Jables thoughts on communication.

Hey all,

I found some time today to get a quick post on my thoughts on communication. I’m coming into this fairly fresh, in the sense that I’m new to not only the game, but to Uber as a whole. I've been getting my head into everything here over the last two weeks (since I started), and am working out suggestions on some changes we could make in terms of sharing information with you, our community.

First thing I should note is, I'm fully on the Planetary Annihilation team and communicating only for it. You’ll be hearing from @scathis for the Human Resources side of things, as he has his own separate team.

So with that in mind, let’s chat on some thoughts for Planetary Annihilation. Overall, Uber has been working hard on getting a ton of things done for PA. The thing I have seen as most missing (as the new guy coming from the outside) is communicating what is upcoming to all of you. We will be making strides toward being better able to share this information, as well as releasing features in steps (where we can) instead of waiting until every piece is 100% final.

You will see our movement toward this with our release of Offline Server step one. I will also be doing a lot of work with the team to better prioritize our roadmap of upcoming work. My goal, as a start, will be to share information on our upcoming release to a level of detail that you guys feel good with (again see Offline Server part 1). This will be a learning experience for me, as I’m usually focused more on pure development, and not so much community, so I’m not going to be as fancy with wording as some might expect. That being said, my goal is to share the awesome stuff we are working on, and hopefully give you guys the info to be as excited as we are about the future of Planetary Annihilation!

good speed!

Don't be off put by the community's.......devotion to the game.

We will chew your ear off if we can, but know it's because we love you.

Here are two excellent resources I recommend:
http://www.artofcommunityonline.org/
http://www.dealingwithdisrespect.com/

PDF:
http://artofcommunityonline.org/Art_of_Community_Second_Edition.pdf
http://dealingwithdisrespect.com/jonobacon-dealingwithdisrespect-1ed.pdf


Reviews

Art of Community:

Dealing With Disrespect:

Hey Jables, Just wanted to day good luck with improving community interaction and such. Hope everything goes well for you in that area.

I feel like since mid beta community interaction has been somewhat lacklustre and we (the community) have been kept in the dark in regards to what Uber has been working on more and more. But hopefully your inclusion will get the levels of communication up closer to what it was like during alpha.

Again good luck with your new position and I hope to hear from you on the forums fairly often.

Thanks for the effort you're putting in here jables. I'm wondering if we can get an update sometime about where Uber's modding goals are. There was some talk about finding a way to monetize mods and the custom commander thing seems like a good first step in that direction. What's next on the modding front?

You. I like you.

Uber has a ton of things they are working/planning on for PA. Currently I am working on prioritizing this list. Should be able to share more as we get that stuff more in stone. We are 100% planning on more modding support, but we are still debating as to what the best line of attack will be for our long term plan (aka what order to do stuff in).

how do you feel about the current balance?

Will you be able to let us in on the end goal of this long term plan? They gave us some vague plans a long time ago, but I'm sure a lot has changed since then. It has been so much fun modding this game alongside other modders and the actual devs and often even very small pieces of information inspire big ideas on the modding side.

Looking forward to hearing more info on upcoming stuff

That Roadmap. Publish it.

Seriously.

I don't care how In-Progress it is or how 'market-speak' polished it is. I'm sure you guys have a way of distinguishing between 'set in stone' and 'cool ideas we think are possible'.

You could use a set of Trello boards to show both progress (we are currently working on this stuff, it's set in stone, release Oct, Nov, Dec, etc) and ideas / comments (here are things that we think are possible, let the community vote on what they want the most).

If someone has an idea, chuck it up on the board, let us +1 it until it gets to the top. Stuff like that.



I like your current posts, I like the attitude, I like the content. Keep us up to date and we'll back you to the hilt.

I think that's exactly why they have been afraid to publish their plans until they are 100% sure of what they want to do. Most people out there on the internet seem surprisingly bad at running game development companies.

I love that we get to participate to some extent in making this game, but let's not forget that it is Uber's game and we're not dealing with crowd-sourced game development here.

+1

It would fire everyone up and re-energize the community. It would also silence a lot of naysayers.

Number one thing I think would be nice is to hear from Uber on some sort of timetable, say weekly or biweekly if that's not feasible. Not expecting things to be done each week but hearing what is up and coming reguarly would be amazing.

And bring on the complaints about "my favourite feature should be #1, otherwise Uber doesn't know how to gamedev".

Also, everything on it, no matter how far down the list, would instantly be perceived as a promise. I say don't provide the full roadmap. Talk about what is being worked on, what is in the immediate pipeline. Talk about what's aimed for in the next sprint after each released build. But a full roadmap is likely to cause more headaches than it's worth, because it's so variable.

I disagree. Strongly. 95% of the flap going on recently hasn't been about whether or not Uber was going to release on this or that day, it's been about whether it was coming at all. There was no central repository of knowledge (aka roadmap) that we could point people to when having a discussion about what's coming next.

The only feature requests I've seen come around and around are about things that were in the kickstarter (unit cannon) or in the game and cut because it wasn't working (subs). People mutter about shields, but they understand it was a design choice and we gotta live with it.

I'm not suggesting we control what Uber develops next - I'm saying we have some input on what we think is important, and even better, we get feedback on what Uber thinks about those priorities.

If you have a great idea and pitch it to Uber and tons of community members pile on agreeing with your idea, what's better - getting zero response from Uber on the issue, or seeing on a board of priorities that your idea has to get in line with a bunch of much more important things?

Personally I'd feel a ton more motivated to keep being a positive part of the community if I know my ideas at least are getting heard.

As an experiment, I recommend that you create and moderate a Trello board just like you describe. If it works, great! Maybe Uber will start taking a look at it. If it doesn't work out, Uber won't have wasted any time on it.

This is an area where the community can experiment with an idea and see what happens. I would be really happy to be proven wrong on this one.

Rubbish. Give the community some credit. Then go take a look here on a primary example of how to handle things you're not certain about while inviting community feedback:

https://trello.com/b/gHooNW9I/ue4-roadmap

Look at the very very first 2 items. How to provide feedback, and how to interpret each card. Notably, at the bottom of the 'What each card represents' is this:

I have yet to see anyone scream at Epic for not developing their pet feature.


@cptconundrum - I'd love to start something like that, but, I'd need something like a roadmap document first, eh? @jables feel free to send me anything at all and I'll make one.

I think that the SHEER VOLUME of possibilities for PA would be enough to give pause to even some of the game's most strident critics. None of the reviews I have read so far, aside from Brian's on Metacritic, seem to have grasped the sheer possibilities of this game. They rated it as if it's just another RTS (as opposed to the future of RTS, which is what it is).

The roadmap would sell game copies on its own -- even if it were never completely fulfilled (as it of course won't be).