Community Council purpose

Phoenix Point Game Feedback
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It bugs me since you have posted this. Active engagement is non-existent. Even at times we had UV as community manager, the only engagement I had with SG employee ever was when he asked me politely to stop when I metaphoricaly “shitted in a living room” here.

Some of those who are in a CC speak how SG is great at listening to us, and how they care about everything. And it bugs me as hell, because you have to join elite handpicked group of veteran community members to even be able to have any kind of engagement at all and to even be able to get any feedback to what you are saying.

When we have had the very first discussions about CC initiative, I thought you’ll be there to catalyse broader community ideas and present them in a structured form to SG and we’ll get feedback. The “Community Council”. What happened to that? When did it turn into alpha/beta testers with NDA?

What is the point of Community Council, if it is not there to present community ideas and issues and return with feedback to community? I can’t find any CC reports here. How can you tell that they are listening to us when they have created different internal community position so they can listen to you. This is mindblowing.

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I follow this forum on a regular basis. As do others in the CC. Rest assured that many comments and suggestions made here are reported by CC members.

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Great, give us the feedback about Overwatch then. Because this is recurring issue here, yet three CC members joined current topic Are you guys ever going to fix overwatch? and neither of them said anything but own opinion.

If we don’t know, from you, what was presented by CC to SG and get the feedback about it here, you are, for us, useless. You are another one-way medium, no different to them reading the forum once a month or so. :man_shrugging:

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From my perspective, I see myself as a voice for the wider community. I think @mcarver2000 here will attest that I regularly bring up issues posted on these forums to the attention of the devs - even going so far as posting links to key discussions on the CC forum for them to look at.

I am also one of the constant voices cautioning the more seasoned players on the Council that we always have to keep the more casual player in mind, no matter how challenging we personally would like the game to be - as is @mcarver2000 . While he was on the Council @drages and I had a couple of contretemps about this, because he is of the view that casuals are pandered to too much by SG.

As for OW, I have not brought up your concerns about it yet because I have not yet had the time to test it myself. If, once I’ve played it, I agree with the assessments in the thread you referred to, then I will definitely be raising it with the devs - but that’s the way I work within the Council. I champion the causes I personally believe in and think have merit. I don’t bring up every little complaint on these forums, because often I don’t agree with them.

However, I know that there are other people, not just on the Council, whose job is to monitor these forums and feedback a digest of the main issues being discussed to the devs.

As to our purpose on the CC. We’re a group of very experienced players who are asked to evaluate certain things within the game and discuss how they affect certain aspects of the gameplay experience. That discussion is ultimately synthesised (by us and by our moderator) and fed back to the devs, who then act on it as they see fit. Oft-times we don’t think they go far enough, but we only have one perspective and I believe the devs are often keeping their wider audience in mind.

That said, I believe they are coming to the realisation that not enough is being done to satisfy the less casual end of their market, and they are figuring out how to address that without alienating their core player-base (which I have to tell you is not us - most of us on these forums are an extreme minority at either end of a much broader spectrum of players).

So that’s what we do and that’s how I interpret my role on the Council. I’m there as a conduit and an advocate, but it’s not my job to champion every single little nitpick that people have with this game because people have hundreds and they are very often completely contradictory.

And before you say: “But how can I get OW looked at if you’re going to ignore me?” I’m just one of several ways I know the devs get feedback. To the best of my knowledge, the Monitors will be passing your concerns along. You can also post a request on Canny. TBH, I don’t even know if the main gripe people seem to have with OW atmo (that multiple squaddies go off in sequence) can be fixed - I certainly used to deal with this by creating a layered tier of OWs, so that Squaddie 1’s cone extended slightly further than Squaddie 2’s and so on. I also don’t know if the door issue you raised is fixable, since OW is triggered by perception - but like I say, until I’ve tested the new system I don’t feel qualified to argue for it on the Council cos I don’t know what I’m talking about.

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Me too. But sounds more like we member the good times, then that we
enjoy it, with current shape of game :slight_smile:

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I am aware of all the ways, I guess. But I thought you, Community Council, was supposed to be the only two-way we, the community, can rely on. And we don’t even know what you are doing and which ideas were presented and which filtered out, because you don’t communicate with us. Looks like you (the CC in general) took the benefit of talking to SG with huge “so long, suckers!” to rest of us.

I don’t care about OW specifically. This is just but one example of recurring issue that already has three different CC members responses and neither of them even remotely suggests it was or it will be discussed internaly.

And I thought it is/was on you to ask and find out, because none of us have the benefit of talking to the devs. The main gripe is way over a year old, longer than CC even exists.

We don’t want to give a feedback (there is shitload of tools to do that already), it is us who would want to get feedback.

And that is why I think CC is useless to broader community because you speak for yourself. :man_shrugging:

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And I do, by engaging on these forums and feeding back what I’ve learned into the CC discussion.

I also do my best to tell you what I, from my perspective, believe the devs are doing in response to various complaints - like, for instance, they are constantly working to fix the bugs that people report, but there are a multitude of quite complex reasons why they don’t happen fast and at times don’t work (or revert). And when I do, I am accused of being an ‘uncritical fanboy’ or a ‘mouthpiece of the (lazy) devs’.

I can’t win either way. So I do what I can and ignore the abuse when I get it :man_shrugging:

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What players exactly? Those who played the game and threw it out for whatever reasons? Did they ever ask them what those reasons were and addressed them? Devs think about some imaginary spectrum of players that they would have to have. And make the game for this imaginary target group. This is unreality and results reflect that.

And again you don’t need to make changes for all players at the same time. So whatever voices on Council that were like: “we can’t do that because it would hurt casuals” is total BS.

