Is this thread a troll?

I'm unhappy that I don't have a Ferrari

Is this a request that the devs spend less time improving the game and more time talking about improving the game?

If so, I'm not sure I'd support it.

If it is just a request for the devs to work harder, or for CCP to employ more of them, then I'll ignore it.

Well it's not just the weekly update posts that are a point of frustration. It's pretty much all communication, that was just the most recent thing to grab as an example. There's hardly anything informative coming our way, spanning back several months at this point. There used to be a fair amount of activity on the forums and IRC, and lately all we get are "thread moved to appropriate section" posts for the most part.

The weekly update posts could stand to have more elaboration, though. Part of the reason is feedback to us that you see a given problem or suggestion the way that we intended. Otherwise, we feel like in the middle of all the chaos you overhear just "small missiles" and then it's off to the drawing board to mess with small missiles! More activity (from your end) on the forums could help out with this as well, participating in threads that you see a legitimate suggestions and discussions to help guide fleshing out an idea, because let's face it a lot of people are bad at fully proposing an idea. That way we don't feel like you just hear the topic and then go off to do your own thing to it.

New dev blogs are good and all, but so far I don't think I've seen one that has really told us, the closed beta testers, anything we didn't already know. They all seem like marketing material to get people out of the loop interested, and not a look at what's on the horizon. The rewards one was a little informative, but really only so far as you guys refused to tell us how it worked exactly before the dev blog, because it was being written at the time and "wait for it."

Many of us still don't know what kind of game you want Dust to be, though, and that's a huge problem for those of us that feel that way. It was always explained as tactical before I joined into the beta, but things have gone in a direction that is anything but tactical with each new build. We don't know how to tailor our feedback when not knowing what vision you have for Dust. If it's supposed to be an arcade shooter, that'll alter our perception of various mechanics (and how we provide feedback) differently than if it's supposed to be a tactical shooter.

One of the biggest issues is all the changes being made with no explanation, such as AR iron sights and ambush red line changes. They're just thrust upon us and we have to beat an explanation out of you as to why they were done, if we ever get one at all (I don't think we have about either of those). Most of the time we make up our own ideas for why they were done, and it just leads to all this speculation about the direction the game is heading.

I spoke to you in IRC (I'm Skytt in there) about communication a while back, and setting up some kind of organized feedback system to have better two-way communication, but I never heard anything since then. I'd still like to see that. You could choose a reasonable number of the more rational members of the community and have a weekly or bi-weekly feedback session (whatever fits your schedule) with them where their role is to simply relay the important matters the community has between you and everyone else. They can do all the typing it up to save you time to work on other stuff.

If we're supposed to have any role in the testing that isn't purely providing you with usage data, and instead actually having some kind of impact on the development of the game with our ideas and suggestions, then something really needs to be done to establish better two-way communication.

One of the biggest issues is all the changes being made with no explanation, such as AR iron sights and ambush red line changes. They're just thrust upon us and we have to beat an explanation out of you as to why they were done, if we ever get one at all (I don't think we have about either of those). Most of the time we make up our own ideas for why they were done, and it just leads to all this speculation about the direction the game is heading.

Keep faith, your forum posters not professional game devs

The Iron Sight for the AR was implemented because there was a lot of feedback in the Feedback/requests forums stating that the AR "mask" was odd. Was mostly because the gun wasn't lifted to the face to be sighted, the camera just moved to the sight on top of the AR itself and was rather unorthodox.

I think another big thing to do with it was that CCP intends (at some point) to implement a weapon customization system.

We may not be professional game devs, but many (probably most) of us are very avid gamers and this is not our first pony ride.

I think many of you misunderstand the purporse of the weekly update posts. They are meant to keep the general forum populus informed (on a high level) on what the dev team has discussed regarding forum feedbak and comments by players. It is not meant to be, nor should it be a detailed essay of development work being done on DUST.

These weekly updates begain as a response to beta testers asking for a brief weekly update that will let them know that the dev team is looking at their comments and taking steps to address them and that's what the weekly updates have been doing.

We are working on publishing more dev blogs that will give more insight to the vision of DUST and the features/game mechanics that have been and are going to be introduced, but it will take us time before we can reach the level of frequency and volume that EVE dev blogs have.

We understand the desire to have a two way communication between players and devs and when done correctly, it is a very powerful tool. However, like some of you stated, what is communicated to us should represent the majority of the player base, and not the vocal minority. The CSM has proven to be very helpful in this regard and we are looking into how we can expand it to include DUST delegates as well in the future.

Lastly, we would like to thank all of you for giving us your feedback during the DUST beta period. To help us build better communication channels, we would like to ask that you give ideas that can improve it in the same level of detail that you have shown in pointing out what was broken with it in this thread.

Keep faith, your forum posters not professional game devs

where were all you guys support when i made a thread about this? O_o

I never had any trouble with those weekly updates. They're meant to be pointers, notes on what is discussed in dev meetings and not full report. Also, someone mentioned how worse those forums would be if they were actually saying "hey, we discussed about making heavies 50% slower and raise bullet spread for HMG by 40% or so"

It would quickly end with multiple " NERF WHAT DA **** CCP!!" vs "HEAVIES DO ARE OP, JUST TAKE IT" etc.... And we already have that every new build. Trust me, you dont want that every week. Especially when there absolutely no reason to think that they actually changed anything in the game. They discuss the feature. Meaning they probably decide of a few test\tweaks to run that may not even end up with any actual change.

Now, is their comm perfect ? Of course not. It's often clumsy, or lacking a bit in accuracy (tourney, late migration with dates all wonky, incomplete patch notes etc..). But even if they were to do more, i think we'll remain unsatisfied as we would then want even more. Or maybe they could add a live feed of all their meeting, who would like that ?

i think we can't actually complain about CCP compared to most dev teams....

I get what you mean Bendtner. But would it be relevant for us to judge changes before effectively testing them ?
I guess if it had worked this way in the past, maybe we could have avoided some unpleasant changes like the 2sec timer. That and other stuff dont need any testing for us to know that it's a bad move.

Maybe it's also a man-power issue. Doing such a thing would require much more time from devs and such that they probably dont have.

I think many of you misunderstand the purporse of the weekly update posts. They are meant to keep the general forum populus informed (on a high level) on what the dev team has discussed regarding forum feedbak and comments by players. It is not meant to be, nor should it be a detailed essay of development work being done on DUST.

These weekly updates begain as a response to beta testers asking for a brief weekly update that will let them know that the dev team is looking at their comments and taking steps to address them and that's what the weekly updates have been doing.

We are working on publishing more dev blogs that will give more insight to the vision of DUST and the features/game mechanics that have been and are going to be introduced, but it will take us time before we can reach the level of frequency and volume that EVE dev blogs have.

We understand the desire to have a two way communication between players and devs and when done correctly, it is a very powerful tool. However, like some of you stated, what is communicated to us should represent the majority of the player base, and not the vocal minority. The CSM has proven to be very helpful in this regard and we are looking into how we can expand it to include DUST delegates as well in the future.

Lastly, we would like to thank all of you for giving us your feedback during the DUST beta period. To help us build better communication channels, we would like to ask that you give ideas that can improve it in the same level of detail that you have shown in pointing out what was broken with it in this thread.

We understand the desire to have a two way communication between players and devs and when done correctly, it is a very powerful tool. However, like some of you stated, what is communicated to us should represent the majority of the player base, and not the vocal minority. The CSM has proven to be very helpful in this regard and we are looking into how we can expand it to include DUST delegates as well in the future.

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