Again. I’m not saying make game be unattractive for casuals. This is what you have to do as well. But not at the cost of the gameplay for the rest of the players who are your true core. And I think you completely believed devs nonsence about causals being most prevelant group in PP audiance. They would want more casuals because it would mean more sales etc. But you have TBS which has very specific audiance. These are mostly not RPG players. And most of them left the game for that reasons.
I’ve search for some streams of PP. Found yesterday https://www.youtube.com/user/TorNis7 on twitch. Seems to be the biggest streamer of PP. Watched like 30 minutes here and there. Look what he’s doing in the game. This is your typical PP player. He didn’t read any of these event faction pop-up events. Was checking what they gave on wiki. Abused bash and war cry and whatever he could.
And you design that RPG system for those kind of players and wondering how the heck they’re leaving.
I may be blind, but can you point me an answer to:
What is the purpose of Community Council if CC do not communicate with Community about CC actions?
Because for me it does feel like you avoid this question.
You just take the benefit of being as close to shaping the game as community person can be, without actually having to answer before the community you were supposed to speak in name of.
Okay this is not the same. You said sth about the need for clear line here.
But eariler you said that causals are the most prevalent group in PP audiance that need to mainly cared about. I disagree with that and not with the statement about clear line between difficulty levels.
You said that you have data which you can’t show. Okay, but I won’t change my opinion based on your hidden data. Let’s say I have some hidden data I can’t show you. Will you change your opinion because I have some hidden data? But I have hidden data.
And data is not some law of physics. You can very easily misinterpret data to match your opinion, and not the other way around. So whatever data they think they have, it doesn’t mean that the interpretation or data itself is correct.
You are not Community Council as far as I am concerned, you are but one Community Councillor (whatever it actually means, because you avoid answering to what is CC supposed to do and keep telling what you, personaly, do).
My point is, in current form you, Community Council, are useless to broader community. You are unpaid difficulty testers, which you are Ok with because can play and shape the game before actual release, but:
Is just bullshit because wider community has absolutely no idea what do you speak about because you refuse to share. So good for you see yourself such, but community does not.
This is yet another one-way relation, even worse than Canny and others, because it is filtered out by personal taste of CC.
(sigh) I really don’t want to get dragged back into this.
Can’t you see that they’re the same thing? Whether you like it or not, the casual game-playing majority are the ones who pay a game company’s bills - especially in this post XCOM/Fortnite day and age.
So any games company nowadays that wants to sell its game has to keep them in mind.
But the experienced TBS audience is looking for a challenge - I’m looking for a challenge. However, we are a tiny minority of the paying audience.
So the only way the company can both keep the paying audience onside and satisfy experienced TBS players is by creating an Easy mode for the casuals and a Hard mode for the more experienced players.
To date, SG has made the mistake of trying to please both schools by opting for the middle ground. That doesn’t work, because one side screams with outrage at every little nerf while the other disparages them for not going far enough. I think they’re starting to realise that. So if we’re lucky (and if I keep patiently plugging away at them) we might actually get a Hard Mode that’s actually, you know, ‘hard?’, while keeping the Easy Mode playable by the kind of player who can’t even figure out that to avoid getting crucified by the Corruption Node it might be a good idea to… maybe… dodge out of the way…?
Typical player is the sort of person who streams a lot of PP? Wouldn’t that mean there be a lot of streams, since that’s typical behaviour? What you’re doing is framing your personal view as representative of the “consensus” which is a tactic to shut down any reasonable objections since any objections become “minority view”.
Not typical like 1 to 1. But typical in terms of approach to the game and thought process. If I’m starting the game I won’t be any good like he is, but I can have similar approach to the game. That’s what I’ve meant by saying typical. And majority of TBS players have some things in common which can be easily observed by watching how they play the game. If a typical player would play more it would end up in the same pattern of behaviours as the streamer here. It’s only question of in game time. That’s why self-restricting idea backfires on typical TBS player. Because this is more RPG behaviour. You don’t do things because you like them more, you do them because they are better. And strategy players tend to go to those kinds of environment where decision process is important. If this is not important for them they will tend to go to those where it is less important. The old RPG - STRATEGY discussion. And you can’t be both at the same time, because then your target group is null really. And PP Devs by trying to make from PP a RPG STRATEGY TBS GAME are actually making their target group go to zero.
They alienated their core target group and have mostly some RPG leftovers casuals. Now they analysing data from those causuals and can’t change anything because those only casuals left would leave the game. So they have simply cornered themsevles with their logic. Good woork SnapShot team. You have respawned yourself in a toilet without the door. And now what? Time to tell it’s free aim fault.
Haven’t read all the conversation, but I will put my perspective, as there is probably some misunderstanding what is the Community Council.
We though that we will be the chosen ones who will get insight into what Snapshot Games is doing. That we will go there to tell them “this is bullshit - change it please”. That we will get vast knowledge of the game and we will test deeply every new iteration of the game while telling people what to expect and how things stand. None of it is true at least in the most extent.
I will tell you what Community Council is. It is selected group of people who can ask questions and sometimes (even quite often) get answers from devs, but we are under NDA from the beginning of Council existence. And we can’t share precise informations we obtain there. And what is most important we don’t know Snapshot Games plans except some vague informations sneaked by developers.
We are also small fraction of experienced players who are sometimes asked what we think about some solutions we are presented. And devs act upon the feedback we give to them about these specific solutions. But they have free will and their own plan and they can completely ignore our feedback.
