Community Patch to Relic

i think it has more to do with napalm being in vancouver and being a reasonably prominent community member than anything else; they're not going to fly people in.

All they had to do is say sorry; sorry for saying that the game won't have any game play elements behind a pay wall and going back on their word; sorry for that dumb ass post noun made which came off that it was content creators fault the community was toxic; sorry for calling alpha testers unprofessional, people who volunteer to find bugs and provide solutions and seemingly do a better job than their QA department does; sorry to the tournament organisers who they are trying to kill off with their ESL programme.

A simple sorry is all it takes but they are too proud to EVER say that. Instead of repairing bridges they'll just bribe some new guy with cake and coffee but they WILL do something stupid and piss that person off and they will just have another angry person.

I think we both know, assuming for the moment that I accept your premise that they have anything to apologise for:

1) That's not going to happen

2) The minute it did happen people would demand they actually did something (nerf this, buff that, change the other, give M26, change the maps, etc, etc, etc)


Actions speak louder than words.


It is however somewhat telling that "The Community" apparently believes as a matter of faith:

1) Relic care so little about their game that they have to be blackmailed into fixing game breaking bugs

2) That the only way anyone can possibly have anything positive to say about Relic is because they are being bribed too



So I sincerely doubt at this point that anything is going to get the hard-core of naysayers back on side, because they each have a Platonic ideal of what they want the game to be and the reality will never match up to that.

The turning of Napalm and others has (as we can see) only made the community more divisive and has contributed nothing to improving the community's view of Relic.

The turning of Napalm and others has (as we can see) only made the community more divisive and has contributed nothing to improving the community's view of Relic.

Who knew that when you post a news article that is basically a very long drawn out way of saying "very excited" people get annoyed. It's not like we have been hearing that exact phrase for months now

I think we both know, assuming for the moment that I accept your premise that they have anything to apologise for:

1) That's not going to happen

2) The minute it did happen people would demand they actually did something (nerf this, buff that, change the other, give M26, change the maps, etc, etc, etc)


Actions speak louder than words.


It is however somewhat telling that "The Community" apparently believes as a matter of faith:

1) Relic care so little about their game that they have to be blackmailed into fixing game breaking bugs

2) That the only way anyone can possibly have anything positive to say about Relic is because they are being bribed too



So I sincerely doubt at this point that anything is going to get the hard-core of naysayers back on side, because they each have a Platonic ideal of what they want the game to be and the reality will never match up to that.

all i want is acknowledgement of, and steady progress on, the biggest issues (trello) without introducing new ones or not actually fixing the problem.

i have no faith in relic though, having lived through the dow2: ret and now coh2.

DoW2: Ret is far better and more balanced than coh2, which is funny because there is 6 factions instead of just 4.

Oh and the Commander system works better to.

I ran tournaments for their games for over 8 years, I ran different social media accounts for promotion of community events, I helped stream events, I helped get various twitch channels partnered, I did a shit load of alpha testing for them, I plugged their game on loads of different community forums.

I did this all because I loved their games and I loved the community and I believed that their games deserved to have more players and more events and have a hundred thousand plus viewers at it's premier events. I worked for all that in my free time for years. I enjoyed working with their staff on various projects, the last one being observer mode.

But the company can go to hell for all care now after what they said that I was unprofessional because I dared voice my concerns (in private) about the alarming amount of bugs that show up new patches and the lack of communication.

If this gets invised so be it, if I get an angry email so be it. Now everyone knows why I personally don't want to get involved with their IPs anymore

DoW2: Ret is far better and more balanced than coh2, which is funny because there is 6 factions instead of just 4.

Oh and the Commander system works better to.

in general yes, but there are some ober level balance issues and some other harder to solve meta issues involving commanders. the last patch was complete shit though.

I ran tournaments for their games for over 8 years, I ran different social media accounts for promotion of community events, I helped stream events, I helped get various twitch channels partnered, I did a shit load of alpha testing for them, I plugged their game on loads of different community forums.

