BARDAS wrote:CCP Cmdr Wang wrote:BARDAS wrote:What are these patch notes that people speak of? Do you by chance mean the arcane scribble that magically appears 24 hours before a change takes place thus preventing any meaningful feedback from the community which could potentially prevent problems before they occur? If so yeah I may have heard about those once a while back. Its a shame we don't see them sooner for the aforementioned reason.
How are you going to give us meaningful feedback before you even try the changes? Or is your brain so awesome that you can look into the future? And while we are on the subject of feedback, guys, a few one liners and a catch word here and there really doesn't help. If you really care about improving the game, then please structure your feedback in a way that will:
1. List specific issues and the circumstance when it happened. We then put these in a weekly report and discuss them with the dev team on ways to address this.
2. Provide insight on why you think this is happening, if you can. Translation, explain as best as you can on how to reproduce the error/bug you encountered.
The patch notes are there to let players know what changes are coming so they can plan their gameplay accordingly, not so that people can theory craft before hand on how things will work before they actually try it.
I think you missed the entire point I was trying to convey. Early patch notes are just the part of what the community wants. So I will sum it up in words that sound less sarcastic than my original post:
We want regular and frequent communication from the developers on what is going on behind the scenes. If you are your staff are unable to do this then hire someone for the sole purpose of doing this. If you cannot or are unwilling to do that then why are you even in the business of making a video game? If you cannot communicate with your customers then you have no chance of keeping an already extremely frustrated player base playing your game long term.
And no the dev blog doesn't count. It is updated infrequently and does not contain all the information we as a community want and/or need. I'm sure there is more that could be said on this topic. Perhaps someone else would care to expand on the subject. I'm currently on my lunch break so I do not have the time to create a massive post pointing out what the developers are obviously lacking.
Think of the developer & customer relationship as being like a marriage. What is the key to any good lasting marriage?
Communication!
What I was trying to say in the earlier post was that patch notes are not the ideal tool for spotting problems. In the current process, at the stage when patch notes are finalized, there's limited time to iterate before the changes are in-game. And the community can help by working together with positive posts. When it comes to giving helpful feedback, Mavado is a good example. He gives focused topics that contain details which support his arguments.
We make every attempt we can to listen and apply feedback where time and resources allow, but this is not always possible as much as we'd like. While we are taking steps with the CPM to better improve our feedback process, the rest of the playerbase can help us out in the meantime. The amount of hostility on the forums make them a very unwelcoming place for those who'd strive to post positive feedback, and the amount of hostile threads can easily clog up the forums and make our job much more difficult when scouring for the feedback that the dev teams need to see. So, to this end... while we try to improve our end of the process, we're asking for a little help from the players on their end as well
Ultimately, the goal is to setup a method that will allow enough time to tell the CPM what is planned for the next release and get their feedback (which will include voices from the community) in time to allow a response from the devs, and changes that are possible based on your feedback. So what we want to have is "better" and more "effective" communication that can then be centralized and shared with everyone.
When it comes to in-game events, we are also making a list of features that will support the type of events that many of you have been asking for. It'll take development time to make them but once it's done we will be able to add more variety in terms of conditions for the event and flexibility of rewards to make events more enjoyable.
Now I think most of us have lost sight of what this thread was about in the first place, and that is when will 1.4 patch notes come out? The answer is tomorrow around DT.