Devs opinion

So after launch and allot of discussions about reviews and opinions of backers and players, I start to wonder what Uber thinks about the points being made in the reviews and on the forums? We haven't heard anything in a while from you guys.

I think the main issues are:

Tutorial,
Planetary invasions,
Galactic wars improvements,
Released but definitely not done, (the real reason for release, not the double agenda talk!)
UI improvements,
Offline mode,

care to comment on this Uber?

I suppose developers commended about it more times than about any other aspect of game...

True dat, soon, but maybe there is new information to share.,

I think we all know what they're going to say.

#inb4 flamewar

>Uses INB4 with a hashtag.
>New*** doesn't know how to greentext.

(This isn't serious )

I seriously doubt they will say anything. Uber have been keeping rather quiet lately as anything they do say appears to make things worse...

- If they say "we're working on it" everyone cries "when is it released?!"

- If they say "we will release it in 2 weeks" everyone cries "why haven't you released it already, you should have waited until now for official release etc etc" + if they miss that deadline people go even more off the deep end.

- If they say "we're delaying it for now, it will get released later, the technical reasons for this decision are x y z..." people will also go crazy (look at the fuss over the ladder / competitive features, Jon gave us their decision with an explanation of why and then got told "wrong!" by the community- at the end of the day we DON'T have the right to say that to them, we can disagree politely but once they have said "this is what we are doing" we have to respect that).

The *only* safe thing for them to say is "here is the offline mode", which they can only say when its done. We keep hearing the 'experts' exclaiming that all Uber need to do is communicate, however we've also seen what happens when they do and the answer isn't *exactly* what we want to hear. I rather sympathise with them on this one. The thing that is really winding me up lately are the comments that anyone who doesn't agree with the angry mob is obviously a 'fan boy' because Uber are obviously bad / wrong / cheats / whatever baseless accusation they care to make. The fact that Uber have delivered what they set out to with a limited budget and have been pretty straight forward all the way through falls on deaf ears due to *insert pet issue here* not being resolved / implemented immediately when requested.

*sigh* not allot can change this though unfortunately /rant.

I am not quite sure about that. If I go at the topic "offline play" from the made up perspective of a person who only backed PA and didn't follow the community as much then I am pretty sure it can easily be perceived as "Uber silently removed offline mode". Yes there are posts somewhere in this forums, but nothing big easy to be found. The easiest to find thing I see is the steam thread from SXX: http://steamcommunity.com/app/233250/discussions/0/616187204015500123/

While that's nice it is a thread by a moderator not directly employed by Uber who quotes a rather "old" post from neutrino hidden in some discussion. Far from an official announcement.
For a person who backed a game that stated "host your own server (will be available on release)" and then downloads the game on release and has to find that the game does not have that feature that looks not exactly good.
Add in a potentially rather negative person and you have one more potential troll on the steam forums.

I hate to say it but maybe the old livestreams have raised the expectations of the people that bought this game, or where going to buy it later, a little too high and if your blaming those people for that its not gonna solve your problem of people endlessly asking for the obvious.

Nobody was questioning anything said in those livestreams till now right? And then you suddenly realise there is no 40 man drop in drop out, no offline, no underwater bases or submarines, no unit wrecks, no multiplayer GW, no over 100 different units, no unitcannon, no differen nukes and all the other crazy stuff from livestreams. If you only checked livestreams every now and then and never visit the site or the forum, you believe all of that and therefor you will ask these questions. There is nothing wrong with that if you keep a decent tone.

I think it wouldnt be bad if uber did a livestream about everything they still want to do and everything they can't or won't do so people will realise whats up with these things and stop asking the same thing over and over and over again.

Also, some of these problems are big for 1 person but peanuts for the other.

Hmm, possibly the best course of action would be to provide an update on offline in an official Kickstarter update (i.e. not a thread open to debate as that really didn't help with matchmaking / ladders- p.s. thanks for getting that sorted on PA Stats Colin!)...

That would at least give weight to those of us trying to calm down the flaming a bit- still as I mentioned in my previous post I don't think that anything less than 'offline is released' will calm things significantly...

I don't care what the people on the extremes of the spectrum think about a progress update. All I know is that a progress update is better than no progress update, for someone like me.

Yeah, people like you and me aren't the problem though.... A few very ignorant but nonetheless vocal idiots can (and have imo) ruined the otherwise excellent communication we had between Uber and the community. The 'I don't care if your working on it, I paid money and therefore I'm entitled to it and demand it now or I want a refund' type comments start cropping up when they openly come out and say "yeah we're working on that now, we'll get it to you as soon as we can".