I did this all because I loved their games and I loved the community and I believed that their games deserved to have more players and more events and have a hundred thousand plus viewers at it's premier events. I worked for all that in my free time for years. I enjoyed working with their staff on various projects, the last one being observer mode.

But the company can go to hell for all care now after what they said that I was unprofessional because I dared voice my concerns (in private) about the alarming amount of bugs that show up new patches and the lack of communication.

If this gets invised so be it, if I get an angry email so be it. Now everyone knows why I personally don't want to get involved with their IPs anymore

Props to you for all you've done and shame on Relic for telling you that. At the very least they'd just tell you how "excited" they were.

I'd say it's less about lack of communication and more about lack of action. I mean, Valve doesn't say shit about anything they do, yet Dota 2 is the most popular game on Steam because it's constantly being updated with new and cool shit that the community wants. They patch ridiculously frequently, and pretty much every single patch has one or two changes that originated in community forums.

The truth is, 99% of people don't give a fuck about balance. A new player isn't going to put down the game because it isn't balanced, they're going to put down the game because it's not fun or it's not worth their time relative to other games out there.

I personally think it makes sense from a developer perspective to limit communication with the community, since it rarely helps matters and history has shown that actions speak far louder than words. But when you're both saying nothing and doing nothing, then there's a major problem.

A few interesting reads, a post by a prominent SC2 personality about that game's decline and a very well-written comment relating that post to Dota 2's success:

http://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/11m21k/starcraft_2_will_be_dead_before_legacy_of_the/
http://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/2wh97q/valves_statement_on_ti4_booth_audio/corb5h8

The turning of Napalm and others has (as we can see) only made the community more divisive and has contributed nothing to improving the community's view of Relic.

I'm not sure it would be better if 100% of the Community was negative towards Relic.

And if you mean me, I don't think I've ever needed turning

Okay, finished reading it. None of that (fantastic) write-up supports the idea that Blizzard alienated players. The reason SC2 died, according to Destiny, was because Blizzard didn't develop any systems to give players reasons to stay. That's completely different than pissing off a community.

For example, Reddit has been in a pretty much constant state of pissed-off. They've been like this since at least the Diretide incident, over various topics with various degrees of hysteria. Yet Dota's numbers recently peaked at over 1.2M concurrent players. This is evidence of how little it matters to piss off a community. What matters is to make correct business decisions: to make sure that what you're doing is keeping people happy and engaged, not what you're saying.

Another example: Nobody would care if Valve made weekly statements that they were working hard to fix the servers. What matters is that the servers get fixed, not whether they say anything about it. (And say what you want about the servers, but supporting 1.2M concurrent players is a massive feat of engineering.)

The point here is that communication from a company is not a huge factor in whether a game wins or not. Communication can be a strong negative factor which is why Valve choose to rarely communicate, a decision I wholeheartedly agree with. But it's rarely a positive except in crisis situations.

Thanks again for the fantastic link.

But I'm pretty certain that people here don't want to hear that

I'd say it's less about lack of communication and more about lack of action. I mean, Valve doesn't say shit about anything they do, yet Dota 2 is the most popular game on Steam because it's constantly being updated with new and cool shit that the community wants. They patch ridiculously frequently, and pretty much every single patch has one or two changes that originated in community forums.

The truth is, 99% of people don't give a fuck about balance. A new player isn't going to put down the game because it isn't balanced, they're going to put down the game because it's not fun or it's not worth their time relative to other games out there.

I personally think it makes sense from a developer perspective to limit communication with the community, since it rarely helps matters and history has shown that actions speak far louder than words. But when you're both saying nothing and doing nothing, then there's a major problem.

