Community and Communication

Ideally it's not just hype. If you deliver a shoddy product, hyping it up beforehand is quite likely to backfire. Polished products and updates on the other hand can only benefit from increased exposure and encouraging user enthusiasm. Keeping your user base engaged is hardly a bad thing, especially if you can deliver on your promises.

Well, even if we roughly know what's coming, we don't know all too much about the specifics. For all we know, Uber haven't made up their mind yet about a lot of it. That probably leaves them enough time to drop some hints and gather more or less unbiased feedback, if community feedback really is something Uber values.

To be honest, I quite miss the more technical streams. I don't think that's something they necessarily need to keep their hands off, if the information is communicated properly. They probably could come up with quite a bit for stuff already in the game without giving away surprises, creating new obligations or risking their credibility.

I guess they could do quite a lot to include the community in the development process. Encouraging and listening to early, unbiased feedback is just one of them. From the top of my head I could think of a few initiatives: incorporating popular and polished mods into the vanilla game, having people design and name new units (possibly for now factory types, spiderbots, hovercraft anyone?), highlight hand-crafted maps once that's available, creating new map features (possibly for Biomes v2), a Commander of the Month/Year contest for community supplied models. Plenty of ways to keep the community engaged/motivated/distracted.

That approach indeed isn't suited for Kickstarter campaigns, where you need to make certain promises and outline your plans to actually get funded. Then again, now that the game is released, they could at least think about changing their approach to communication, if only for new stuff we're not yet aware of. Not creating new obligations and risking credibility unnecessarily is something Uber could only benefit from.

Sorry to call you out on that, but it's something I noticed recently as a good example of what might be called bad communication. Stuff like that discourages people from discussing a prominent topic due to perceived futility and skews opinions. Also, it makes it harder for you to change your opinion (which is a healthy and natural thing) without risking credibility later on.

How so?? He clarifies Uber's vision as a game-ender rather than a balanced, counterable feature. Then he specifically says he "appreciates the feedback", "likes the conversation" and "please continue". How does that discourage people from discussing it?

Uber is now more like Valve. They are pretty quiet and then suddenly things start rolling ending in an update

I also noticed them trying Valve's way of advertising. With Gamma they did a 3 day update cycle, like get some bits on day 1, some on day 2 and all on day 3. This was also discussed in one of the steamdevdays vids.

Might want to read the post again Zaphod, he said they view it as "-that we still view the metal planet laser as a balanced, game-ending weapon." ;p

Breaking the comment down thought it comes in 2 primary Parts;

1. Feed back is appreciated
2. It's fine/balanced as/is

1 is nothing new, that's been said the start of the Kickstarter and 2 is stating the facts as they see it. It's not that he directly discouraged discussion, but by pointing out the fact that they are perfectly confident with thier implementation it suggests that they won't be making changes based on Consumer feedback, thus making it any discussion surrounding the balance of it pretty superfluous.

It's easy to see how it could be interpreted more along the lines of "We're the game designers here and we know what's best." with the rest being there for tact.

Mike

I don't think it was meant that way, but I thought exactly that as well after reading the post.

I think my point KNight is that people want some sort of balance that means you have extra time to stop people after they start lasering things.

It's balanced as it is - you counter it by not letting them build the laser. You have to not get smashed, have loaded antinukes at every catalyst, and have a lot of orbital defense at the North pole to try and build a metal laser successfully.

Ultimately Uber have to make design decisions on the way things are implemented. There will always be people who like that implementation, and people who think it should be different. Uber can't appease everyone and have to do it one way at the end. But that's what modding is for, right?

You might want to work out exactly what you mean then, because you're flipping back and forth between calling it balanced and unbalanced, so which is it?

Of course, in the end Uber is confident it the it being balanced so we might as well just go along with it.

Mike

Omg thank you for daring to say what we all feel!

jesus christ that's a terrible way to break something to a community.

I don't intend to claim Brad wanted to actively discourage discussion or depreciate people's opinions in this case. Nonetheless, that statement may be seen to imply Uber is not interested to listen to that particular line of feedback.

Obviously, Uber makes all the decisions, there's nothing wrong with that. On the other hand, they might just as well stifle valuable feedback by implying (intentionally or not) that those decisions are final.

Everything they communicate might be misconstrued at some point if they're not careful. If they change the Annihilaser now, people will jump at the opportunity to claim Uber don't know the first thing about balance. They make it harder for themselves to change their opinions than it needs to be. We all benefit from it if they retain those options.

Of course they're free to disregard external input or at least to make that impression. PA is their pet project and they decide where to go with it. If they want it to be a commercially viable product that might be a different story though.

I don't think you understood what yrrep said. At least it seems to be something different from what I understood.

