I think it’s fair to say we have experienced somewhat of a bug apocalypse of recent. I think it’s also fair to say that the general feeling in the community ranges from disbelief, frustration, hopelessness at a solution being reached to some just shrugging their shoulders and accepting that this is what we’ve got.
I don’t want this community to feel this way, I’ve been here since 2017 and I don’t want to give up on you. You deserve better and I want to help.
I’m suggesting that we, as a community, have a once monthly virtual meeting where we can collate all our unresolved issues, foreseeable issues and feedback which we can then present in a quick, precise list to the devs after the meeting.
It’s no guarantee that the issues will be dealt with, it’s no guarantee that things will magically get better but I feel like it’s worth a shot and it’s worth our time.
I’m open to ideas but my initial thoughts were:
I could host the meeting on either discord stages, zoom or twitch.
I’d encourage each GM or head admin from Guild Families to put forward their unresolved bugs, potential concerns and feedback from their guild/s to me before the meeting
We could cover the items which will largely be the same across most guilds during the meeting.
I’d set aside an hour for the meeting, recording it for those who can’t attend
I’d whip up a quick summary for the devs to get a copy of.
rinse and repeat on a monthly basis
I’m willing to put the time in and I hope that somewhere inside, that joy you felt when you first installed gems is still clinging on enough to give this a shot.
I disagree wholeheartedly with this, the vocal few on the forums and on discords are the last people I would want with any input to the game.
Nothing against you Hawx, I greatly appreciate your input and work you put in.
Honestly the bugs we encounter are so minor really, on a game with a small team and 24/7 uptime, its a great accomplishment by the devs to keep so many people engaged.
It’s an intriguing idea. But, I’m curious what a council of this nature would accomplish. The dev team knows what the problems are because of the multitude of bug reports/feedback posts on the site that they read.
So, how would a council repeating those same issues actually create change in the game?
I am pro this, and would like one output from this to be a prioritized major/minor/cosmetic list of current bugs.
One problem I see over and over again is that bugs get reported here; sometimes get a [Reported] or [Investigating] tag, sometimes don’t; and then fall entirely off the radar, never getting addressed and never getting added to the Known Issues page. For example: the ongoing bug of “last troop in defense team gets replaced with a Lance Knight”. It’s frustrating that bugs get submarined like this.
I hear this! and I feel the meeting would need some fairly strong moderation to keep it on-track and productive rather than turning into an airing of grievances.
The community “whines” and “complains” about certain things since forever. Things anyone actually playing this game would know about and understand even without! There’s either no desire to implement certain changes. Or maybe they don’t know “where to start”. Or just can’t (ability).
The only thing that gets changes, is if a (ludicrous and shameless) pricetag can be put next to it.
If such a meetup idea would’ve been suggested by the devs themselves, my hope for small improvements in the future would’ve been slightly higher. Time would have to tell, if that’s even justified.
But my guess is that whatever “list” gets delivered to the devs would have way too high expectations. I mean, again, they should know by now what the biggst issues currently are, but nothing gets fixed it seems. So, if things that were discussed and msg’d over and ultimately don’t get (any) changes, improvements, or whatever things will just fail again due to frustrations etc.
But that’s a problem also due to unclear information, even misinformation and also simply because the players may not like certain things.
Yeah I think it’s important to note that this isn’t a ‘hey this will fix the problem’, this is a ‘hey we are wasting so much damn time saying the same thing over and over’ especially GMs.
Let’s take for example that Lance Knight in pvp defences. We can ping up the bug report here saying its still happening but after a while we stop posting to say a bug is still happening. I bring it up in beta, the devs are like ‘that’s stiil an issue why didn’t you say’ so this council/ meeting would be a chance for those bugs that keep falling through the cracks to get mentioned. Things like czernobog when he had a spelling change that I saw mentioned in general on the alliance, I pinged GMan about and it got fixed before release. These are the things we could get raised and fixed before they are ever an issue, before we waste time reconfirming bug reports, before the devs get tickets about it, so they have time to devote on fixing the big things rather than wasting their time on admin stuff.
There’s no guarantee of change. But doing nothing different certainly isn’t going to help either
I seem to recall the dev team doesn’t read the bug reports/feedback section, or any other part of the forum. They receive their information exclusively from the community manager team. The last dev I saw visiting was Andrew, about three years ago.
I know Salty missed a lot of feedback points we all made on here but that could of been because there was so many. I’m not sure how they are handled currently. I feel like Jeto passes points on pretty well that I bring up but I genuinely don’t know what the process looks like outside beta
Well, I should have said staff instead of devs. Jeto and Kafka read the bug reports and feedback section. So, I’m going to go with the assumption that they are telling the truth when they say that they report these issues to the actual devs.
