IMO, I think it’s obvious based on the constant meltdown of the media/forums over the last 2 months that whoever is in charge of communication, is over-sharing believing it will do more good than bad.
I’m not saying communicating is bad - IMO, they are oversharing information that has no merit. So what happens is, bad actors just eat this bad information up and spit it back out.
So the CM team seems to be under constant fire and pressure to please everyone. Eventually, they seem to finally collapse under pressure and end up making educated/best information statements about potential dates. It feels like they don’t understand/consider how the development cycle works. I don’t think they’re even considering how the average consumer/forum/media person consumes this type of information.
Even if we see the forums/Reddit as the outlier. The average consumer will not care about the whys, what fluid information is, what agile means, or anything beyond the fact that what was stated as the estimated/speculated DATE by the CM team, wasn’t delivered.
I’m just saying, it’s demoralizing to all parties here because of overcommunicating. I’m not trying to get anyone fired or point fingers even if this post seems like it.
My suggestion is to stop overcommunicating information that’s redundant and only fuels toxicity.
For example, did we really need to know Smilegate ran into development issues, why did we need to know this? is the studio incompetent? Should they tell the devs to come in and work 7 day weeks?
You guys release patch notes every Thursdays-/+ that has a patch or update. This is way more than enough communication to tell us what you guys have been working on.
I think the bigger issue is people acting like a slight content delay or no communication on something for a single week is tantamount to losing their first-born child.
I think this is the wrong lesson to takeaway from this. The issue wasn’t overcommunicating, it was the opposite. You announce a road map without specific target release dates for long-anticipated content. You go on the record saying it’s “not this thursday” when the roadmap is released and people ask. People naturally assume that this will follow the Argos content patch date and align with when the events end. Speculation spreads because of a continued lack of confirmation one way or another. People get their hopes up only to be disappointed. Anger ensues. Then it appears that they never intended to release the content patch on April 14th, which frustrates people more because if it was never planned, why couldn’t they have told people definitively not to expect it on the 14th?
The issue isn’t overcommunicating, it’s undercommunicating.
Exactly this. Ppl expected the content patch to drop today, also bc of omen skin, which also got extended for a week, the login rewards, the event… i just can’t believe they “never” planned to release it this week, since so much had to be extended to fit the new timeline. But whatever, maybe they didnt. Still, they HAD to have known that people were expecting it today and dropping the bomb a few hours before the patch dropped is just bad communication. roxx mentioned somewhere that they planned a statement earlier this week but it got delayed since they didnt have a definitve release date for the patch due to running into problems. no problemo, but saying NOTHING instead of “btw folks no patch this week, more details in the future” is just like… wtf?
its the same as with the delay of the initial release. it really doesnt matter that there was a delay, but the way it was announced and the timleine is just amateurish.
just to make it clear, i’m not blaming anyone specifically since we cant possibly know who made the decisions
I think they would be better off communicating only in official channels (and less often), disabling the forums, and leaving the community to use its own platforms on reddit and discord.
Getting into back and forth discussions with players in the forums has no value at all – it will always be used against you.
