Today

Planetside 2 devs. And honestly, I respect them quite a bit. Planetside 2 is a decent experience, albeit the oldschool and the vets pick it apart and pick every new update apart the worst. It really is a bag-o'-popcorn moment every first reply to an update thread. They eventually started locking update threads and posting exterior response threads so they can nuke them if necesary.

Yeah but balance is never perfect on any RTS realese. I think it's almost good enough now. And Asteroids are kinda possibly with small mons now. A belt would just be an effect right? But no ladder..... Well it's a surprise to say the least.

Uber releasing PA is like Luke going to Cloud City. They may save their friends and find out who their father is. Or lose their lightsaber and get a hand cut off. Or both.

There are many things to be worried about. But I'd rather wished them luck than pointed at those things for a thousandth time.

Worry not my young pa-one, for the awesome is with them...

I beg to differ.

The latest weekly update from Brad is surely well written and engaging to read, but the only real new piece of information that it contains is about a new update for Toy Rush. Which is totally unrelated with the status of development of PA.

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/uber-weekly-update-july-21-2014.62112/

It's being a while that Uber dodges few specific, critical questions. It's actually months at the very least. We simply can't get them to tell us what's in for v.1.0, and what will be in later. And what's out. That's totally mystery.

And if you say it's not our right to know, let me remind you that we all paid already the game. It has been their choice to pre-sell the product.

Of course Uber is experiencing more and more discomfort.

Brad himself days ago expressed his concern about updating us of the progress of the game, 'cos he doesn't want to over-promise and causing in us discomfort. Still his last weekly update is quite bombastic. His usual propaganda if you allow me a bit of frankness.

Just saying, the game is getting together very nicely, and only a very naive person would assume it is simple to put together such a massive project as PA.

Let's be honest, though. Uber could do a better job in communicate with its customers base. That's where the real issue stays, and it's definitely not fault of the community in here.

Actually the community in here is awesome in supporting Uber, and keep believing in them.

It should be Uber to apologize with some of the people in here, as well.

I humbly apologise for using the word "lies" in my forum post! i used the wrong word and that compleetly set the thread on fire, which was not my intention. My words are never written with anger or disrespect, altho it might seem that way. I'm dutch we are very upfront, honest and say the things that bothers us and say it directly without running around the bush.

My apology to you UBER!

Good on ya

(That's an Australian phrase meant as a positive)

Im dutch aswell and yes, in our country we don't give a **** about what people think of us, therefor we can and will say anything that is on our mind unless it might lead to a police assault on our house. Its a fundamental law and a cornerstone of our society. Care about what people think of you and you will always be their prisoner. It is indeed a freedom that is about absolute honesty but therefor it sometimes also smacks you in the face every now and then.
Probably because politeness and staying silent also have a reason that they still excist. In our country good people died for it and thats why freedom of speach is of immense high value to us to a point where its almost as a religion. I highly respect you for apoligising to UBER that was really good man. I totally understand that they closed the topic, it clearly shouldn't have been there in the first place looking at this, but it just seems cultural differences got the best of us.

Regarding the mod visibility issue:

Do you think having an in-game splash page of useful/ popular mods would, to some degree, remedy this problem?

I've full confidence that mods will have a lot more visibility than they do now, since they're an integral part of Uber's business plan.

Heh. Heh. Heh.

I was there. Those were some good popcorn nights XD

There's so much in common with these developer's woes it's not even funny.
Besides the fact that the issues which plague the two games are fundamentally different (in terms of gameplay), but besides that the community interaction is similar. Uber is a bit, overall, more personal, and takes this more personally.
Why do I have to like two games that have this community problem?
Oh, also, BuzzCutPsycho is my hero <3
I get deleted every time I mention his name, though.

Rule N°1 of not finished games : take care of your fans.

They will do ANYTHING for you. Even if you do very borderline things (yes in game shop, i'm looking at you), play with words and exclusivity (Delta/Invictus and Progenitor/Able, i am also looking at you) or even worse when you open the Pandora Box (Boxed Early Access, i didn't forgot you either), your fans will be here and defend you with all their power. But only if you take care of them.

And this mean feeding them, and a nice scratch behind the ear from time to time.
How to feed a fan ? Infos.
Anything. But real infos. A concept art. A screen of something new. A post of a dev talking about something he is working on. Anything to chew, but something to chew.
Silence or almost empty Public Relation messages (Hi Weekly update) are NOT a good thing. Especially long Silence, then empty news. This is the worse. It can cause riots (and it caused...).
Because your fan need to eat. And with no food, what do they do ? they fight. Each other. You. And some of them can bite quite hard.

