What are you doing about the mod situation UWE?
tallhotblonde
Join Date: 2012-12-11 Member: 174770Members, Reinforced - Supporter, Reinforced - Shadow
Join Date: 2012-12-11 Member: 174770Members, Reinforced - Supporter, Reinforced - Shadow
Well?
NS2 comp is in a coma.
Every wednesday and sunday we have around 25-40 people play ns2 comp within TAW. Collectively our members would count for thousands of dollars in revenue over the years through DLC and supporting the worldcup and reinforcement programs.
Last sunday it was almost unplayable without the valuable mods and bug fixes created for FREE by community members. (Which you don't seem to care about, at all, judging by the lack of public response)
Tonight we are faced with another struggle with vanilla ns2. But why should we bother?
As most of us simply love to play ns2 and maybe took the work by community members for granted over the last year, what should our position now be?
What are YOU (UWE/PDT) saying and doing about the upset?
What do i tell our community members? Can we get reassurance that you care about our playerbase? Is it time for competitive ns2 players to move on?
As i said, most of us really have no idea what is going on and it would be nice to hear from you and not from the grape vine...
NS2 comp is in a coma.
Every wednesday and sunday we have around 25-40 people play ns2 comp within TAW. Collectively our members would count for thousands of dollars in revenue over the years through DLC and supporting the worldcup and reinforcement programs.
Last sunday it was almost unplayable without the valuable mods and bug fixes created for FREE by community members. (Which you don't seem to care about, at all, judging by the lack of public response)
Tonight we are faced with another struggle with vanilla ns2. But why should we bother?
As most of us simply love to play ns2 and maybe took the work by community members for granted over the last year, what should our position now be?
What are YOU (UWE/PDT) saying and doing about the upset?
What do i tell our community members? Can we get reassurance that you care about our playerbase? Is it time for competitive ns2 players to move on?
As i said, most of us really have no idea what is going on and it would be nice to hear from you and not from the grape vine...
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
That's why they've both come on here explaining the situation from their point of view... Oh wait, they haven't.
So they're mad at UWE for not communicating.. While they themselves don't communicate either...
http://forums.unknownworlds.com/discussion/comment/2274089/#Comment_2274089
https://www.twitch.tv/schustor/v/52608949
He mentions a few key points about addressing the current issues at hand. He also mentions that he was just leaving for holidays, so it's unfortunate timing.
I think we need to give them a bit more time to digest all of this and formulate a response before we start making new threads daily, especially when other threads have covered it.
Cool heads guys - let's meet them halfway.
Most problems boil down to bad communication. NS2's are no exception. Sadly, no one with the power to fix this seems to have realized or care.
edit: Also I think the problem is mainly lack of communication from UWE. Not that they're the only ones at fault, though.
So yea, give it a second guys.. Let them negotiate. Even if you don't trust uwe, I'm sure we can expect dragon and mendasp to tell us when there's something to know..
Im with what @SantaClaws says
There is literally nothing to disagree with...
If they did, CompMod wouldn't have been a thing, and this whole situation would be resolved by now!
#SilverLining
Well, this is a communication.
So @Obraxis you guys say that you're taking actions right now with the discussions? Why hasnt it been done earlier? Why did you rely on somebody for that long without even taking hints and notes from @xDragon . Like he said earlier, he's been trying to get his voice heard, but was ignored several times. So the only way to get his voice heard was trough taking down the mod, and get the whole community even more irritated? Why arent you guys recruiting a community manager? When the studio clearly needs one from several occasions?
And when can we expect a course of action from UWE's side regarding this matter? "When we have something to say we will." aint just good enough as a current info. This is also a reason why UWE SHOULD have a community manager.
In Stage 1 of our NS2 Development, (which was only slated to be 3 months long), we had certain mandates we had to hit in order to actually continue development or NS2 Development would be shut down. Balance changes and implementing new features and quality of life stuff could not be done or we could not hit our targets for renewal.
Thankfully, we managed to exceed 2 out of our 3 metrics, with the third metric being very very close. So UWE renewed our efforts for the NS2 Dev team for another 3 months for Stage 2. After we got renewed for Stage 2, we could finally start talking about what we would LIKE to do, including bringing over ideas from other mods. We started seriously discussing & debating all the things in the 'simplifying NS2' discussion and who we should talk to to get thoughts and ideas from...... THEN within a day of us getting renewed, all this happened. Perfect timing right?