A few interesting reads, a post by a prominent SC2 personality about that game's decline and a very well-written comment relating that post to Dota 2's success:

http://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/11m21k/starcraft_2_will_be_dead_before_legacy_of_the/
http://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/2wh97q/valves_statement_on_ti4_booth_audio/corb5h8

eh, that's true. not really how i was thinking about it but it's true. i do have one point of contention though, and that's that valve (and blizzard) DO communicate. you know when dota 2 is having an event because you get pops in steam about it, it's on the main page, and the first thing you see when you get into the game is a giant ass banner. they don't have gabe go out and talk to people on the forums, no, but they do have tech support people providing what help they can and moderators in the forums.

the thing about relic is that A, they have a history of communication, so there is an expectation there, and B, they're not making the right decisions regardless of their communication level. you can offset poor decisions in the short term by coming out and talking about it but you have to produce results later (and results that don't include breaking something else...). and it's not like relic doesn't have the tools to make the changes... the trello has been up for 2 or 3 months and this forum and the community cesspool, as well as GR at CoH2's release, provide a shit ton of feed back and some of the feedback has been given for months (OKW, pathing, i could name others...) and nothing has been done about it and we haven't gotten any explanations of why things haven't been done. and many of the things relic has tried to fix have either been incomplete, had knock on effects, or were paired with them breaking something completely unrelated...

i really wanna write "this game fucking sucks" but on reflection i don't really believe that, i'm just pissed at relic.

That's not communication though, that's marketing. There's a big difference. Sure, Valve communicates sometimes on the Dota 2 dev forum, but mostly it's just to ask questions or address specific issues in very rare cases. Actual developer posts are relatively rare.

Just like the posts I linked said, Relic posting "We're working on bug fixes" doesn't fucking matter, what matters is fixing them and releasing the fixes. Is it a problem that it's taking them so long to fix problems? Sure it is. But it's not a problem that they aren't talking about it, because talking about it wouldn't be productive at all.

Like I said, it's not about communication, it's about action. Relic not implementing community suggestions for things like quality-of-life improvements to the interface is a problem because it means they aren't acting in a way that encourages people to continue playing their game. But not talking is perfectly fine so long as you're confident that your actions will speak for themselves. So far, Relic's actions with regards to CoH2 have been extremely underwhelming.

yeah, i'll give you that too. relic is also poor at marketing though, and i haven't seen shit out of sega, despite them being the publisher.

it's really easy to get focused on dev responses in the absence of actual action because it's theoretically the next best thing. people started by complaining (or suggesting, creating discussions about, asking, etc) about specific issues, like the KV-8's insane wiping power a year ago, and when nothing came of that they moved on to complaining about the lack of developer communication as well.

The KV8 did get fixed though yes?


I have a reasonable amount of faith in President Bear

AA was as good as he said, so I consider there is a track record there.

The KV8 did get fixed though yes?


I have a reasonable amount of faith in President Bear

AA was as good as he said, so I consider there is a track record there.

I have a lot more faith in people like IpKaiFung, whose comments seem to actually sync to reality instead of being non-specific apologetic promises of things getting "better".

for what it's worth the game has improved a lot and it will continue to improve but not at a pace and in a way that is to everyone's liking. I imagine that by 2018 (the end of the five year plan) the game will be pretty great.

As for me what they said to me cut me so deep that I can't bare to ever support them by buying their products or doing community work for their games.

I remember how long Luftwaffe Medical Bomb Crates were around for.

Someone released a video about blowing up someone's base with Luftwaffe Medical Bomb Crates

Literally before I could get my credit card and buy luftwaffe supply, relic fixed the bug.

IT HAD BEEN AROUND FOR A YEAR


Regardless of whether or not the community needs to 'blackmail' relic to do something, it certainly seems that 'blackmailing' relic by exploiting gamebreaking bugs certainly makes them fix it faster than a year of bug reports.

More community involvement/demands for involvement can only speed up balance patching processes.

for what it's worth the game has improved a lot and it will continue to improve but not at a pace and in a way that is to everyone's liking. I imagine that by 2018 (the end of the five year plan) the game will be pretty great.

As for me what they said to me cut me so deep that I can't bare to ever support them by buying their products or doing community work for their games.

DoW3 is going to come out before that, and the minute it does this game will be officially dead. CoH2 can't make anywhere near the amount of money DoW3 would make in the first week of sales alone.