I have just posted a message what after 4 years daily playing the game I love and played with so much pleasure and passion! Turned this weekend but for sure today!
Maybe your idea can bring back my pleasure, I dont believe in miracles but I dont give up the hope that it can be better in long term!
Thank you for your input, your passion and believing that it can be better and im so grateful for all what you do for this community RESPECT
Not trying to blame anybody specifically, but something in the communication process seems to be broken. There are so many things that get reported, then just fall through the cracks for the next opportunity to show up. Like incorrect battlecrasher counters and duplicate campaign tasks, we already had those during Nexus release, they’ll probably show up again when the next kingdom gets introduced. And I believe those could easily have been fixed with reasonably small effort if somebody had just picked up the task.
I’m not really sure how one could address this. Maybe they need to work on their internal communication. Maybe they need to use some proper bug tracking tools, like Jira. Maybe they need to shift some budget from quantity to quality. However, I’m getting the impression they are perfectly happy with the current state of things, they won’t be interested in changing anything.
There is definitely a breakdown in internal communication and basic controls going on within the company. Otherwise these issues which get “fixed” wouldn’t resurface again in the next iteration almost without fail.
From a complete non-programmer it almost seems like they make the code go live full of bugs, they patch it after public complaint, but the patching code never goes into the archived version for reuse. Then they go back and reactivate the unpatched code again next time which predates any fixes. Aren’t common tools like GitHub a thing to track version control and keep stuff like this from happening? Extrapolate this out into every single recurring issue that has piled up and you’re trying to carry a bucket of water with holes drilled all in it. Not a very fun experience for the person having to use the bucket for its intended task.
Sadly, I truly think there is nothing external which will have any impact on motivating internal change other than taking our money elsewhere. That is our only actually impactful power to force change as IP2’s customers. Mountains of sound, sincere, and helpful feedback and advice have been given to address all of these problems from the time and care of the community, and it goes nowhere. I don’t think any amount of well-meaning community organization will change a thing, in my admittedly jaded opinion.
I gave feedback multiple times months ago straight to the community team about killing the golden goose by running multiple concurrent paywalled events at once when Kingdom Passes were being tested. We are now in the midst of 3! simultaneously with a two-week event costing more than a year’s worth of Campaign Passes, and all three being various stages of broken. That’s beyond outrageous. Jesus, at least have the decency to pretend to respect your user base as more than wallets on legs. But as a lowly wallet with legs, the only agency I have in this spiraling relationship is to use those legs and walk away… cash in tow. IP2, you all are killing your own game.
I don’t know that this would do much, but the concept of having a “quick, precise list” is good. Salty mentioned those are helpful. Of course, things have changed since then, and reported bugs are often ignored/missed/delayed.
I can’t say I’m overly optimistic about this idea, but then again, we can’t force the devs to care more about fixing issues - we can only make finding/fixing bugs as easy for them as possible. I think Hawx/Gary would do a fantastic job leading a venture like that. Its effectiveness is what I’m not sure on.
I echo many of the other thoughts here. If you feel this is worth your time, Hawx, then go for it. Certainly no one should expect any magic fixes - ultimately, the devs have to step up and take ownership of the problem. Perhaps you want to show them you’re fit to be community manager. I suppose there’s no harm in trying.
I would love to see the devs address whatever issues are leading to the bugs not being dealt with properly, but I’m not holding my breath.
Couple of month ago I made a thread which suggested to stop pushing out new stuff for some time and get rid of the majority of big bugs and fix such things like the disliked offerings and improve Arthurs little help advices (you know what I mean).
Nobody replied to. Nobody liked it. And now while I’m trying to look back into it, it’s vanished somehow. Don’t know why. But that doesn’t matter for me.
If they really wanna save the day, they should create a new server and use it to fix all the stuff and once finished replace it with the current one. Even if it will take the game off for a downtime of a few days it would be more useful then anything else they do currently.
The biggest issue is, I guess, they can’t figure out how to fix the coding somebody else probably implemented and they just use tape and glue to fix the ship instead of building it up from scratch.
I hardly doubt that a counsil would work out as we would like it to. But if you (and they) want me onboard, I’m happy to help. At least for a while if it’ll be sowewhat useful.
We can be the best community ever, but if nobody hear , it’s all about us.
We need to support each other like we already do, keep continues like this and try different ways to resolve things with the only weapons we have.
I see a huge wall between US and the game and who develop it
We did something like this in another game over Slack - but in chat form.
It lead to a developer/leader thing. Not sure if it’s still active as I’m not active as a leader anymore but it was very constructive.
But!
They also hired a dedicated community manager, they have two now, and they work closely with their players. They hear player feedback and implement most of it, they take player ideas and make them happen if they think it fits the game - it’s quite a different dynamic from what I experienced here so far.
