Interesting Reading in Relation to PA: I asked the E:D Community Why their Crowdfunding was so Great

Lots of good answers: http://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDanger...heard_here_and_there_that_elite_dangerous_is/

The main takeaway is good communications and expectation management.

Which leads into the trend of the week with Planetary Annihilation: communication is good, and expectations are important.

The bringing of @jables onto the PA team so far has been awesome. I'm REALLY liking what Uber has been doing this week and what @jables is talking about doing in the future. Not to mention the overall mood of the forums and /r/planetaryannihilation/ these past few days has been awesome.

Keep up the great work Uber.

Minor opinion quible.

It's just that in reality it's the viewer/players/community that create the expectations and Uber has little control over the outcome, the same piece of info could generate different expectations in different people and like wise even no communication creates expectations as well. So "Expectation Management" might be better term for what Uber is/should/whatever doing?

Mike

Yes, the community can set some of their own expectations, but Uber can correct those expectations rather than not talking to us.

Also, don't forget all of the expectations that Uber set, like offline at launch, 40 man games at launch, and... there was another really big feature that was specifically promised at launch... server? Can't remember. But rather than communicate and ask the community if we'd rather have a sooner launch or postpone for the features, or tell us the reasons why those features were removed, Uber just removed those promises from the steam page and then let the community continue to say "___ will be available at launch" for the next year.

Edit: on re-reading, yes, "expectation management" would be better phrasing. Editing OP.

and how do you manage unrealistic expectations?
"i backed this game, i expect starwars/star trek/wh40k spacebattles
i expect shields and WH40k like titansized units" ....


god damn it supcom what have you just done ...
like seriously pe0ple seem to be bend on getting their superlatives with what came out before ...
like just because something else was there before the next game has to have it too or bust

yea this is something i don´t get either ... i mean it simply is possible that initial ideas may
not work as intended or simply get not worked on for various reasons and as such not being included in a unfinished/unconfortable state or at all ... i think everyone can understand that things can happen ...
i mean if uber see that they have such problems why not tell the community about either a delay or abbandoning of that idea if nessesary ... because imo while that may rub some people i can´t imagine that to be worse than just straight out keeping the information from the community and running into that hatetrain of promised but unfullfilled features risking to lose even more trust ...

On that point, you have to trust the community. I don't spend a lot of times in the forums, but I do think there are a lot of voices that have level heads and will plead on behalf of the devs.

The problem is when it becomes all they do with nothing added to the discussion by the devs or their PR folk.

Managing expectations is the role of a roadmap. "You can expect these things in this order." "These things can't be done in the order you want because X, Y, and Z."

Not knowing what's coming when has been the biggest source of complaint the past two months.

I think the most important thing is *tell us* what's going to be going on with the game development. I'm okay with no shields, no experimentals, no comm upgrades and (currently) no 40-man games, because these were things that I knew were coming (or weren't in from the beginning) and so I said my peace and dealt with it. Things that are just dropped on us as a community though isn't okay.

Now that we have the server 40 player games are as simple as editing some scripts

Think of it like this Imagine trying get someone to guess what picture a 1000 piece puzzle makes by only giving them a single piece, the guesses will be all over the place naturally. But imagine if you gave them 10, 50 or even 100 pieces, sure it's still a lot of guessing but by giving them more pieces it helps put the pieces in context of each other, for example if you have 10 out of 10 pieces showing greenchances are that Green makes up a goodly portion of the picture.

By providing more bits of info, even if they're not supre directly related it allows people to see more of the "big picture" and provides a basis for better expectations/assumptions/guesses.

Mike

Well, look at the trailer for HR. The big monster has even a bump of surprise when the laser cutter activates, and it's tentacles swing back. Look at the details in the video, there is plenty, it's more a movie than something you could easily do today coding wise.

Then of course people may set wrong expectations. Not really all their fault, It's not that people are all digital game designers.

Edit. The more I look at the trailer, the more I realize that it had to cost like crazy.

I think people really need to remember that running a business is complicated and there's a lot of fiddly background stuff which isn't known to anyone outside the company (and for legal reasons cannot be known outside the business sometimes).

If everyone stopped pretending they had a PhD in economics and business strategy there'd be a lot less debacle in general. It may same insane or silly, but odds are there's a good reason behind most things, and we just don't know what it is.

PS: You now have exactly 7000 likes, you're welcome.

That didn't last long...

There's always that one guy out there somewhere that has to RUIN EVERYTHING.

.

I just need somebody who tells me how do i get to an awesome private server with Ladder like PAstats and a mod for reworked orbital/naval and i will be a happy man

Anything like that will be fairly hackish through mods. Since Uber isn't officially supporting server (yet), there's a lot of server optimizations yet to be done. So we're going to need a really beefy server. We won't need as powerful of a server in the future.

I will be offering server rentals when the time comes though. I'm not sure if I'm going to start with the modded stuff, or if I'm going to wait for the official server support. Probably wait.