Thread: Customer service and the hunter

Originally Posted by Khafar

They have 2 full-time people who do customer relations and are authorized to speak for Turbine, and that's it. Would it be nice if they had more? Yep. The game is dirt cheap, though, and I don't really expect to see that anytime soon.

They also have moderators (see: aisle four). If there was so much abuse that is constantly alleged, they would need no excuse to throw so much infractions and as long as it takes for those "major-league jerks" to remember where that line they chose to ignore was. Instead, you have people pissed off by one more small factor: that it is apparently guessing game what is maximum of tolerable rageQQhysteria and minimum leghumping required by individual known only from few words but apparently able to communicate in other class forums as long as this quota is met. Sure, common sense and social graces are usually enough - but you won't get much common sense after pissing people off and ignoring it in some angry diva style. The funniest part: someone suggested to take the blame and sit quietly, perhaps type some nice posts and have generic tuxedo discussions, probably about how much they like the class and shooting orcs and then... it will be magically over, love and bunnies, everybody happy. Until another debacle after which we are told it's time to take the blame again. Why another debacle? Because no one learns from mistakes without admitting them - not necessarily by performing public self-crucifiction so it's not a nice excuse to do nothing instead.

If anything, I expect it's more like waiting game: let another regiment of angry people get tired and (given retention level of this game) be slowly outnumbered by people for whom current state and current "norm" is WAI either because it is the only thing they saw since joining or because they didn't look for anything else than "generic tuxedo" mentioned above.

Originally Posted by Khafar

Nonsense. I'm a developer. I don't do "PR", and anyone who asks me to soon discovers why.

No one asks you to do it - but if you suddenly do, as many of Turbine devs do, some more often than others, some better than others - I expect you would want to do it well enough. How much fault would you be prepared to take for some rageQQhysteria after the same forums were (relatively) calm for months and months? None by default as well?



Is what Orion does enough to be called PR? (it already is on functional level anyway)

Originally Posted by Tinluen

Causual players only see a river with a layer of solid ice. And if they step out on the edge they are ok... the further you go in the more the cracks appear.

It's an interesting vision, though I should probably say "inbeforeelitist" given usual knee-jerk it causes. Don't forget about those Hunters in yachts passing by from time to time - probably representing those with either entire raid catering to them for no reason or the percentage of people who can afford the cost. At the same time you have other classes paying tiny fee to access the bridge. No wonder some of yacht owners prefer it this way, but having such ugly "middle" is one of the reasons it's not worth to bother with the class *too much*, "love & bunnies" and "out of sight out of mind" works better for the mood.

Originally Posted by Khafar

Question: if you were a developer and sticking your head up out of the bunker so you can be pelted with rocks weren't mandatory, would you be posting in the Hunter Forum? Be honest. I gave up on reading it several years ago, let alone posting there. And I'm not even a target for the chronically unhappy.

Should Turbine have someone who stands up and takes a pounding? Maybe. But they'd be in customer relations, not development. The developers can get the feedback they need by A) lurking in the Hunter forum, and perhaps B) posting in the NDA forums, where people are required to be constructive and civil. I certainly would.

Khafar

Wow, congrats on an obnoxious and exceedingly ignorant post made in response to a very civil and well thought out statement from the OP. I wonder if your other 10k posts are equally irrelevant.

I love playing a hunter. I'm not sure I feel I need some kind of goody bag from the devs for playing what I already consider to be the class with the most perks in the game, but I understand what the OP is saying. I don't really appreciate that they haven't fixed the fact that we have been nerfed to the point of uselessness in the moors, but that's not something I'm going to self-immolate over. I actually find myself looking forward to the hunter changes in RoR. I think there are other classes that need FAR more attention than we do.

Whether or not you'll see posts in a given area depends on which specific developer(s) owns it, what their history has been, and whether they (still) think it's productive or not. A majority of developers never post a thing, and those who do rarely last more than a year or two in the public eye. It's not very difficult to guess why. Public interaction has a huge "burnout" factor that comes with it, and only a few (e.g. floon for 3+ years and Orion for more) seem to be able to hang in there long-term.

Example: Hakai used to post quite a bit, back when he was Lead Combat Designer for SoA and then owner for the Champion and Guardian classes. But he was pounded on pretty relentlessly by players, and started posting less and less. Then rarely. Then not at all. Now he's working on a different (unannounced) project. It's a pretty common trajectory, and I could give a number of other similar examples.

Khafar

Originally Posted by Nakiami

The issue isn't broken skills or inconsistencies. You (loud obnoxious hunters) are not vilified for posting bugs or suggestions or defense theses. You (plural) are vilified for being loud obnoxious jerks. You're disregarded because of your (plural remember) sense of entitlement, your name-calling, your developer-denigrating (devs are people too, and you don't deserve to treat them any worse than your mother). You're marginalized because of how you present your arguments.

I have a 75 hunter I consider my main, and I too have given up on reading most of the Hunter forum.

P.S. he warned you.

