Feedback about how TWI communicates with us and the consequences for the future of KF
- Thread starter polomi
- Start date
Yes, it was by courtesy. Since several people have asked for it however, I simply removed names from the document, except my own.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eE3uuRWco0yO4Ugx_ivzpAqoZ4FnGVq_Wx7AnoucTSQ/edit?usp=sharing[url]https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eE3uuRWco0yO4Ugx_ivzpAqoZ4FnGVq_Wx7AnoucTSQ/edit?usp=sharing[/URL]
I added an introduction to the document which I will copy here as well, and which I think everyone should keep in mind when reading the whole document:
We haven't done as much balance work as we intended so far. Between our lead designer being out of the office due to having a kid and a focus on getting new content out as fast as we could (a community demand I might add), we have only had a chance for a couple small changes here and there and the Beserker overhaul.
We are hoping to spend some cycles early in the new year dedicated to a few waves of balance work but the production schedule is still being finalized so I don't know where everything will land.
But the community feedback has been gathered up and documented.
We are hoping to spend some cycles early in the new year dedicated to a few waves of balance work but the production schedule is still being finalized so I don't know where everything will land.
But the community feedback has been gathered up and documented.
Neat! Most of these are easy for anybody to agree to, especially mixing up the perks would be great IMO.
Well that's great to hear.
Thank you for your answer. Most of us always understood that serious balance work on TWI's part will only come later, so your answer doesn't come as a surprise. What I was trying to bring attention to however was the serious lack in transparency and communication, which we think is one of the root causes of why the game is imbalanced in the first place, and why we have to live with it for months. In 8 months, all such communication from TWI has been sparse and unfulfilling.
Jeez, I leave to go cook a few dishes for the big day tomorrow and come back to someone telling an epic story of love and betrayal on the forums. Strange day ahead, I must say.
Anyway, from the original post, I'm drawing the conclusion that what you want for all of your volunteer work, is simple acknowledgement from the TWI staff? Is this correct?
I make no attempt at denigrating what you've done to help improve the game. I follow such things, as I would like to consider myself a relatively talented and like-minded member of KF2. I have my own little projects that I never hesitate to shove in TWI's face, small as they are:
http://forums.tripwireinteractive.com/showthread.php?t=112030
Easy read, btw. TWI has never acknowledged the armor repair situation openly, at least not to me since as far as I'm concerned I am it's biggest activist on these forums, but I'm not going to lose any sleep over it, gross balance issue as it is. Your entire OP has this air of despair and not-so-subtle discontent to it, it almost strikes me as if you're saying TWI has slighted you; in short, "How dare they ignore the genius of me and my cabal of experts", simply throwing your hands up on the projects because you aren't seeing the results you want.
Anyway, from the original post, I'm drawing the conclusion that what you want for all of your volunteer work, is simple acknowledgement from the TWI staff? Is this correct?
I make no attempt at denigrating what you've done to help improve the game. I follow such things, as I would like to consider myself a relatively talented and like-minded member of KF2. I have my own little projects that I never hesitate to shove in TWI's face, small as they are:
http://forums.tripwireinteractive.com/showthread.php?t=112030
Easy read, btw. TWI has never acknowledged the armor repair situation openly, at least not to me since as far as I'm concerned I am it's biggest activist on these forums, but I'm not going to lose any sleep over it, gross balance issue as it is. Your entire OP has this air of despair and not-so-subtle discontent to it, it almost strikes me as if you're saying TWI has slighted you; in short, "How dare they ignore the genius of me and my cabal of experts", simply throwing your hands up on the projects because you aren't seeing the results you want.
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That's cool man, I can get behind that.
I also understand how you've expressed that your point of view doesn't feel like it matters to a company that's claimed to be interested in it. I understand it on a collective level because I feel the same way [despite not being a great player myself].
But yeah, to reiterate - I can get behind that sentiment now I understand further where you're coming from.
Thanks ScrakeMorgendorffer, I think that you summarized how I feel pretty well.
I realize that I have been a little bit too vague and that some people misunderstand me as wanting TWI's attention for myself. This is not the case, so please let me be a little more specific and offer some suggestions. I think that without something similar to what I am about to describe, the game will not end up in a satisfactory state:
Those are some requests for TWI.
I realize that I have been a little bit too vague and that some people misunderstand me as wanting TWI's attention for myself. This is not the case, so please let me be a little more specific and offer some suggestions. I think that without something similar to what I am about to describe, the game will not end up in a satisfactory state:
Those are some requests for TWI.
