also in small "doses" so they get a lot of time to specualte about it.

On the other it seems like they were aware of this, or were recently made aware of it:
Since there are few details about wich units will be in teh final game, this is perhaps the one area it can still be applied to. Lot's of room for speculation.

I think they actually used some of those techniques for the whole Anni-laser. They mentioned "activating lost technolgoy of the metal planets" somewhere, giving room for speculation about what you would get from it. Maybe they even only decided to make it the Death Star Laser we have now after people seemed to want the Death Star Laser.

About letting the Dev team do the communication/not having a seperate community management team:
This is what used to happen actually. With the Videos the devs themself were talking. Nowadays we don't see a lot of it being done anymore.
It seems they are aware of the dangers of external communication and choose to rather not get into it (unless the fix will be in the next build). There needs to be room to change your mind and your own word can bite you in the long run.

Well there are still a bunch of things the game still should have, throwing in a new unit or 2 along side the other things would be a the best way to go about it I think.

Barring that they could try re-structuring and working on things in "Modules" like I described in my first post as well.

Mike

TF 2 has been slowly ruined by badly designed gimmick weapons. They also have killed most of the community servers when they added "quick play" feature and started hosting thousands of their own mediocre servers.

I don't like how he keeps bragging how good they are at managing community yet I am constantly unhappy and frustrated with their actions and design choices. It's really sad that they seem to think that inventing new gimmick weapons is the only thing what keeps people playing the game. Yet it makes me want to play less and less.

As I never tire of saying to people: the actual content of your message is probably less than 20% of what people take away. Delivery is everything.

Imagine if on the PA Kickstarter trailer we hadn't had the pre-vis, and only had a bunch of guys talking about what they hoped to put into the game? Same content, far less effective delivery, I'd put money on that Kickstarter not getting funded.

I've not played TF2 in years, as I am simply not very into shooters in general, but the numbers he shows at the start are pretty obvious "they are doing it right".
Now it may be that some people do not like gimmicks as much, but that has not much to do with the general idea of communication through updates.
Basically the idea laid out in the video is to:

- bundle updates to be big enough for news sites to care. Do not constantly give small bits of information. These quickly bore most people, resulting in less media coverage.
- start media pushes about the updates a few days ahead of release and give people a few bits of information every day until the update actually hits. This way people can keep up with the changes and the moment the update is released people know what they get.
- Make sure to release information in an interesting way. I.e. little comics.
- make sure to inform people of vague ideas during the development of new features in interesting ways, so people start to speculate, base further refinement of the upcoming features on those speculations and ideas.

Imho that can be perfectly applied to PA and some parts of it have already been done for PA.

EDIT:
In fact releasing the server or a navy rebalance or an official mod manager or similar in the future may just be planned to have the effect of such "big updates": Media coverage, people see the game, people buy the game. Profit

Numbers tell how many people play the game, not how good the game is. Sure, they are "doing it right" from business point of view. But that's not what matters to me.

I'm not against updates. Constantly updating the game is a good thing. But in TF's case, they seem to care more about "the idea of constantly updating" than the actual content of the updates. Like adding new weapons "just because". Don't get me wrong though, there are some great updates here and there. But they do not negate the effect of the bad ones.

Which is a fundamental part of sustaining longer support, which is absolutely required to make a good game.
Sure, just "business success" is not enough, but it is the foundation of maybe making a really good game.
The question "good game or not" in the end is a pretty subjective one

You mean money is required to make a good game. Doesn't matter how you get the money.

Doesn't really matter what people like or dislike unless they have a valid reason behind it. I could hate apples because I ate rotten apple as a kid and was traumatized for life. I could love apples because all of my friends love apples. I could think that apples are the best because I simply don't know of any better.

I could reason why I think certain things are bad in TF2 but I'm not going to do that in PA forums.

Well yes, that's what he was saying. It's entirely subjective as to whether a game is good or not. Personally, I LOVE Tf2, so I'd have to disagree.

How can you disagree when I haven't said anything in detail? I mean, it could be that you'd love TF2 even more after the changes I'd propose. But I guess we'll never know.

You and he are looking at different scales here:
He is looking at the macro scale. The total players playing. That is what ultimatively will decide the longelivity of the game. And he has to create this hype to get that effect. The games longelivity is based new content and that the update reaches new and old players.

It was mentioned in another place that moddability is what will give this game longelivity. Mods are Web 2.0 applied to computer games.
That and the increasing scale as computers develop. I wonder how long it takes till we can get the whole solar system inlcuding all moons done (and when we can get it effecively run)

This video did get me closer to understanding that, but it is still something I have to work truly implementing for myself.

This is a fascinating video, and I would recommend that people take the time to watch it. It puts some things in context as to how Uber's communication strategy fits in with the broader "industry wisdom" on the topic. There are two things I would like to point out.

1. Uber has had a stab at some of the things suggested in the video, but the one they really haven't tried yet is the most important - namely directed and transparent polling of the player-base in order to find out what the next priorities for development should be. The video discussed how Valve initially did polls, and how these are the entry level for this kind of feedback. We haven't really had that, unless you count the naming of a few things in the lore. I would really like to see this kind of communication in the future, whether through polls or even metagame systems in order to try and get the most widely representative and engaging feedback possible.

2. Although there are many good points in the video, there is one big issue. Namely, I don't think the "don't tell them what you are going to do" approach works for kickstarter/early-access type games. Developers have to say what their future plans are, because otherwise people have no information to base their backing/purchasing decisions on. As the video pointed out, this will create obligations, non-fulfilment of which will create bad feedback. This requires a different mode of communication and possibly a different style of game development, otherwise it just doesn't work. Unfortunately, this is just a constraint of the kickstarter/early-access funding model. Just as traditional publishers or venture capitalists have strings attached when they fund a game, kickstarter has strings attached too. Developers would be naive to think that the need for high quality communication wasn't one of them.