Vanguard Community Consultations

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Previously we've organised community meetings where anyone can come and talk to us on a teamspeak channel about anything to do with PA as a bit of a test to gauge how we could use it to increase the bandwidth of communication between us and the community. We think that this was a good trial period. We're ready to formalise it into an official Vanguard initiative and publicise it better. With that in mind we would like to invite all of you to participate in the weekly Vanguard Community Consultations!

What are the Community Consultations?
Community consultations are an opportunity to freely and verbally discuss any aspect of PA with other community members and the PA Vanguards. They are a great way for us to help gauge the most important issues to the PA community in order to better communicate them to the Developers.

Who Can Join in?
Absolutely anyone. It doesn't matter how active you are on the forums, or even if you found out about them from somewhere else, feel free to join in and have your opinion heard. All we ask is that people are polite, and all conversation is in English. It is likely that one of the Vanguard will stream the meeting to Twitch, allowing those that want to join in, but lack a microphone, to ask questions that the Vanguard will attempt to answer as they read the chat.

When are they?
Every week on Sunday at 20:00 UTC. If you're wondering what that is in your timezone here is a handy converter. There will always be at least one or two Vanguards present in order to discuss what people are interested in. We will aim for them to last one hour.

How are they held?
They are held on a private teamspeak server. The address is 188.226.190.9.

How do I join?
All you need is a copy of the teamspeak client which can be downloaded free of charge from here. Once it is installed, go to connections -> connect, and copy the address from above into to address bar. Type in your preferred Nickname, and click on “connect”. If you want to talk to other people verbally, then you will also need a functioning microphone, although if you don't have one then you can still hear everyone else and text chat.

What if I missed one?
We will try to record every meeting or stream it to twitch, meaning you can always hear what was discussed. We will also publish minutes below.

What will you talk about?
That’s up to you. We tried it in the past with an agenda but PA is in such a rapid state of development that what may be an issue one week turns out to be fixed the next. We will keep things informal, and see what people want to talk about. We would only suggest two guidelines through, which we think will help keep the discussion as useful as possible to Uber. Firstly, try to keep topics broad, as specific personal suggestions can get things bogged down. Secondly, try to identify problems before identifying solutions. This is just a general exercise that helps make things clearer when the vanguards bring things to Uber.

We hope to see you there!

Sounds like a great idea to get opinions flowing to the devs.

Although I'm a UK resident so it doesn't affect me, might it be a good idea to have at least one vanguard who can answer questions/discuss in some other languages? I feel given how much of the community are from non-English speaking countries you could be excluding quite a big chunk of players with only English discussions.

Considering that many of the people here CAN speak English, I beg to differ. I agree with the move to English because it is the MOST COMMON language understood among our community. Trying to have more than one to be considerate of others is a nice thought, but it will lead to separate conversations forming in a quiet corner of the room.

Sorry ;(

While it's true a lot of non native speakers speak good English nowadays, I would bet there are a lot who don't. You just never see them, because they don't frequent these forums, because they don't speak English.

I'm not suggesting completely separate discussions, and I agree the main discussion should be in English, I just think if any of the vanguards are bilingual they could converse with, say, the german speaking community and relay those ideas to the rest of the vanguards.

It's not super important, but I think it's worth considering.

this is a great idea.

I was incredibly frustrated when I couldn't attend the previous community chats held by @cwarner7264 even though I really wanted to.

This time I should be available.

20:00 UTC. UTC. Words cannot describe how much I love you.

Yeah Dawg!

*Fistbump*

Mike

Was subsecond accuracy really needed though? Saying UTC means I had to look it up to find what the time was in GMT.

Also this excludes Australasian/Pacific and Asia. That time is either 8am on Monday or earlier that morning.

There will never be a time that is perfect for everyone thought, you set a time that's good for those regions but all it does is shift where it's bad timing for them, for example 10AM in Europe is about 3AM for me. 8AM may be early, but at least it's more feasible than middle of the night/middle of the day and we do plan to try and make sure they are accessible outside of being there when we do it.

Mike

Yep. That's 8-9am New Zealand time, on a Monday morning. It's really not that feasible. It's the time where most people leave to arrive at work/school on time.

And 8-9 am 4-5am in Western Australia, 7-8am in Eastern Australia. That will change to 6-7am in Eastern Australia when DST ends.

The Vanguard is big enough to lengthen that window. And if it's not big enough (i.e. the time is unsociable for most people), may be time to start asking about global coverage.

Yes, we can spread out a bit more, but something needs to fall within certain windows. I'm trying to be active with the VCCs and want to branch out to doing other things like some kind of AMA or explore my Custom Commander Design process means it does need to be at times that work with my schedule if I'm going to take part. The thing is that the Vanguard is biased towards people in more Europe centric Timezones, which for me is quite a bummer when trying to plan and organize things because once I'm back home from work everyone is already punched out for the night and once I get to bed everyone is up and about all night.

It's never going to be ideal but we work with what we got.

Mike

Yep, and I get that, and the community is biased towards people in more Europe centric timezones, and that's nice.


But comments where Zaphod says "most of the best players are from the EU" are really only valid because EU tournaments exclude people from Australasia purely because Australasians are getting up at 5am in order to play in the tournament.

All I'm saying is, Asia-Pacific is also part of the community, and it might be a worthwhile idea to consider whether a Vanguard presence in Australasia is needed, and then possibly implement that by inviting one of the more sensible members into the Vanguard? Realistically, if we want to participate in the community consultations, we have to do so by email, which isn't really what it's all about.

TLR - Maybe what you got isn't good enough?

Well if we want to do a thing and the people needed to do that thing are only available at X time, we can't exactly doing it at Y time you know?

It was never that we would only ever do one time but this is what works best for those organizing this "revamp".

Mike

Which is why I am saying that maybe it would be a very very good idea in terms of future proofing to ensure that there were people who would be available at Y time, you know.

So how many times are we going to repeat ourselves to each other? ;p

Mike

No times. You seem to have missed the fact I am making a different message, so I will take my comments to a member of the vanguard who is willing to listen.

Twenty Minutes to go as of me posting this comment.

We'll be starting soon. Anyone wishing to observe the proceedings can do so here on Marshall's Twitch. Be aware that we're unlikely to be watching the Twitch Chat as hawkishly as the TeamSpeak Chat.

We are starting. Feel free to hop in if you like.

this whole event is a good idea! we have to get more people riled up for the next one !

Same time, same place, next week!