[2021] Where is the community engagement?

Hi! As mentioned earlier in the thread, we are only so many people and we cannot reply to literally every topic or bug report in the forum. As Multigun posted, there is a dev tracker site players built where you can see what we’re posting and where (https://devtrackers.gg/conan-exiles) and I have been looking into how we can effectively re-implement a dev tracker for the forums itself.

It’s a little tricky since we have a bunch of games on this forum so some of our posts may show up from other categories (such as posts about downtimes or seasonal events in the MMOs), but the information is available to you as a player.

We do not copy paste our responses in public threads. But there is also only so many ways one can convey the same message without sounding repetitive and some players may feel it is that way. It is the nature of the beast.

We try to reply to as many threads as we can, but at the same time, we cannot offer the level of attention and detail that suits everyone. We try to do our best, and likewise, most of our community is also excellent at keeping in the loop.

We do also like to engage in fun topics every now and then. The forums are a place for constructive conversation, both for the good and bad moments. And to that point, they are a place for conversation for you our players as well. We will continue to contribute to those topics as we feel it is important to engage in positive conversation.

To add to Ignasi’s reply; we get where the complaint comes from, but it’s the nature of the beast, as mentioned. We cannot realistically reply to every single bug report topic that pops up, and we can only urge yall to understand that us not posting in a topic does not mean we haven’t seen it (and on the flipside, since we’re ultimately human, sometimes we do miss stuff, so sometimes we need a prod).

What we’re doing in the ‘fun’ thread is very much the definition of “Community Engagement” and is absolutely a part of our jobs, in addition to being a funny diversion. This is a forum about a video game, after all - we should be having some fun.

Does this mean everything’s being handled perfectly? Of course not. We’re aware there’s issues and we’re thankful for your reports, and we’ll always continue considering improvements on how information is collected and presented to everyone.

We have a dev tracker here
https://conandevtracker.com/

You can search Activity under the Conan Exiles Dev Group or the Community Groups, and the ‘Dev Tracker’ link at the top of the Exiles forum does seem to work. That links directly to the ‘Conan Exiles Dev’ group’s activity.

Technically the forums do have a tutorial when you create a new account (via CatBot) but it may not be the most extensive program.

Thanks for the usability feedback. We’ll look into what’s possible with the forum software provider.

I appreciate that; we do try. Obviously we can always do better and make presenting info that much clearer to the average forum lurker

It’s, uh, me

But I guess I do have similar features to Mr. Lee here

Yes! Also added a post to the intro topic with search links for each section:

We’ve also updated the ‘Dev Tracker’ button at the top of each category to only search for Funcom posts in the specific category you’re currently viewing. We’re also working on some extra functionality that clearly marks topics when a Funcom staffer has replied.

We have a sticky for critical issues known on PC (with workarounds) and it hasn’t reduced the number of repeat topics and questions, unfortunately. We’ll certainly consider it, but I’m also trying to think of ways to make using the Search tool and looking up our posts (or showing where we’ve posted) more obvious to users as well. Even small stuff like showing an icon on a topic we’ve commented on with an answer may go a long way (will show example with this post - feature is not quite done yet). Thanks!

Adding a whole new banner element to the search page is a neat idea, but I’m not 100% certain it’s possible. Will have to look into that. We have to keep in mind that the site isn’t just for Conan Exiles however; not everyone in the Community team works with all our games so anything we add to the site has to be relevant for all users and not just for one game’s community.

Hey there,

Just a quick dip into this thread again to clear out a point of confusion that might be originating some of the recent arguments:

This forum is not meant to be customer service, nor we, the community team, are customer service representatives. This is a key difference with what other forums are providing, such as our hosting partner G-Portal’s.
It may seem like an insignificant difference, but it seems that it’s what for some this problem boils down to.

As the community team, we take care of collecting feedback, trying to keep the majority of the community informed and on the loop about major events (for instance, the thrall cap) on here and other places of engagement, identifying major pain points for the community and keeping both devs and community informed about it whenever any major breakthrough happens. It is also in our responsibilities to engage with players in ways that can be considered as fun, as mentioned above.

For 1-to-1 problem solving and direct answering to every thread, that is a luxury scenario we can afford only in periods of time where our other responsibilities don’t take the majority of our schedule.

As usual, there’s always ways to keep improving the way we communicate, and we’ve aimed for that since Conan Exiles was a baby. Sometimes we hit, other times we miss. But our aim is to keep improving. However, please you need to understand the key difference explained above and how not taking it into account may lead to some misleading expectations.

The simple answer that nobody will like is “we didn’t get around to making one yet”. We talked about it but the task fell through a bit since we were all over the place handling other matters. I don’t think it’ll cut down on the number of duplicate questions about a known issue but it’ll help. We’ll get on it.

That said, and hopefully not sounding too cynical, we’re certainly doing what we can but there’ll always be those we can’t reach despite our best efforts. I had to raise an eyebrow at someone above saying they have to work hard to find where we responded while my forum frontpage looked like this:

In any case, this is a continued process we’re working to improve bit by bit, so thanks for the feedback!

Edit: I should mention that it looks like we did untag a few threads since this morning, as there were maybe too many dev reply markers floating around

Oh no worries, I’m just super feedback/critique-driven to a fault so I take a lot of that kind of thing to heart

I totally get what you’re saying and using as reference, and I really appreciate the constructive criticism you’ve offered so far.