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What you don’t do, as CC in general, tell us what have been reported and what was addressed so far. If you think that “responding to various complaints - like, for instance, they are constantly working to fix the bugs that people report” is the feedback we expect you are wrong.

If we knew what was reported, what is addressed and what is status (even if it would be: “can’t do, not possible”) maybe some wouldn’t accuse devs of ignoring us. Maybe they are not, maybe you are.

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If one feels that overwatch is broken, they need to report it via F10 so the devs can gather the logs to see if and how it’s broken. Also, if one is having issues with OW the should check out this wiki entry: Combat - wiki.phoenixpoint.com

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Oh, yes. That is exactly how I percieve CC right now. :slight_smile:

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This idea of CC is quite good but execution is disastrous and mostly waste of manpower. It turned to poeple reading posts and beta testing their patches instead of making better game for players. This should be done in a way where they make 5th difficulty level: Community Council level. And the council send them what numbers they put into the game. This would make some impact on the game. But currently instead of that they read posts and checking whether the game crashes. Like really you use poeple who have thousands of hours in the game, or similar game genre titles, for reading post and catching black screens? Who the heck thought this is good resource managment? Maybe SnapShot.

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Well, first there’s the silent majority who play this game and buy the DLC without commenting on any forums, and far outnumber all the players who participate on every forum that’s available.

Then there are a bunch of ways that companies like SG gather information which we are not privy to in detail and could not talk about even if we were because it’s privileged information.

TBH with you, it’s our perspective in this little self-referential bubble that is ‘imaginary’, in that we believe we speak for a far larger spectrum of players than I’ve come to realise we actually do.

As for casuals, let me give you an example which I think I can talk about without breaking any confidences. As we tested the Gift in this DLC, it became clear to me and others that it was very easily cheezable by using a vehicle. So we raised the issue and argued for some additional barriers to be put in place to make it less easy for a vehicle to simply race to the evac point in 4 turns without taking a scratch. The devs responded by putting a couple more obstacles in the way, but pointed out that this was an early-game mission often played with low-level squaddies - and while we with our experience knew exactly what we were doing, they had to keep in mind that the majority of players were not as adept at exploiting the meta as we were. Ultimately, we compromised by getting a larger reinforcement pool of better-armed Pandas who got in the way of the vehicle on the higher difficulties, while the way was left more clear on the lower difficulties. It wasn’t ideal, and I personally would have liked a couple more obstacles put in the way, cos it’s still pretty easy for a vehicle to beat the mission (but then that’s vehicles for you, and there is a loooong an ongoing discussion about them on the CC). But I get where the devs were coming from - just because I could ace that mission in 5 turns with no losses because I knew what was doing and had scoped out the optimal route didn’t mean that the core audience of this game was going to have the same experience, especially not on their first run.

And given some of the threads I have read on these forums since, they’re right. For every one of us who feels that the Gift is too easy and can be cheezed , there’s another - if not a couple - complaining that it’s too hard and should be nerfed. And tbh, their opinions are just as valid as ours.

Now, to my mind, the only way to square that circle is to have a hard line between Easy/Vet and Hero/Legend where the difficulty ramps up exponentially for those of us who want a more challenging experience. And I have been arguing very strongly for that. But I equally believe that Easy should be exactly that - easy - which for many people it is not atmo.

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Yeah. But you’re making assumpitons as well as devs, what kind of players they are. I think there is high probability you’re making completely wrong assumptions about those players which leads to wrong game-design choices and bad results. Then you’re making another bunch of wrong assumptions about how to address that → making bad design choices → another round of even worse results.

So instead of making two options and see what players choose you’re trying to choose for them because you feel superior in knowledge what is best for them.

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Well, without breaking confidences I can’t go into any more detail.

I’ll just tell you that you are making equally erroneous assumptions based on little to no data.

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I have data. YT, Twitch, Steam, Players engagment. And your data is what? Some inside info from devs that nobody knows about. If the data from Snapshot was right, they would make a successful game. They didn’t create that. So their data is another BS. They think it’s right, but that doesn’t make it right.

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Well, they might buy the game and not play it, as well.

Cut the campaigns for each, Legendary being longest and rookie being shortest.

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And that is a great addition to how I percieve Communit Council. :stuck_out_tongue:

Once again I will ask: what is the purpose of Community Council if you do not communicate with Community about your actions?

You keep saying you read forum regulary and bring issues to devs attention. Do you have NDA on what do you bring up? Do you have NDA about respose?

What is the point of CC in current form? You seem to be unpaid difficulty tester with responsibility of checking if casual/hardcore balance is fine. You are anything but Community Council. :stuck_out_tongue:

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I’m going to end this conversation here because it’s only going to get acrimonious for no good reason and nothing I say is going to convince you out of your opinion anyway.

Let’s just leave it that you have your opinion and I have mine.

And whether you believe it or not, I will continue working in the Council to persuade the devs to improve this game for all players, both casual and experienced TBSers. Ultimately, my goal is to have a game which those of us who gravitated to the Long War because we found vanilla XCOM too easy will enjoy just as much as the casual majority (and believe me, they outnumber us by a lot).

I’ve been patiently plugging away at the devs since the Backer Builds, and I don’t intend to stop. But I will say that in that 2+ years I have learned an awful lot which has changed my perception from one which used to be pretty close to yours.

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I’ve already answered your question, several times. If you don’t like it, there’s not much I can do about that :man_shrugging:

I shall keep on doing what I’m doing, and working to improve this game for all players on the spectrum.

I shall also keep engaging on this forum and telling you what I can from my perspective. If it’s not enough for you, then I’m sorry. But that’s all I can do.

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