You can only talk to the waiter. What the fuck do you do
As someone in customer service, this is nothing new
I’m a developer also and I keep a pretty simple concept. Don’t make promises you can’t keep.
You can get caught in weeds and something you though would be 5 min turns into 5 hours but long as you relate that to consumers who are people and understand you’re a person. It’s fine.
Trust is key and once your consumers no longer trust you. You’re done.
Well… Normally. No idea how companies like EA are still around.
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I also work as Dev/Project Manager and I agree that communication is a big problem for AGS.
But in regards to the development and testing I slightly have to disagree.
In short our releases also follow automated tests, most times during the night because they take so long and even longer automated tests on the weekend which take up to 24h. After automated testing wo do manual QAs. And with one of our releases it happend just about 1h before release, that we found an issue causing the server to crash.
And as we do not release an untested version, this led to a delay of a whole day (bugfix, build software, run automated tests, manual testing).
But still the planning of this update feels kinda wrong/rushed, because of all the miscommunication. First I’d like to add that it was never said that the update will come out on April 14th as some people claim. But instead of simply silencing them and pointing to April 21, they just posted this on twitter and the community had to find out themselves.
And for a huge company like AGS I’d expect that they have the patch notes ready way before it gets released. Because about 50% or more of such an update is simply marketing material. But they don’t even have the German version ready before release.
So this all point to miscommunicating, bad management and chaotic planning.
The CMs are not to be blamed for this. It is the management.
Same here. And this is exactly why I totally believe Roxx when she says, that a roadmap is hard to put together due to all the dynamic adjustments they need to make and so on. But sadly most of the community seems to think that development is so easy and a full roadmap for 2022 should be there in no time.
Yes there is always the argument “just give us the KR version”. But even if we leave out the (childish) discussions about censorship: they still need to make adjustments for the western release e.g. translations and adjustments for Steam and so on.
What else should they say?
If you encounter a critical error, you first need to analyze and then fix it. There might be bugs that lead to a delay in weeks, some in days and some in minutes.
But I also assume it was something on the database or server side. Because normally it takes hours to compile everything on such a scale and if it would’ve been within the client, I’d assume they have to get the bugfix version through the Steam application process again, which also might not just happen within an hour.
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But this is exactly what people in the forum are doing.
They basically blame AGS/Smilegate for listing to QA and not just simply releasing the update.
Or to use the restaurant example:
- waiter tells customer “food will be there in 5min” > waiter goes back to the kitchen
- waiter finds shit on the plate that he was supposed to bring to the customer
- waiter goes back to the customer and says “sorry, something was wrong with your food, unfortunately you have to wait a bit longer. As I’m no chef, I can’t tell you exactly how long it’ll take, but we’ll have something ready for you asap”
- customer says “I’m so hungry and basically dying here and there is nothing else to eat on the whole planet, bring me my food now you…” > starts cursing about the bad waiter
(yes waiter = CM and QA at the same in this example)
So in this case, what the customer wanted, was salad, steak and shit on the plate, so that he can complain about the shit and then blame the waiter and the chef and the restaurant. Because this is the only thing the customers wants. He didn’t want to eat in the first place…
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She is also face of the company, its part of her job, not like you dont know while signing for it that messenger always get shoot first.
People know that its not the community managers fault …
Every time someone has said “good news” or I got it in a letters witih “Good news” in it, turns out well for me. 
Releasing the game straight up converted would be a bad idea. It creates a huge gap in progression where players are going to feel like their being taken advantage of by the systems in place because, well, most gamers aren’t patient.
Coding doesn’t always go like you expect but I’m purposefully vague if I just don’t have a date I can give. I’ll be like next week. In a day or two. Then sometimes I’ll see a crippling problem drop everything and fix it which turns out to be a simple thing and get praised. It’s silly.
One thing I would have done for sure without a second thought is releasing all the classes.
Gamers like making builds. It’s a huge part of how I develop add-ons, mods and other things to games. They want to feel like their decisions matter in a game and there’s tons of ways to play that game. Keeps people playing and coming back all the time. Since Lost Ark has pretty much no build versatility. Class options are obvious choice. Big mistake to hold those IMO.
Skin are up for debate. I can see both monetization and the fashion side of things. One thing I do know is if a F2P game has a good enough fashion scene they don’t need to resort to other forms of monetization ie. Path of Exile.
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So despite they saying they don’t develop anything they did actually and passed the build for inspection to SG.
So, literally, AGS has an old frame of the game and purchased packages/modules to release us this poor version. The build are ready for years now guys!!!
I suggest them for a next time to discuss their post to not to let the player find out they are lying.
Usually, I’m always very cooperative and appreciate almost all their efforts. But now, I’m super annoyed!!!
Annoyed? Naw. You should be livid.
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I don’t want to waste so much energy, they’re annoying like a lazy kid in a school who never gonna do anything the right way but seeks attention, understanding, and wants their head to be caressed.
You don’t blame them, but you can hand them a juicy vulgar message to send to the chef that might result in spit in your food from the chef.
I can’t follow your conclusions here. When Roxx said that the build passed inspection it is not related to anything AGS did. The inspection of a build is most likely being done by Smilegate.
I’m sure the community manager will pass on our sentiment to the people responsible if they haven’t already (:
Apparently, they spent a lot of their day on a plane to get to PAX East.
May they have fun and enjoy their time.
You would think with all the experts present in this forum its a wonder there are ever any problems with any product releases. Your talents should definitely be put to use.
Yeah you arent allowed to tell the waitress the food sucks right? Just hold it in and pay like a good boy
They can’t and won’t. The vocal minority are a bunch of whining children who were raised wrong. They’re so emotionally immature that they can’t handle being delivered news that they don’t like, and they believe that they’re entitled to whatever it is they demand without regard for reality. Honestly I’ve never experienced such a horrific community and I was in WoW beta and stayed through BoA before giving it up.