Edit: It's a shame we can't have a special invite only sub-forum for the non idiots where we could actually have a sensible discussion about some of this with Uber.

It's impossible to make a idiot-proof sub forum, society keep making better idiots =P

That being said, "fans" comes from "fanatics". As soon as you create a fanbase, there's gonna be extremists in there.
Those fans will be quick to buy the "Extreme plus universal Edition" at 999$ but will be just as quick to volunteer to be the firing squad at your execution if you disappoint them in the slightest.

Uber with their kick *** kickstarter really set the Hype bar High, and while they are still working on the game and making it better, the whole "release" thing sparked even more controversy than "the steam early access" event ~1 year ago.

Personally the actual 1.0 can still be years away. I just hope that the bad press won't prevent it from happening. I was always in favor of them taking their time and pop something epic. Hell, I backed Grim Dawn YEARS ago, it's still in developpement, but it's looking sweeeet. (I only have the release key, I haven't purchased the beta ;_; )

Here's the thing, the problem isn't that expectations were formed, after all, anything but complete silence acts as a basis for forming expectations. The problem is that Uber has done very little to actively manage the expectations formed by the community, and by "community", I'm not talking about just this forum, it includes everyone Uber has ever communicated to. It seems to me that Uber feels that no expectations were formed, or rather they feel what we have are baseless assumptions and so didn't really keep us up to date on how things were going until past they point they seemingly could have told us.

The problem isn't that people's expectations are wrong or too high or anything like that, it's that our expectations were based on old information and stopped being applicable and it's entirely outside of our control. In addition, as wrongcat likes to say, how information is delivered matters more than the information itself. When the community has to drag answer out of Uber Employees(on purpose or by accident) or worse when we discover something on our own it's easy to see why the community is so concerned.

The solution thought isn't to try and cut the community out, that only makes the situation worse in my opinion. Yes, Uber's development method doesn't involved detailed plans. Regardless of all that they are still making decisions on a regular basis, if anything they're making more decisions more often compared to a more "standard" method which does mean things are going to change and change often as things are tried, work or don't work. This makes it all the more important to manage the communities' expectations as the game organically develops through those decisions.

Is that an easy thing to do? Depends on your mindset. I love showing WIPs and getting feedback for my art and whatnot in pretty much anyway possible, so for me it'd be easy. For something more used to only showing more completed works or only communicating something in very specific "theaters" I can easily see it being a 'scary' thing to do.

Mike

I strongly suspect the devs are just knuckling down, doing what needs to be done, and not making any comments! That being said, I would really like some kind of short statement from Uber to address the discontent in the community, particularly among the backers, about delayed features.

During release, I wasn't actually that bothered about missing features, but as time has dragged on lack of official match-making has been quite frustrating. I use PA Stats' matchmaking system implemented by @cola_colin (which is great!), but still I find it very hard to find an opponent of similar skill level who gives me a good, fun, challenging match. I either stomp all over a noob (highly frustrating introduction for them to the game...) or get stomped by one of the top tier players. This is simply due to a small player pool. An official system could be used by ALL players.

I've mentioned before that I worry that the early release will lead to poorer reviews which might well lead to poorer sales. Meaning less players to share in this game, less people to play with, and shortening the lifespan of the game. So, yeah. An official statement would be nice. But I wouldn't be surprised if we don't hear anything until the next patch!

I don't want to sound sour though. I've been having a lot of fun playing PA, and hats off to Uber for making a great game-engine and game, allowing for mods, stirring soundtrack, etc. I just want to know what, exactly, is going on.

I think the other issue is that it depends *what it is* your doing how easy this stuff is. Varrak for example has been very communicative regarding is work on both the graphics engine and memory usage. I think though that is partly because this information is fairly 'safe' to share- no one is going to complain about the game getting faster, or looking prettier and not many people are going to criticize *how* he's achieving that. Sorrian does similar with his work on the AI.

Other areas are trickier though, I mean allot of the questions people want answers to are related to 'higher level' strategy which is something most companies would be reluctant to share. It's a shame we can't talk to the guy actually working on the offline mode a bit about the implementation and what's happening (a bit like Varrak's various threads)- that wouldn't need to give away anything specific about 'when' or 'why'- just the 'what'. It would also provide people some irrefutable evidence that *something* is happening without anything too official being required. It's probably too much of a hot topic for that now though unfortunately...