So now, rather than us working on our own timeline with our own internal discussions, we've had to jump on this sooner. We've been in contact with Mendasp and xDragon and meetings have been had. Personally I'm not yet aware of all the outcomes of those, but @rantology is now going to be our liaison between the NS2 Dev team and the NSL. She will be posting up a blog post soon of some of the outcomes of that.
As I have said before, we're quite easy to contact. If it's something important, a PM or email is all that's needed to get our attention as many of you have done every day of the year. Sometimes we miss posts in Discord as we're working, but we try to keep on top of things as much as possible. We're only human, after all.
I agree a community manager would help, but that's not in the NS2 Dev team's hands and would likely mean we would not be able to afford as much programming time on the project. As I said above, @rantology will be posting a blog post and has been working with @WasabiOne in her meetings with Mendasp and xDragon. I'm hopeful it will be fruitful as we as a community need to move on from all this and work together to continue development on the game we all love so much.
Everyone should read at least the first page of given thread to understand how old the underlying issues actually are and the reasons why they are so hard to solve.
We are currently working on resolving some of those issues and you will hear from us about it in a few days.
This would be perfect as there are already a few candidates that would fit this role perfectly providing they would want to do it, that said, a budget to justify the vacancy would have to exist beforehand which to my understanding is just not there at the moment.
Community Manager would help alot between easing the relations between Developers - Community but good wills and gestures only work so far without money.
If there are people willing enough to code the game for free, mod the game for free, run servers out of their own pocket, run a competitive scene out of their own pocket/time; there will be people willing to do this job for free.
NS2 is such a niche game and the community is fiercely passionate, good will and gestures go a very very long way without money.
You do realise CM is practically a full time job? Why don't you apply then.
http://www.indeed.co.uk/Online-Community-Manager-jobs
http://www.totaljobs.com/JobSeeking/(Community Manager).html
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/jobs/by-category/community-management
You get the idea already.
Right what we're pretty much asking is for a person to be a bridge between the CDT and the Community. Not for merch,advertising or anything like that. Just an communication pillar.
I don't think you realise how much work it would be, if it was that easy it would of been done back in '13
http://forums.unknownworlds.com/discussion/133661/community-manager-s/p1
See blinds comment in particular
http://forums.unknownworlds.com/discussion/comment/2175899/#Comment_2175899
To see also that UWE didnt want to start with balancing, when they had the most support to do so is just even more sad.
But the "As I have said before, we're quite easy to contact. If it's something important, a PM or email is all that's needed to get our attention as many of you have done every day of the year. Sometimes we miss posts in Discord as we're working, but we try to keep on top of things as much as possible. We're only human, after all."
From what @xDragon said before, it's not only one time he's been trying to reach out to the developers, but on several occasions (how many i'm not aware of, cause im no friend with dragon)
That is the reason why i say there should be a CM.. Working as a bridge between the Studio/CDT together with the Community. And if that person isnt being heard, well man... then we're destined to having posts like these each and every 6 months : )
And btw, can someone remove my jailthingy on my avatar? i feel like an refugee in a foreign country!
@Obraxis just told you that they had targets to meet that were set by UW. I'm 99% sure one of those targets was 'make X mount of USD'. There is no easier/faster way than doing it the way they did. But to do that, they had to take a large amount of time to implement the entire economy/market thingi and the items, then designing everything, implementing it, making sure it doesn't impact performance too much, testing it again and rolling it out. And they still managed to do some other stuff.
I wish it would've been clearer before that they were hired to meet some targets in the first phase, because that would've explained a few things that later let to people getting bitchy about bugs not fixed and two people taking their mods offline.
Can you show me where you read this?
Was just going to quote the same, where and when did you find out this information? I know that the UWE wanted to get more money in, and keep on sustaining the current players. But 99% of those target would just send the wrong idea.. It's like saying "We're a money machine, all the money that comes from NS2 will go straight into Subnautica" which may be partly true, but they would NEVER post anything like that :P