A week later: Heart of Rage fiasco takeaways.
- Company representatives continue to maintain their level of professionalism:
We were told:
We get:
- Developers are behind some/many of the decisions players keep blaming 505 for:
A couple of options here:
- the original HoR drop rate was determined by Devs using whatever decision-making process they may have (or lack thereof), and then they raised it based on player frustration, thus reinforcing the notion that their decision-making process is disjointed from the reality of the game; or
- they released a deliberately low drop rate, to do the PR stunt of ‘generously’ increasing it (from undisclosed rate X, to undisclosed rate Y)
- Speaking of rate disclosure: Twitch
(go to 00:23:55)
we decided not to release the drop rates on that purely because we thought that it was gonna cause further dissent and discussion among players in a way that was gonna make things quite negative. I know a lot of players were like “oh if you tell us the drop rates we’ll trust you more”, and it’s like no, if we tell you the drop rates you’re just gonna ??? us like you always do, it’s gonna make no difference to the happiness and goodwill about this situation
Interpret the above at will: if it truly made no difference, opting for transparency would seem the preferable path, since there is nothing to hide; especially for a company that likes to justify its actions/inactions behind ethical/moral reasons:
Noteworthy how this ‘reason’ for not disclosing the HoR drop rate was conveyed to 20+ viewers in a stream, instead of the official forums: what we got here instead was
- Much of the ongoing friction continues to be caused by lack of soft-skills required to communicate as a forum moderator, and was very eloquently illustrated by @Fourdottwoone :
Which was unsurprisingly dismissed by a company representative, despite the ongoing evidencing that communication consistently exacerbates situations created by design/QA/localization shortcomings
Worth remembering.
