Profile of nigo

Ooof. Well. I can't really agree with referring to anyone as a dick. My post sort of addresses all sides of the discussion in this thread. By all sides I suppose I mean two sides. Also: I don't think anyone here has claimed to speak for everyone. I'm going to go a bit further and also address a few comments I've seen pop up lately, in some threads that have had to be 'dealt with' for various reasons.

I think the bottom line is this: the community is REALLY passionate. This is a good thing. We know people want us to improve, and it's nice that people care enough to get so worked up over things. As a game developer, your dream is to work with a project that people care passionately about, just as much as the internal team does. So hey... we totally have that covered!

Regarding criticism - it can fall into different categories. Constructive, or ... less than constructive. And we're trying to make sure that our forums are a happy, constructive and open place for people to discuss our titles and share their experiences. I want conversation to flourish here.

We have to walk a line where the negative stuff is dealt with, but we still allow constructive criticism. It seems that no matter what we do we will still attract ire, or calls of RELIC Y U CENSOR us?! This is specifically why we have moderators edit comments. Sometimes within a comment is a very valid criticism, sandwiched between a string of insults that violates our forum rules. We could simply have all posts that contain the violations deleted entirely, but instead our aim is to have the offensive comments removed but still allow the constructively negative parts. Do you have to speak with respect here? Yeah, you do. I don't think anyone would want someone to come into their home only to see that guest 'pudding' all over things. That would be gross, and a horrible clean-up job that might require dry cleaning. We will show those people the door. Other cool people aren't going to want to come hang out in our home if it's covered in pudding. Can you imagine how horrible that would smell?

The onus is on us to provide a good experience here in these forums, and we're still working to provide that. We will do that by:

1. Cleaning up the way people interact with each other. Chill the hate comments, cull the insults, encourage conflicting opinions to become discussions and not flame wars
2. Offering up new events and initiatives for our community to enjoy our game with, and better interact with our dev team.
3. Deal with some of the frustrating technical issues this forum faces. I think everyone can agree that some of them are just... painful. Like a million papercuts on the same finger level of painful. And that probably doesn't help when people are already frustrated about something related to the game.

We are still early on in this journey. There is still more to do.

I'm going to take this as another opportunity to shout out to our awesome moderator team. The team has grown from one to six in only a few months, and they care quite a bit about what goes down in these internet halls of ours. I've already seen a shift, and it's thanks to them.

Regarding transparency - no, we don't tell you guys everything. I think that the community may always disagree with us to some extent on when the 'right time' to discuss new stuff is. We listen to your feedback on this, and it results in us trying things like the public beta for the October Patch, more stuff going through Alpha. But we are still not going to share all of our Future Plans (patent pending) straight away because our team needs time to be able to grow their vision, work on things and develop their ideas. Sometimes all you get is hints. When we finally get to tell you guys stuff, we get really excited! It feels great to be able to do that. We want to do it ALL THE TIME but the time has to be right. Me, whenever we know it's the right moment to tell the community something:

http://bit.ly/CynHappyYelling

For bug fixes, sometimes a bug that we're aware of can take a while to reproduce in ways that allow the team to fix it. Sometimes even after diagnosis, the fix can be more complicated than we'd originally thought. Sometimes a fix breaks another thing, and a different fix has to be found before pushing that fix out. Bug squashing is an interesting sport and skill. But our team that works on these things is VERY dedicated (and some of the funniest people in the office, I might add) and I think this needs to be mentioned.

I hope this helps to clear a few things up for people that have voiced their concerns recently.

http://community.companyofheroes.com/forum/company-of-heroes-2/company-of-heroes-2-general-discussion/134961-my-conclusion?p=135192#post135192