Hi everyone, we’ve seen posts in the last few months about how you feel that our level of interaction with the community has diminished or moved away in a different direction and that this had even led in some cases where you even feel like we’re not as involved with the game as we used to be.
While we want to reassure you that the above is absolutely not the case and we’re working as hard on features, improvements and fixes as we always have, we hear your sentiment and understand that it’s on us if you don’t feel as heard in general. The level of daily (in fact, all day long forum browsing) interaction we had early on in the game’s life cycle wasn’t sustainable for us, but we understand that the current way we interact with the community might not be sustainable for you.
We’d like to meet you halfway here and improve the ways we communicate with you in a few different aspects.
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A monthly Q&A / Dev “Check In” blog post. We’re going to pick a number of questions, comments, and even popular suggestions, and we’ll write regular blog articles where we can respond to these and go a bit more in detail about those subjects. We think this format will let us talk more about community concerns without spreading ourselves thin in all the different threads and also will be making information more available and centralized to refer to. The first one of these should be out this week. (edit: Monday)
Keep in mind this doesn’t mean that we’ll respond less to forum posts, but is in addition to what we’re already doing. -
More in-game Dev activity. We want to ensure that our community knows that we will be with them in game, but we understand that this has been lacking recently. You will see individual Dev team members in game more now, along with Robert (Outlander in game) getting on specifically to answer questions, interact with the community, and hang out in general. There will be more on this in the future, but it will be something where there is a forum/ discord post a day in advance with the time and place and then just meeting up with the community.
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Personal forum responses - This last item is a bit more personal to me as I’m the primary liaison between you and the Dev team:
We very often take inspiration from community suggestions when we add new features or quality of life improvements, like the upcoming Treasure Map mechanic for one example. I’d say most of what we’ve added since launch has been at least in part taken or inspired by suggestions. We haven’t been doing a great job of highlighting that and as a result players don’t feel like we read them. We’ll pay more attention to that in the future.
While we really do read all suggestions, I generally did not respond to suggestions or questions about existing features unless it’s something we know we can implement in the near future. The development schedule is pretty strict and I felt like responding to posts saying we’ll look into it without having a time commitment can cause issues (and did even when the pace of responses was frantic.)
At the same time, responding that we wouldn’t implement a suggestion kind of shuts down the discussion entirely, when in reality it’s happened many times in the past that the original idea wasn’t something we would implement, but that over time as players responded and fine tuned the ideas, we ended up implementing a version of that.
I’m open to feedback on this in general, about how you’d prefer I respond to things like that (while keeping in mind that I simply do not have the time to respond to every thread or question at the moment, and that I often do not have the answers.)
We hope these additions to community involvement will strengthen communication and the bonds between us and our community, and we’re open to feedback as well on this subject.