We also report issues mentioned on forum, on canny, on discord and some even dig through rubble on Reddit. But we do it only on topics we feel we can support and argue about. Often we even argue between ourselves if something brought in here is right or wrong. Our mentor there from SG side is reading this and is putting it as some feedback for the core development team but we don’t get reports about what designers or even Julian himself is thinking about the issue. Sometimes we just get notifications that something is looked upon and may get changed in the future (but we, the Council don’t know how or when - and even if we would know we wouldn’t be able to share this because of NDA).
We sometimes also get working (let’s call it so, if ton of bugs can be skipped) build to see incoming features to test them and to comment on them. But still what we see is not guaranteed to be in final build and we can’t share what we saw. And here again Snapshot can do anything with our (Council) feedback as they please.
Often they comment that they understand our concerns but they also need to take care of the wider audience. They have telemetric data from game. They have issues from bug reporting tool, they have canny which they read. But they just don’t comment on it. It would require a lot of time to comment all the issues and some of these comments could be innacurate. I suppose that they don’t want to get into situation where they have promised something in the comment and then it can turn out it can’t be done or will be done but differently.
So yep. You can call us unpaid testers. We have little voice over what is and how is made. And we can’t share the information we receive. But we try to report main issues. And we hope it will have some impact in not foreseen future. And we try to be the voice of the players, even if only representing some small fraction.
@Yokes is my man as he is one of the most honest and self awareness. This is the most accurate CC description. Yeah others would not make to accept it but sadly, denying is not changing the harsh truth.
Even @mcarver2000 does not want to remember me as an old CC member (joking man…), I was there for some months and I experienced it.
CC discuss something for hours and no SG developer talks until they pinned finally and their standard answers are:
We will look to it, but there are priorities.
Didn’t we fix it already?
Of course we want a balanced nice TBS game but… (disconnected)
We don’t have any plan to do that.
We can’t do better AI because…
No comment any of design chooses.
BUT when SG needs something, they ask our opinions and take the easiest one and make it half-way and as a result, it’s still broken.
When new DLC comes, they start to send test buildings and asks for problems… but only bugs…
CC: this mission does not work.
Devs: Thank you, we will handle it.
CC: This system is not so good, it could be better with those options…
Devs: Uhm, thx, we will look for it.
After 2 weeks:
CC: This system is still bad. Any news about some changes?
Devs: The person you have called cannot reached at the moment, please stop to bother about design and content ideas.
I know that this happened at LotA too as even a single idea from CC didn’t considered.
So yes, CC is for free testing not design but bugs and funny part is most of the bugs are not fixed at all.
If you just want to see a new patch some weeks ago, yeah CC is cool.
Yet this makes CC practically useless for Community.
Lack of transparency between you (the CC) and people here is makes it even worse. We should know in advance what will be reported to SG. We don’t care about CC internal disagreement, it shouldn’t be up to you anyway. Otherwise you are Little Internal Council, not Community Council.
If we had your report on CC meeting, we could at least have something we can relate to. And we could bug you to bug them about things “we’re looking into it”.
I am not happy about it but, yes. You are little to no use for community here, but you are useful for SG in giving early feedback you are not even allowed to share.
Not sure why it was so hard for @MichaelIgnotus to admit any of that.
I said before that when you have no money then the obvious choice is to build some sort of Youtubers, Streamers, Players cooperation. But you need to be good at communication in the first place. It seems that they have problems with good communication even between themselves. And someone told us: we didn’t see any company that has such good communication standards. What standards again?
If you name sth Community Council it doesn’t make this a “community” Council. The same with good communication. If someone is asking about sth it doesn’t make it a good communication. Are you sure devs didn’t send bots at those CC meetings? It looks like they sending the same answer no matter what you say there.
Maybe we are not useful for the community because we can’t share what is going on.
But I think that at least we have some impact. Small but still valid and pushing the game by small steps in right direction (in the consensus direction - not mine, unfortunately for me). Maybe I will explain. I care more about the game and how it is built and if it is challenging (to the extend that I would make this game really hard to beat on the highest difficulty setting, on easy it could be easy) rather than particular gamers feelings. But I’m not the only one there and all other concerns are brought there to the table. So community still benefits from our existence even if it is in longer term.
All balance changes (past and future) can be considered as our deed. Some things in Festering Skies were also influenced by us (not much and definitely not all, but at least few annoying issues were addressed). With LotA it was worse, so devs thankfully improve in hearing our small voice.
I suppose that we also will have impact on the DLC4 or DLC5 (can’t remember which one was meant to include one thing) so I’m little happy with what we do there. Even if it is a small fraction of what should be done.
This is a flawed design. Because you’re trying to find a solution that would appease everyone. Instead it should be “Casual” Council vs “TBS” Council. It shouldn’t be one for everyone sort of thing. The person responsible for difficulty level for TBS players shouldn’t be the one that is trying to balance the game for casuals. It’s quite obvious. You’re probably wrong people to make balancing for casuals to begin with. Balancing for casual should be done by people who know little of the game.
But would creating CC report after such meeting, without of course mentioning unreleased content, be a violation of NDA?
Because CC telling us how hard devs work after shitstorm about them ignoring us reach fecal culmination point isn’t exaclty resolving anything. And such report could prevent at least on of such discussions.