- Instead of generic, vague and rare communication and interaction with the community, please make posts which are accurate and dive into topics in depth. For instance. instead of "We are looking at Nuke", please let the community know of what possible changes exactly you are thinking of making, even if there are several alternatives, of what numbers you are thinking of changing, why do you think this can work and how it affects balance, and ask what the community thinks of it. Otherwise, we get an update in which we have to discover ourselves that the balance is poor again and are stuck with it for months.
- The Korean, Japanese and other communities feel completely in the dark, and yet many of the most dedicated players are from there and don't speak English. Many players are also not on this forum for many reasons. I would like to try to voice their frustration as they don't have many opportunities to do so. Their suggestions are necessarily ignored unless people bother to spend a lot of time to do what I did, and even then none of them felt like the effort was worth it.
- Don't ignore balance suggestions that are focused on high level play simply because we are a minority. Mass appeal will sell the game of course, but this is not where the retention rate will come. Listening to only the suggestions for which the majority of the community is very loud about isn't going to solve this. Eventually, with enough playtime, everyone becomes good and everyone will notice the issues. And many of these people don't have the patience that I had, and leave.
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I thought this discussion turned out a dead end the first time? 
The thing is your objective is a good one that could benefit us all but it seems impossible to achieve - even if TWI wanted to.
I've been learning about agile software development, Use cases, User stories, TDD and that sort of thing. Oh boy would I love to see some these practices put into action!
I mean it's their game and I (as much as anyone) am entitled to nothing. However, I start drooling whenever I dream about the potential fun and resulting quality that could come out of involving the community as a kind of "product owner" (figuratively).
At least, for some aspects of the development process most notably balance and maybe perk design to an extent. Of course, it's not all roses either and sorting out quality feedback means a lot of additional and hard work.
However, from what I could gather /speculate it can never come anything close to that because of 3 reasons:
Does it even make sense to add more cooks considering it's already a pretty huge broth?
Will forcing this onto them despite TWI potentially having the wrong people and development tools provide any benefit?
Unlike the first time this came up, I think the answer is "No".
The thing is your objective is a good one that could benefit us all but it seems impossible to achieve - even if TWI wanted to.
I've been learning about agile software development, Use cases, User stories, TDD and that sort of thing. Oh boy would I love to see some these practices put into action!
I mean it's their game and I (as much as anyone) am entitled to nothing. However, I start drooling whenever I dream about the potential fun and resulting quality that could come out of involving the community as a kind of "product owner" (figuratively).
At least, for some aspects of the development process most notably balance and maybe perk design to an extent. Of course, it's not all roses either and sorting out quality feedback means a lot of additional and hard work.
However, from what I could gather /speculate it can never come anything close to that because of 3 reasons:
- TWI didn't specifically hire people for this but their devs have to be open and actively supportive towards this. Forcing it doesn't improve anything. (Key word: "We've been burned before")
- The project and the company behind it are both too big and they don't want to risk anything.
- As Yoshiro stated several times they cannot iterate public builds any faster without losing a lot of time on their schedule.
Does it even make sense to add more cooks considering it's already a pretty huge broth?
Will forcing this onto them despite TWI potentially having the wrong people and development tools provide any benefit?
Unlike the first time this came up, I think the answer is "No".
Perhaps you guys can actually indicate you are listening from time to time. If I'm being entirely honest, it does not appear anyone on reddit or the steam forum believes you guys really are listening. All communication is almost completely one sided, amounting to basically press releases.
I'm completely indifferent about MTs, I see no value in gambling crates and cannot get upset or excited about a system that does not appeal to me in the slightest. However, the timing of the Trading Floor announcement- showing a monetization scheme before releasing any content or balance fixes while impatience with the lack of progress is as high as I've ever seen- really makes me wonder how out of touch you guys are.
Balance was the number one topic on reddit, the steam forums, and here before MTs came up, and besides one quick jab at nuke in a WWAUT and one comment on the Zwei, not a thing has been said to indicate you actually hear or care. Please, gather a list of issues you'll be reviewing and let us know you're actually listening.
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That's a real shame. Even very small balance hotfixes every couple weeks would really soothe the pain that is the long 3-5 month wait time for the large updates. The game is pretty unplayable at the highest level of play now, as I'm sure you know.
Hey Escadin. Very thoughtful answer. I can't answer yes to any of the questions you have. Which is why I personally have not much hope for this game being properly balanced even after Early Access, and why I think any efforts such as what we did and were about to do in the future are futile. I don't see an easy solution to the problem, my previous post was written quickly to convey the spirit of what I am frustrated with, it wasn't intended as real solutions to the core problem here.