And explain things. Inform. But do not let people discover things by accident.
Something is not/will not be added ? Why. Then let the fans work on that.
Want to do something that will involve the community (ie : Charity Commander) ? I readed that somewhere, was an awsome idea, sorry for not crediting it, but ask your fans what they think and even let them make a lot of the work, they will do it very happily.
Show progress. Even small progress. But do not keep saying soon, over and over. It worked with Half Life 2 or Starcraft, but games that survive to that kind of comunication are rare. In fact they survived because the mother compagny was strong enough and the original had such an aura that people had enough faith to wait.

PA has no predecessor, and a lot of promises. I don't think it can not afford such model...

It's not something that will be solved by any one thing, it's going to take a much more of a "United Front" to make it work and much like my opinion on the ladder, it's not something that can wait because even a few weeks for a game post release is a loooooong time and it's easy to lose all those potential long term players simply because the hooks weren't there for them in the beginning, some might make thier way back around to PA later on but that's no substitute for getting them hooked right away.

Mike

Some food for thought, while I work on a new PTE build (just some fixes I think are important before we consider it for promotion to stable):

• Audience: Consider the audience. You guys, by and large, are not the audience for a release like this. Brad posted it here, because it's a good idea to repost any major communications. But there are a few hundred thousand people who don't hang out on the forums at all. Most of you on here are already better informed, through posts, through accessing the PTE, and other forms of interaction, so of course a post like that is going to feel somewhat redundant. You're some of our most engaged community members. That's a good thing, but the reaction to what you all considered to be either overly vague, redundant or irrelevant was a bit extreme for what was, at the end of the day, a communication to all players of PA, not just the forum community.
• Hype: We are an independent studio, we don't have a marketing budget to speak of, and getting heard above the noise of the internet is hard. Hype and getting people excited helps with that. Especially when we honestly feel the hype is deserved. We think we have something cool here. The purposes of us communicating things is not just to inform current fans, but hopefully also attract a few more.
• Transparency: I've spoken about this many times. We're as transparent as we can be. We push everything, including often the kitchen sink, to PTE pretty regularly, even if we know we're a ways out from a new stable build. Yes, we hold some things in reserve, sometimes because we're not ready to talk about them yet, sometimes for business/pr reasons (see: hype).. actually, those are the two main reasons I can think of why we'd hold anything back. The first one is part of game development, no shock there. The second one is harder, because when we have things like that, you should hear _us_ complain in the office about not releasing it, because we're excited to see how you all respond to it too. But in the course of a project, you have limited opportunities to make big splashes, so you have to take advantages of the opportunities you can.
• Balance, Changes, Etc: The ways to make a game are as wide and varied as there are people in the forums. When I said we do read the balance forums, and read most threads we can honestly, we do take that feedback into account, and things do change as a direct result of community feedback. However, the exact form of balance we're creating may not mesh exactly with your preferred style of play. That's one of the reasons we feel modding is so important to the health of the game, and why we'll continue to make it easier to make, and share, mods. If you think we're wrong on a design or balance decision, you'll have ample ways to show how you think it can be better. If we wake up one morning and notice 95% of our players are playing your balance mod instead of our vanilla balance, I think it's fair to bet we'll take a long hard look at the differences.

At any rate, I hope this helps to put in perspective part of the intent of not only the weekly update, but how we approach overall releasing information, builds and getting people excited. I'll start working on a post - maybe in blog format - about how we create builds here and how we do feature planning. It will hopefully also illuminate why we are so reluctant to provide highly detailed feature release plans. Because we often only know days or maybe a week in advance if we're lucky of what will be ready. If you want to know what we're working on, the PTE is usually the best way to find out. PTE generally gets updated as we have checkins occuring. It is a living, breathing changelog.

Thanks all.

95% is a bit of a steep ask.

We'll need a lot more tools to promote RCBM or Statera, making them much more visible to everyone (remove/change the filter to show mods by default) and allowing people to retain the mod in their server-files after playing a game should they join a "random" game and enjoy the changes.

I'm pretty sure 95% is what we would call an "example number" pulled out of a hat, not a legally binding "this is our threshold anything below which will be ignored for balance" number. A suggestion to demonstrate a point.

I'm aware of that. However the "number pulled out of a hat" can sometimes give an insight into the mind of the person who pulled it.

Because hyperbole. Don't be so literal. I was using an extreme number for the sake of argument. Honestly, if we even saw 40% of the audience focusing on a single mod, we'd want to know why, and understand what about that mod is pulling in that much audience. Of course, percentages are purely a function of the underlying numbers they represent. 95% of 10k players is a lot different than 95% of 500,000 players.

Not really. It's mostly a sign of sloppy thinking to make assumptions about hyperbolic examples.