devtrackers.gg
Hey everyone, hear you all loud and clear - and agree with a lot of your frustrations. The team have said they will remove the countdown for next season. Their intention was to let people have a rough idea of how long they had left to play through the Season - so they wouldn't be upset if it ended before they expected. It's been really painful on the community side of things though, as there has been a lot of misunderstanding around whether Season's ending meant the next Season would begin. Thanks!
Hey everyone, hear you all loud and clear - and agree with a lot of your frustrations. The team have said they will remove the countdown for next season. Their intention was to let people have a rough idea of how long they had left to play through the Season - so they wouldn't be upset if it ended before they expected. It's been really painful on the community side of things though, as there has been a lot of misunderstanding around whether Season's ending meant the next Season would begin. Thanks!
I understand why there is a lot of frustration here - we all do in the community team. Communication about the seasons ending and starting has been painful. I can assure you all this isn't a delay from an earlier planned date at all, but the fact that it comes across that way (which is understandable) is a huge flag and we will fix these comms going forward. It can feel like you'll be waiting weeks and weeks for it because we haven't done our usual content posting or released a trailer yet, but that won't be the case.
Thank you all for your patience and your feedback in the meantime :(.
It seems like folks are upset about more than the season pass timer. This thread has some very important points made about what has been disappointing in the past few weeks. Although a lot of this may not be within your personal area of responsibility, I truly hope the mediatonic team can find some time to hear this feedback. Beyond the frustration, I see a lot of folks that want success for this game and are disappointed. Even with this well-meaning comment, it seems like you may not be seeing it all. This kind of stuff is truly messy and I must respect the fortitude it takes to interact with it all. With that being said, I really hope this feedback is seen as an indicator. It's far more than just a misunderstanding, this is just the last straw on the camel's back in what has been a large misalignment between Mediatonic and the community.
Not Oliver but wanna respond anyway because also CM:
Absolutely. This morning I have gone through the comments here and there's a plethora of feedback in this thread and wider subreddit that we want to make sure we action. A lot of it is recurring themes that we are absolutely, high-priority, wanting to nip in the bud. We genuinely do hear and see the feedback. I have sent this thread to the wider team today but a lot of these are issues that we are 100% aware of, but progress hasn't matched expectations, and there are improvements I can make in how I communicate with you on this sub. I'll do what I can to improve the latter here for sure at least. The patience is greatly appreciated.
Enjoy it while you can because a lot of posts criticising them are mysteriously disappearing from this sub recently.
I just need to clarify that this subreddit is run and moderated independently from Mediatonic, we absolutely do not delete or censor discussion here or elsewhere on Reddit.
No offense but "Communication about the seasons ending and starting has been painful" is 100% Mediatonic's fault. You've had the entire Season to say when it's ending but chose to never say until the last minute. You've had the entire Season to say when Season 3 starts but chose to leave that to a trailer on The Game Awards. This is just another instance (in a very long line of them) where your company screws up and just says "We'll do better next time." Well...this was one of those "next times" and you screwed up again. How about "next time" just tell us actual information like every other community management team and not just throw up a few memes on Twitter and call it a day.
The reason I said that is because it is something we will improve on - I'm not sure who else's fault it could be or what you thought I was insinuating other than that.
Just mentioning it because "We'll improve" has been said by the community team since Day 1 of the game coming out and months later it hasn't improved at all. A lot of it has just come off as telling us what we want to hear without any actual change.
Ah, yeah sorry I get you now. I never want that to be the case, and I know that the wider team wouldn't either. That's a symptom of realities not matching what we'd articulated, or me/us not communicating when things change (I.E, something that was going to be fixed, isn't, and then there's no communication about it). That kind of thing.
We'd never just want to say things to satiate the community at all - as part of being vocal community managers is that we expect this degree of accountability back and I knew that's what I signed up to when I joined at the end of October.
Aside from the obvious, if there's a better way to communicate to you guys what we're working on, let me know. I am pretty reactive here but I'd be happy to do weekly threads or similar to help keep people afoot of what's going on. I think a lot of the disconnect comes from lack of proactive updates when things change?
