Last

week, an article went up on our sister site, href="http://www.eqhammer.com/">EQHammer.com,

entitled “ href="http://www.eqhammer.com/column/underfoot-silence-isnt-golden">Silence

Isn’t

Golden” and talked

about all the reasons players think developer

communication is a joke. Some complaints pointed out were that X

Company doesn’t

communicate enough. Players are tired of feeling like they’re

being kept at

arm’s length. They don’t understand why their

important questions are not being

answered and have determined that this “needs to stop

immediately”.

As

a former Community Coordinator for BioWare and

ArenaNet, I'm here to give you some bad news. It’s not going

to happen. I agree

that in a perfect world, it would be awesome if developers could take

time

every day and respond to player posts, read the forums, and share the

long-term

goals of the game they’re working on. The sad reality though

is that while communication

between developers and players can change and improve, until there's a

shift in

human behavior on the internet, it will never happen.

There

are a number of reasons for this, but let’s start

off with just a few. For starters, just because someone is a great

programmer

or designer does not mean they’re good at communicating with

fans. For example,

I worked with one developer that was a mathematical genius and thought

he was

funny, but sent a set of forums into a complete meltdown when he

started

trolling the players. He wasn’t trying to, he just failed to

understand how

things come across differently in the written word so that’s

the way his posts

came across. He was also far too opinionated to be a voice of reason in

the

middle of an angry mob.

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Companies

hire community professionals for a reason, not

the least of which is our ability to deal with players on a daily basis

without

sending them into an uproar. At least that’s true for most

days. Like it or

not, the amount of vitriol any community team deals with on a daily

basis would

send most people into a black pit of depression they would never emerge

from.

Developers are skilled in their professions, but style="">many

do not handle hatred and vicious comments well – to the point

that I’ve seen some leave for days because they were so hurt

by the words of

their “fans”.

And

yes, I put the fans above in quotation marks. I can’t

count the amount of times players have used the forums or private

message

systems to write some of the most horrific things about developers and

their

families that you can imagine. Most of these comments make the whole

Penny

Arcade Dickwolves fiasco sound like a story you’d read to

little children to

help them go to sleep at night. Most developers are not wired to handle

that

kind of hatred. And yes, before you ask, of course the community team

does

everything they can to keep the forums clean and amicable.

So

far, this sounds like a rant fest, eh? The good news

is that the majority of any game’s players never set foot on

the forums and

those that do are actually pretty good people. The problem comes in the

form of

perspective though. Keep in mind that with some of these games, like

SWTOR, we

were dealing with over a million forum users. Literally - over 1

million. Hundreds

of thousands of posts were made every single day at one point. Even if

only 1%

of those posts are hate-filled diatribes (and the percentage will

always be

higher than that, no matter what game you’re talking about),

that means that

out of 200,000 posts, that’s still 2,000 posts that need to

be cleaned up or

removed. In the scheme of things, that doesn’t sound like

much, but it doesn’t

take too many rotten apples to spoil the bunch.

Forgetting

the angry posters for a while, let’s talk

about the developers themselves. I can tell you from personal

experience that a

large number of them would love to answer tons of questions on the

forums. For

the sake of argument, let’s assume they even had the time to

do so (which they

really don’t). Let’s even assume that

we’re not talking about them going

through the forums themselves, but are just responding to the forum

posts

forwarded to them each day by the members of the community team. 99% of

all

questions have to do with one of two things – something that

isn’t working or

something players want to see in the game.

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In

the case of something that isn’t working, I style="">guarantee

that if there’s already a

thread about it, the development team is aware of it. There are systems

in

place that continually monitor and analyze player behavior. As a

result, it

doesn’t take long to discover when something went wrong with

the latest patch.

In these instances, community team members will normally either combine

threads

(which gets messy) or select one main thread, let the players know X

bug is

being worked on, and close all the others. It’s not a matter

of censorship or

that they hate you, it’s because they’re trying to

keep things organized so

people coming to the forums can see what’s going on. In the

case of old bugs,

again, the team is well aware.

Despite

what some people think, posting a message of “We

know it’s broken and will implement a fix as soon as we

can” gets old to

players, quickly - especially when that bug persists for months on end.

Like it

or not, all bugs are prioritized and quite often repeatedly get pushed

to the

next patch because more impactful bugs have been discovered.

Eventually, they

may even be deemed minor enough to be listed as “Not going to

fix” because of

the cost versus return investment isn’t worth it. I know that

to you

it’s a big deal that sometimes when

you fire your Bow of Awesomeness within 5 feet of a cavern wall inside

the

Dungeon of Doom and it heals an enemy instead of doing its appropriate

damage.

Sadly though, that bug may only affect less than 0.0001% of the

game’s population

and the cost to fix it just isn’t worth it. I know it sucks,

but it’s the

truth.

In

terms of players posting about something they’d like

to see in game, the ones that gather enough interest from the community

team,

individual developers that periodically scan the forums (though rare,

they do

exist), or from other players, are sent on to the appropriate

development team.

When it comes to something cool being added into a game, developers

cannot wait

to tell everyone about it. I’ve seen developers get something

into a workable

state and are salivating at the mouth so much in anticipation of

letting

players know about it that they nearly drown. Once again though,

they’re not

allowed to and for a good reason.

Let’s

say a developer made the following statement in a

forum post - “The team is working on this awesome new feature

called Bazoola

Woogle Hunting. The design discussions are going great so far, but

it’s still

on the drawing board. I can’t promise anything will come of

it, but hopefully

we’ll be able to show the community more about it

soon.” There are so many

reasons the community team on hand would cringe at this that

they’re hard to

process, but let me point out a few.

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style="font-weight: bold;">Rule number one

– I know “soon” to the player base means

a couple weeks, but in development speak, that can style="">easily

be six months or more. Remember, these people may have been

working on this project for years. To them, six months is nothing.

style="font-weight: bold;">Rule number two

– “I can’t promise anything”

gets

translated to “I promise it will be in the game

soon” within a matter of

minutes on various boards the statement gets forwarded to.

style="font-weight: bold;">Rule number three

– Rules one and two are the creators of

“The Company Lied To Us!" syndrome.

I

realize this article may seem a little harsh, but these

are some of the realities of communicating with developers and game

companies

in general. Does that mean there aren’t ways to improve

communication?

Absolutely not. It does mean that a utopia of players always being

aware of

everything a company is working on will never come to pass though.