Even if TWI do their best, and I am actually quite sure that they are doing so, it will always end up with even small balance issues finding their way into the game, issues that will inevitably have large unpleasant consequences that spread to many areas of gameplay because of how intertwined the metagame always is.
If anyone has good suggestions, that's what I'm here for.
@Oddux and ramndude: Absolutely in agreement with you.
Even if TWI do their best, and I am actually quite sure that they are doing so, it will always end up with even small balance issues finding their way into the game, issues that will inevitably have large unpleasant consequences that spread to many areas of gameplay because of how intertwined the metagame always is.
If anyone has good suggestions, that's what I'm here for.
@Oddux and ramndude: Absolutely in agreement with you.
KF1 had and still has some pretty wonky balance issues. There's been a track record of things not being re-balanced very well like the reload speed of the Xbow, pistol penetration, existence of the ZEDMKII, but TW has always at least attempted to fix the most glaring issues in KF1 like the OP scythe and m99. There is some hope that KF2 can be balanced.
However, with this current direction and pacing of addressing balancing, things are looking very grim. There are a lot of small things, like tweaking damage or range values, that could very easily balance the game just a bit more to keep people happy. Small hotfixes like those until the large updates is something I think this game needs. It's clear that with the last update, members of TW don't really understand what sort of balance needs to be implemented. Something else that this game could really use is a beta-beta, like before, that instead tests out community suggestions for simple balance tweaks.
This would very much help keep the player base active between content updates, IMO.
Damn Polomi, that is an amazing post.
I completly agree with you, and the answer from Yoshiro just confirmed your worries. Yes, they answer to posts like this, but without referencing anything.
Statements like
It doesn't answer following points:
Again: What balance work? What do you want to change? Just tell us!
I completly agree with you, and the answer from Yoshiro just confirmed your worries. Yes, they answer to posts like this, but without referencing anything.
Statements like
are (sorry) just a slap to the face. Why?Yoshiro said:
It doesn't answer following points:
- How has the feedback been gathered and documented?
- Who gathers the feedback at which time? And more importantly:
- What feedback has been gathered and how important has it been rated?
Yoshiro said:
Again: What balance work? What do you want to change? Just tell us!
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I'd also like to say rust is a little unstable, each update is a gamble that they aren't breaking anything, but I like how they announce each week the upcoming changelog, and how each dev lists the things he worked on that week, gave a couple of pictures and explained his work and what he hopes to work on next week. Sometimes the devs even just say "sorry I was sick as a dog, I didn't get anything done this week but next week blah blah blah."
The problem here isn't that big, you guys just need to hire an official community manager, or free Yoshiro up enough to properly coordinate longer WWAUT posts each week. From this thread, I think the obvious thing we've gathered is that players just want to see some progress being made. They just want to see a list of confirmed changes, a quick preview video of the internal dev build demonstrating a few upcoming features, some photos of the skeltons you have chained to the computers.
All in all I realize TW is doing a lot for us, but you guys under-estimated how involved people get, and the same lack of communication that Torn Banner suffered from is turning some fans bitter. Even while you're slaving away making a better game for us we don't realize it because we go months without seeing hotfixes or detailed to-do lists. I only remember seeing Yoshiro post a list of known issues being worked on once, other than that it's just these informal press releases meant to generate hype. Every time I see Alan Wilson or one of the few devs others than Yosh that posts here, they always seem to calm the situation immediately just by filling us in a bit. But these interactions are few and far between. I can understand to an extent, cause you never know what wackos are on the internet, but never coming to the forums of the game you develop to interact with the fanbase isn't the solution either.
The problem here isn't that big, you guys just need to hire an official community manager, or free Yoshiro up enough to properly coordinate longer WWAUT posts each week. From this thread, I think the obvious thing we've gathered is that players just want to see some progress being made. They just want to see a list of confirmed changes, a quick preview video of the internal dev build demonstrating a few upcoming features, some photos of the skeltons you have chained to the computers.
All in all I realize TW is doing a lot for us, but you guys under-estimated how involved people get, and the same lack of communication that Torn Banner suffered from is turning some fans bitter. Even while you're slaving away making a better game for us we don't realize it because we go months without seeing hotfixes or detailed to-do lists. I only remember seeing Yoshiro post a list of known issues being worked on once, other than that it's just these informal press releases meant to generate hype. Every time I see Alan Wilson or one of the few devs others than Yosh that posts here, they always seem to calm the situation immediately just by filling us in a bit. But these interactions are few and far between. I can understand to an extent, cause you never know what wackos are on the internet, but never coming to the forums of the game you develop to interact with the fanbase isn't the solution either.
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