As I understand it (and I saw the same issue),
It was not that they said it is balanced. It is not that they consider it balanced. It is not that they said it here.
The only possible problem is that the text gives "word of god" on the matter. Once you say "X is working as intended" people will cry & whine when you do something they think goes agaisnt it (like giving it a cooldown or increasing build time/metal cost, making it work differently). It does not mater how valid and nesseasry that change is, but that it goes against what was said.
You should never confirm your position so much that you cannot change your decision without loosing credibility. There must always be a certain amount of "flexbility" in what you say.

So this thread was just closed but I feel like some of the discussion happening there (with a couple of exceptions) was actually headed in quite a positive direction. There's definitely a conversation to be had on the topic of communication, because I feel there is a bit of a gap between Uber and the community on the issue.

However, the conversation needs to be had on the topic of communication itself and not individual people.

So if we could continue the discussion and suggestions over here, maintaining the positive and constructive tone and without discussing individuals in the process, I think we can make a bit of headway.

Yeah, don't say anything bad about Brad or he'll bradlock the thread, no matter how constructive and important the thread is.

Essentially you're saying if that thread was exactly the same but didn't say Brad's name it wouldn't have been locked? That's really messed up.

Not really. A thread criticising the pathfinding is acceptable, but a thread saying that Elijah doesn't know what he's doing is not. Same thing.

Since that was locked. I'll move my post over here.

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Agreed. There is much to be desired when it comes to communication from Uber.

One of the things Uber keeps on saying over and over and over is "we're working on things and stuff and it'll be cool and you should be hyped." No. That doesn't work. Maybe it is alright once, but it's all Uber does.

One of the main selling points of PA is that it is going to be updated over the long run. If that is a main selling feature we should know what is coming. It keeps the community happy, engaged, and is a sales pitch.

Many of the bad reviews could have been less bad if Uber had made any form of attempt to communicate. Tell peopple that offline, server, etc is coming. Most people don't read the forums! A post from brad on page 2 of a community member asking what's going on is not acceptable.

There are so many basic things in regards to communication, sales, promotion, and the like, that Uber should be doing and isn't. They hardly post on social networks! Easy way to get sales is to post on facebook about some cool video, mod, screenshot, etc. People share it, people see it, people buy the game. It's social marketing 101.


But I digress.

Uber. Communicate more.

YYou have an incredibly dedicated fanbase. You have a fanbase that most game development companies would die for, yet you do nothing to capitalize on this. You ban people for asking questions. You troll heavily invested fans. Youu don't take advantage of the raw power of a dedicated community.

Lets keep this off individuals, reading through that thread *I* think it reads like a bit of a personal attack on 'he who shall not be named' I think it's understandable why it was locked.

What *was* useful from the thread, is ideas on how to actually move forward in a positive way. I've always been a believer that when something goes wrong the first response should always be:

"how do with fix this?" and NOT "who do we blame"

I can see the point of this, but it raises a question. What if the way to fix a problem is to remove the person who is to blame?

Suppose, hypothetically, that there was a genuine and consistent problem with how a member of Uber entertainment was approaching their job. How would members of the community flag this up in good faith? I just want to stress that this is a hypothetical scenario, and I am neither naming names or pointing fingers at anyone.

It seems that recently there has been a lot of criticism of PA on the forums recently. Much of it has been constructive, but there has also been a component which has been posted with malice in mind. It is clear that there is a line between these two modes of communication. However, I think that there is a growing divide between where Uber (or the representative members thereof ) and community think that line is.

Well, if people were to complain about the AI being bad (Using this example because it is so obviously not true) Uber would not have to think very hard to realize who was responsible for it. Issues of personnel are entirely on the business end and we as backers and customers don't really get a say in that. We can criticize the product itself but I am not comfortable with calling out individual employees.

I would venture to say that the majority of the criticism on the forums is constructive. Reddit... There's a few bad apples, but mostly constructive still. Steam? We don't go there anymore.

Just because we say "I don't like how ___ works" doesn't mean we think the game sucks or the developers are incompetent or anything like that.

It just means we are invested in the game and are doing what we can to improve it.

this thread is no longer serving its original purpose, so it's locked.

our model of discussing certain game-related topics with you guys has certainly evolved over time. the valve-like approach to community is certainly a good one. we took a couple lessons away from Steam Dev Days when first heard this talk and i think you've experienced the awesome results around big releases. we're going to keep moving in this direction while sprinkling some extra goodness (fun details! project updates! insight! polls!) where we can. I especially like the idea of bringing in more polls.

what this forum isn't about, however, is calling out dudes. this is a place to discuss planetary annihilation, our next-generation strategy game.