I don't think an official ladder would be much better- as more people play on the ladder, and also as *you* play more games, your (and their) ratings will get better tuned and your likely to get better games. Starting out on a ladder (even an official one) will always be unbalanced as you get an arbitrary 'middle' rating. A real pro player could come back with the same rating, as does a total noob. I'm not sure having the ladder available to everyone is going to make all that much difference- only a fairly small % of players are really that bothered about 1 v 1 type play, so I think the majority of users will avoid it irrespective. Those that want it probably have the initiative to go and find PA:Stats. There are already several hundred people on it so it's getting there, give it another few weeks!

Because I can tell when I use PA Stats match-making that I'm waiting a few minutes for a game, meaning that it could not immediately find a player of my skill level. It stands to reason that the more people in the player poool, the more likely it is you'll find a good match (unless perhaps, you're really good or really bad!). I've played lots of games now so my rating should have stabilised.

Also I think a lot more people would play 1v1s if there was officially support for it. E.g. in the main menu, click on Multiplayer, click on '1v1 match-making'. Boom. Who wouldn't try that?! A lot of people just flat out don't bother with mods. Doesn't mean they wouldn't use a matchmaking system for a game. I mean, after all, who wouldn't want to play against a similarily skilled player? That's in everyone's best interest in order to have fun playing the game. No one likes getting stomped and stomping noobs/lesser skilled players isn't really fun either.

Ultimately I'm just saying an official ladder/match-making system would be a good thing for the game.

If PAMM was available in-game (like in civ5) it would get used by the 'norms' a lot more.

TotalBiscuit published yesterday an update about SpaceBase DF-9, which has been released, jumping straight from an early alpha, into 1.0. Developers said the game is fine as it is, and it is what they envisioned for it. Which apparently isn't what they promised during the Early Access campaign on Steam.

Now, this sounds a bit like a deja-vu, doesn't it?

In fact it led me to a consideration. If a company pledge for money to the classic investors (or financial institutions), it surely holds to clearly communicate to them about the status of the work, progresses, roadmap, and so on.

The investors (if they're not stupid) at some point make sure to get their money back, and often a sweet cut on top. They may not care too much about the future of the developers if they lost hope in the project.

On the other hand, when a company pledge money on Kickstarter, backers basically accept that the project may fail and never seen the final stage. By this perspective, Backers might have little to complain about what PA is right now, and what will be in the future. They get what they get, it was part of the risk they undertook.

You simply would expect the developers to clearly communicate with their Backers since, technically, they are your investors.

But, and here is the catch, when a company pre-sell the product as Early Access, then it is bond to deliver what has been promised, 'cos an early access is just that: a pre-sale. You're not asking people to finance your project. You are pre-selling it.

Ok, now here I sounds like a grumpy cat. But that's in short what TotalBiscuit says in the video here below. And it made me think quite a bit, and re-evaluating how I see the Early Access thing vs Kickstarter.

Tbh the problem I see with Uber's current level of communication is *NOT* about people who watch livestreams and read the forums. We regular forum goers knew the server would be delayed since weeks already. The issue is people who do not bother with the forums at all. There are a TON of such people. They never got to know the server would be delayed until they downloaded the release patch and found that the feature that was promised years earlier for release was missing. That's a letdown for them right at that moment that and since Uber made no official update "hey guys, we're sorry but feature X has been delayed because Y" it can easily look like Uber doesn't actually care.
Yes I know Uber does care, but people who are not as much "into" PA do not know what about some little red post made somewhere in a thread even I can't locate with doing a google search on the forums.
Most reviews who had the con of "no servers" didn't even mention that servers are being developed right now. If Uber had made an official kickstarter update explaining why no server is there and that they know the server is important and are working hard on them then I am pretty sure most reviews at least would've stated that as well.

About constant tiny updates about the progress of features: Watching the steam video that @yrrep linked actually made me change my mind about this. It is not a good idea to constantly share all tiny steps that are made. It is much better to do a big update, one big enough to make it interesting for news sites to share. One big update every 2 month or so that ends up on games news sites is much better than one small update every 2 day that is only visible to people already playing the game. Uber has to sell the game after all.
Now we existing players (and that is bad for the game. While we existing players already payed our money it still stands that a game with lots of active players is more attractive and tends to get more new players to buy it!) will feel bad if there is no communication whatsoever in the 2 month between the updates. To solve this, and to get community feedback into the development process, it needs a few smaller updates in between that share the ideas that Uber has for a new feature in a non final way. That way the community can start making up ideas on the feature and has fun with that while Uber can read those ideas and formulate the final implementation under the influence of the community.

However I think this kind of "big update every 2 month with a few teasers for discussions" is not good for a feature that is "late" like servers. People go nuts about that feature missing, so lots of small updates probably would not be wrong for it.

At least that's what my current idea of "good communication from a developer developing a game as a service" is.