Lycus
Legendary AdventureGuide!
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Another thing to remember is that the Developers have a job, as has been mentioned, to create and run the game, that is their position. It is great for them all to interact, whether it be on the forums, Twitter or the Design Notes, with you guys, however their main priority is to make the releases for you all to enjoy! Still, as you see, Charfade and Rabblefroth are particularly active on the forums here, and all the Devs post rather actively on Twitter, as Charfade said, it is much faster and easier to post on!
The Moderators are there to help out in-game and be active around there, most Testers/Moderators are at least active in looking over the forums and the AK's do feedback, especially since quite a few AK's are Mods/Testers. It is part of their position to help reply to you and pass on things, helping to liaise between you and the team, allowing you to get responses and the team to get the feedback while they can still concentrate on developing.
At the same time, some times just because they do not comment, does not mean they are not looking. There are a lot of topics on this forum, however there are a lot of times where I know I look at some of them, I know the developers do to and they could be great topics, but it is not exactly somewhere something of value could be input by us. Therefore, we take it in, but cannot exactly reply since there just is not something of use we can say. Sometimes they do post and what they say is split up into little bits and they're eaten alive, which at times can be unfair and can discourage any more posts in that session on the forum. Again, any non-constructive and quite aggressive topics also do not make people want to post replies. These are just a few reasons, they may sound like excuses, however I am simply giving a few suggestions as to why there may not always be loads of responses by Developers and also to say how some of the In-Game/Forum Teams do help with the liaising as much as possible.
The irony being that this topic is complaining about Developer interaction, you have a developer who replies multiple times in the topic, clearly showing activity of Developers and Developer interaction and yet quite a few people jump on and just say 'Excuses!' and have a go at them for responding to the topic in a way they do not like. Is this supposed to encourage them to respond more in general? Since it certainly is not the way to go about it. Some times people may say something you do not exactly agree with or that you do not exactly want to hear, however by simply dismissing what they say with things such as 'excuses, all excuses' and other dismissive comments, you basically tell them that what they are saying is invalid and/or not wanted. So why would they want to continue posting more invalid/unwanted things and 'waste time' that they could spend developing. This is not exactly the case, since quite a few people do respond fairly, I am simply trying to question some of the logic of what does go on in these sorts of topics. It does begin to prove one of the points made in the above paragraph. Again, this is not the soul reason or an excuse, just pointing out what is going on and the possible consequences of it. I do think Trans summed it up pretty well earlier, saying this same thing.
The response to the above was about quality of response and quantity of response being different. However this topic is mainly based on quantity, if you read through from the start that is the message it gives, that there is not enough interaction. That is what the responses given were based on, then about mid-way through someone decided the issue was actually quality. Now the rest of my post does mostly talk about the quantity and explains that, however quality wise, it is certainly a hard one and I have touched on it already. With quality, you need to remember that the examples that have been given of Alina and Cysero, Alina is a writer and Cysero does a lot of AQW's writing at times to, so you have named two people who have a lot of experience in writing and verbal communication skills, using that writing to interact with the players. Where as Titan and Rabblefroth are Programmers, Charfade and NightWraith are artists. They can communicate perfectly fine, but they do not exactly have the skills that writers with a lot of experience have to express the passion or emotion through the communication they do. Writers are specifically specialised in that area and it is why a lot of Writers are usually the ones that do the PR for companies. Quality of response is also subjective, some people may like one response others like another. Some people want us to post on ideas 'Yes, great, we'll implement it' however in the past we have found that promising things like that does not work if we find it is not possible or it gets pushed back, so usually it will be a may be or a we will look into it. As members of staff everything that is said carries weight and so, everything that is said has to be worded in a way that takes that into account. Sometimes it can lead to the post maybe being very blunt, but not everyone can phrase posts in a way that offers emotion/passion while phrasing it well, since that is a writing skill and the four lab staff are all artists/programmers, not writers.
At the end of the day the developers develop releases for the game and work all week each week to do so. Charfade and Rabblefroth both try hard to get on here and reply in different topics as much as possible, Charfade certainly answers some questions in Q&A, in Suggestions, here in GD and anywhere she can. Rabblefroth replies wherever he can on balance and other general things and both do give some of their development times to reply to you all, but they only can give up a bit of that time, so they can still make sure their work is all completed! All of the developers make sure to tweet as frequently as possible and design notes are posted weekly, usually with patch notes also coming on Fridays with the release. This all takes time out of development and it is why there are teams to help with the liaising. It is nice to have direct contact with the developers, it is completely understandable, but it does need to be understood they do only have a limited amount of time they can allow for this interaction and that is why they are not always as active as you may want, but that tends to mean something good is in the works, such as this Dread War and it is draining their time! :)
< Message edited by Lycus -- 6/13/2013 2:48:42 >
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