Gee, I pay for a game and heaven forbid I get some sort of sense of friggin' entitlement from it. I'm paying them my money for a product. Cripes, what was I thinking. That's not how the world works, I mean really you buy a hotdog from a street vendor who gets cross and throws you in front of a speeding cab if you happen to ask for ketchup. THAT'S how the world works.

Oh, and as far as treating the devs worse then my mother, if I had a brother (Blackarrow) who's birthday (Expansion Upgrade) happen to fall on around the same day as mine, and yet my brother (Blackarrow, remember) had repeatedly gotten some of the good toys and name-brand clothes (skills) I'd have been asking for before the birthday while I was getting hand-me-downs from Goodwill and toys from the 99cents store, yet while they are putting on a facade about how I'm *so* much better off, you're damn right I'd be cross with both of them. And since Devs aren't my mother and Blackarrows aren't my brother, I could give a flip less how they're treated if they want to treat me like excrement they scraped off a boot.

Originally Posted by Eckenbrand

Gee, I pay for a game and heaven forbid I get some sort of sense of friggin' entitlement from it. I'm paying them my money for a product. Cripes, what was I thinking. That's not how the world works, I mean really you buy a hotdog from a street vendor who gets cross and throws you in front of a speeding cab if you happen to ask for ketchup. THAT'S how the world works.

Oh, and as far as treating the devs worse then my mother, if I had a brother (Blackarrow) who's birthday (Expansion Upgrade) happen to fall on around the same day as mine, and yet my brother (Blackarrow, remember) had repeatedly gotten some of the good toys and name-brand clothes (skills) I'd have been asking for before the birthday while I was getting hand-me-downs from Goodwill and toys from the 99cents store, yet while they are putting on a facade about how I'm *so* much better off, you're damn right I'd be cross with both of them. And since Devs aren't my mother and Blackarrows aren't my brother, I could give a flip less how they're treated if they want to treat me like excrement they scraped off a boot.

its even worse if those toys from goodwill are broken

Originally Posted by Khafar

Whether or not you'll see posts in a given area depends on which specific developer(s) owns it, what their history has been, and whether they (still) think it's productive or not. A majority of developers never post a thing, and those who do rarely last more than a year or two in the public eye. It's not very difficult to guess why. Public interaction has a huge "burnout" factor that comes with it, and only a few (e.g. floon for 3+ years and Orion for more) seem to be able to hang in there long-term.

Example: Hakai used to post quite a bit, back when he was Lead Combat Designer for SoA and then owner for the Champion and Guardian classes. But he was pounded on pretty relentlessly by players, and started posting less and less. Then rarely. Then not at all. Now he's working on a different (unannounced) project. It's a pretty common trajectory, and I could give a number of other similar examples.

Khafar

this makes no sense whatsoever.

burnout factor? do devs have 1hp like the squirrels in chetwood?

get a grip people! its not like you have to take every complaint as a personal attack on your soul essence!

some troll player tells a dev that they did a horrible job? ok, moving on.

angry class people like eoburn throwing very harsh stuff at you? take the hit, ignore it if you want.

entire community unhappy with you? explain what you did and try to make it better next time around.


this turtle mentaility wont get them anywhere. the devs need to ether man up and be able to take some heat and not snap like a dry reed or hire a person who will take the heat for them. its just plain stupid to turtle up because it angers constomers who feel like their concerns are being tossed aside and overall degrades the game.

ZC has stated some time ago (maybe year/s) that feedback is nice, but it is much more valuable if there are numbers included in it. Some of us went the extra mile and provided all the numbers we could pull of from turbines lackluster combat log.

Some went even further and made experiments to test threat management, real legacy influences (not vague "rank 3" info). I, and many others, spent hours on bullroarer and live servers to test crits, dev crits, crit legacies for every skill, every debuff, etc, to see whats up with our class.

Pretty much everything was posted on these forums(part was on eu forums where we played before, if you think dev communication here is bad, you should have seen eu forums where DD made like one post per year), in excel sheets, google docs, graphs and what not.

The feedback from our class dev was silence, and once per year we get "Class feedback thread" where customer support(not class dev) asks us what we think about our class. It is like a slap in the face, I mean come on there was great chunk of feedback on the class forum throughout the whole year without any response from officials.

As for devs being unwilling to participate in forum discussions, it is a two edged sword. This is internet, if you don't have at least a bit thick skin you will have a bad time here. That is why there are forum moderators who should take care of useless and non-constructive posts when they occur in community-dev discussion. If players feel like they bug reports and feedback is not taken into account, and such state is going on for months/years, obviously it can cause some frustration. And frustration just leads to lesser quality of forum activity. I play Rift from time to time where class devs post on average once a week, and I don't see any behaviour from them where they hide because someone on the internet said something they don't like. They know there are customers who appreciate their comments and visibility on forums.

More on testing. Plenty of hunters were happy when ZC said he will welcome feedback with numbers, but there was no way to acquire those numbers. Plenty of ingame skill descriptions are too vague, plenty of skill mechanics is hidden, etc. And when after years they gave us a band-aid in form of test dummies, they reset every 12s so again the tests are horribly uncomfortable to execute. I would have no problem to provide everything players/devs asked, if we were give the right tools to do it. But that time has passed, just as my passion for the game.