How long this can go on without a change?
I like playing this game and it has been part of my life for 10 years now so I would like to see it do good and go on as long as it can. There are personal preferences that I would like to filter out as much as I can and I would like to approach the recent doings from my profession perspective. I am working in software development as project manager for almost 11 years now. This might feels like a little bit of a ramble between topics, so apologies for that, I just wanted to get this off from my chest.
Mistakes can be expected at all levels and those can be even forgiven if you learn from it, but it seems that all throughout the years this is not the case with this game and with it's governance. I understand that this is a business for Kabam and sometimes they have to make harder decisions for the shareholders and such to raise the profit and all the corporate things you can imagine. But how long you are able to do that while you are burning out your customer base and basically shrinking it slow and steadily?
Let's try to break down some major block of this issues:
Basic game mechanics and fundamentals. Missing inputs, frameperfect AI and the never ending discussions around this. At it's core the most important part of the game is the fighting. If it's not working well and you have issues, you should have that as your no1. priority to make it better. Allocate your capacity mostly to it and make it happen.
Communicate well how you are doing and what is your plan. Timelines can shift we know that, but admitting to those and transparently putting it front of the community would increase your creditability. This has the largest effect all across the game, and it is swept under the rug, why?
Suggestion to make it better:
- There should be communication expert in the team that should build up a multi level communication plan, factor in the CCP opinion or the community wide sentiment, address what you can and commit to a smaller amount of deliverables, but aim higher. Constantly deliver smaller packages but in good quality to get back the trust.
This leads into another topic which is Kabam's internal resource allocation and priorities. Making the game profitable is not a surprise in a for profit company. How to make that happen on the other hand can be achieved in various ways. The tempo overall how thing are rolled out is just simply dialed up to a rate that the delivery can't really match. Again, step back a bit and deliver less but quality content. In cases less can be more.
While experimenting with new things modes should not be discouraged, modes like dimensional arcades and the poker game should be at the bottom of the priority list and never really see the daylight until other higher prio items are solved.
In these things, who approves those and who validated that it is a good idea to spend X amount of hours and resources delivering something that will end up receiving mixed feedback?
Plan more at the beginning - you can here, you dont always have to be agile - and then you can spare a lot of firefighting.
Overall the agile approach that "lets put out something as soon as we can and we will adjust it on the fly" really not sitting well with this community. We've been burned enough that we would like to have stability and consistency and well advanced communication about changes.
In any given company PMs should oversee these delivery project and should have plans or sorts of in place that they are following. From those the community managers and the experts should be able to synthetize enough information to feed the information hungry players. Once again, you see the people that you are playing this game and know how they are thinking as they are putting out lots of videos about it and why are you not listening to them?
You have your inner "focus group" the CCP and you barely involving them in anything and barely proofreading or testing things with them. Why?
Once again, in any given company if you are doing your job and you constantly failing it our making mistakes that upsets the customer base, there has to be a consequence for that. I am not saying that you should fire people - please don't - rather just invest time into learning the lessons from those mistakes and try to do better and not repeat the same thing.
Again, some suggestions:
- Have a meaningful way for the trello board - instead you allocating resources to things, offer X % of your capacity per quarter - give the community 5 options to choose from and allow them to select what they would like you to deliver and develop. Then, update the trello board items, leave meaning full updates, and once a month in the streams give a 5-10 minute update on your progress. (in software development you should be doing that anyways)
- What I mentioned earlier - dial back in the speed of pushing out new things and focus on the quality instead. It is noticeable that there is barely enough resource spent on testing. Involve the CCP more, do more BETAs like you are doing for Act 9 and such, involve us more. That way you can get a lot of valuable insight so you can polish the product and push out better things.
- Communicate more with more clarity and with more purpose and focus. In the recent communications it is visible that there wasn't enough effort or once again quality check implemented in these. You know your audience, tailor the update to them, make it clear, detailed. Say it high level in the streams, then provide a very very detailed breakdown in a forum posts - content creators can be involved so they can prepare explanation videos as they would normally do anyways. Also, goes one level deeper - inspect the effect of your actions, what this will cause and so on. Prepare for that too
This could go much much longer and we could go into a lot of specifics, but I wanted to keep this high level.
I am thankful for all the hard work that the team at Kabam is putting into the game, I dont want to be disrespectful with them, just one again, as this is a job, we are allowed to suggest and give feedback. And recently they overall performance leaves a lot to be desired.
Thanks for whoever is reading this, I really wanted to get this is out and see how other might feel about this.
I like playing the game but sometimes it's just bloody difficult to enjoy it due the things above!
