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The Reddit Anthem community has gone volatile, people are spending more time ranting and raving on the subreddit than actually playing the game it seems. With the amount of vitriol it's hard to discern if the people spewing their collective hatred are trolls who love to see the subreddit burn, or actual players that feel slighted and disappointed. Combined with the endless flow of click-baity posts chasing imaginative Internet points, it isn't making it any easier.
Most of us here understand that communicating with this ball of hatred is not anyones favorite past-time. Had I been a BioWare employee, be it a developer, community manager, producer or EA support personell, I'd dread opening up this subreddit and even reading, let alone writing any feedback here. Yes, there are tonnes of great posts that bring quality discussion into the subreddit, but as soon as the "BioWare Reply" flag pops up on the post, it's basically summoning every hateful individual that starts replying directly to the person who braved the inferno and hit submit on the post.
So, my suggestion for making things easier for both us the players, and them the Anthem team is a scheduled, communicated weekly update that continue every week until the dust settles a bit. In the weekly update, whomever drew the short straw (ha ha) that week get to present the state of things. The weekly update should contain some or all of the following items:
- Current State of Anthem - A general overview of how BioWare feel Anthem is going, some sneak peaks into what's coming soon, some fun facts like "This week 5 023 011 Grabbits fell victim to callus heartless freelancers", "35 billion damage has been dealt to the Tyrant this week" and so on
- Known bugs and issues, separated into [Acknowledged], [Investigating], [Need more info] (With a link to either the official forum thread or separate thread), [Fixed in next patch]
- Feedback gathered from the subreddit and official Anthem forums that are either being considered, are being worked on / implemented in next patch or is just not a good fit for the game.
- Highlight some of the coolest Anthem Javelin designs and/or fan-art.
- Upcoming events and limited time bounties / unique weekly challenges in the game with details on the rewards they bring - Look to Monster Hunter World updates for inspiration /u/Basketspank
- Community movie of the week, players of the week, streamers, discord groups, and other highlights /u/Basketspank
- With the current state of the game and the community they need two updates a week. /u/Zeroth1989
- Monday evening (developer time) Let us know what the plans are this week, What feedback you have looked through over the weekend and whats going to happen.
- Friday evening (developer time) let us know how the week has gone, Did you hit your expected goals, did an issue cause problems and gonna need another look next week, most importantly, What have you nailed down and solved this week.
It would make it a focal point for developer to player communication, stop the continuous attempt at summoning feedback in random posts and make for easier moderation for the Anthem moderator team. By addressing feedback and bugs in a consistent list on a weekly basis, you also communicate clearly that "Yes we are here, yes we are reading, and yes that seems like a great / cool / absolutely horrible idea". Acknowledging bugs is important as well, or the sub will end up as a giant echo chamber that's getting spammed by 100 posts on the same issue because no-one feel sure you've actually registered the issue. And please remember, you are allowed to bring up an issue raised by the community and comment that "We are discussing this internally" or "We acknowledge this issue, but company policy / US Trade Law prohibits us from saying anything more specific on this issue until we have a concrete plan in place".
So to whomever got this far, thank you for reading. Hope it's worthy of consideration and if you have suggestions on what you'd like to see in a weekly update; post it below.
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