First thing off the top my head is that Abbie announced on Discord that you guys were doing a weekly Q&A but this has not been publicised anywhere else and sometimes it feels as if Discord gets a disproportionate amount of attention. A lot of us prefer Reddit because in my experience Discord tends to be populated by the kids/teens and just speaking for myself as an older player of the game, I feel a bit out of place there. When you and Abbie first came onboard there was noticeably a massive increase in the amount of Reddit interactions from the community team but it feels like in the last couple of weeks the Reddit engagement has dropped off a cliff.
I think MT are very good at engaging and replying when there's an issue (e.g. Fall Mountain bug) but when it's actual game feedback (e.g. the shop system, countless suggestions for how to improve games, getting rid of unpopular games, new modes) it feels like that stuff gets completely ignored. Just for one example, I feel there's a big enough proportion of the community who actively want Tail Tag removed from the game for MT to at least acknowledge it. Even if they say "we've heard your feedback but we don't want to remove any games so it's staying" that's fine. I know you can't reply to every single bit of feedback but I think MT are struggling to keep their finger on the pulse of what actually are the biggest community concerns and cherry pick certain ones to comment on.
And finally, and I apologise for this wall of text, I feel like a lot of the reason MT are missing the real issues the community care about is because they're dropping like flies. When I first joined this sub, there was a real active and communicative relationship between MT and the community, people complained about things constructively and MT engaged but you get 2 months down the line and look back and try to think what really have you guys done based on community feedback? Changed Hexagone back to the OG layout because it was changed for no reason in the first place...made it so teammates fall together....the server region selector. I mean it's hardly a massive list of changes and improvements, and thusly the numbers of people on this sub have plummeted by almost 10k because people feel they're not been listened to so they just leave and then MT get a false sense of security because fewer constructive complaints are coming in.
I hope you know, this is not aimed at you personally or any one individual at MT and I would never accuse Devs or community staff of being lazy as some do because I have zero doubt you all work hard and care and on the reverse side you have to remember that it's people who offer constructive feedback who deeply care about this game and want it to succeed, not the people posting "lol look what Yeetus did to me" videos.
For the Q&A, that's a great point I hadn't considered. Abbie had that really good idea for the Discord, but I could at the least X-Post questions and answers here for visibility and also help get questions from this sub into the AMA? I don't think we'd be able to do two of these on two platforms at the moment but I could at least help unite questions from here into it? I'll look into that this week and see :)
I am sorry for my absence the past week on the sub - I have focus that changes week-by-week but I'll do my best to be as active as I can here to help with the points you've raised.
I can see how it feels like we're not addressing complaints due to less volume coming in, as we have less active community members than we did at launch - but that's not the case for us. I think again it'll help if I respond to more here to show that rather than just say it in-thread, but wanted to share.
Thanks for the caveat at the end. The two-way accountability is part of the job for me and I never take it personally, it's all good. (Unless it's actual hate/death threats which we tend not to respond to haha) I want to get to a stage where we can all talk about fun stuff we're doing and more of a future-look into the game than bug fixes, but we're working through this at the moment.
I can assure you all this isn't a delay from an earlier planned date at all
I'm not buying this for one second. You found an opportunity to promote it on the Game Awards and grabbed it because the player numbers are dwindling because of poor game management in the first place. Please for the love of god pull your heads out of your collective asses. You have a good thing here that you are slowly driving into the ground.
I'm not sure what you're saying?
The timer miscommunications do not reflect delay on Season 3, I'm slightly confused by the rest of the message and the overall animosity.
You had a season ending date.
You had an opportunity to promote the game on the Game Awards.
You looked at the "player base chart" hanging in the Mediatonic offices ... you know the one with a sharp line at the end going downwards
You thought, we really need more people playing this game so you jumped on a chance to get a spot at the Game Awards.
In turn delaying the season.
Not sure how the animosity is confusing though. Can't help you there.
The Game Awards is a huge production and isn't something we last-minute organised to participate in - though it's awesome that we've got content going there, this is all entirely fabricated. I'm a little mortified to read the conviction in this theory, this isn't how things go.
The animosity was confusing because it's super duper weird to talk to people online like that no matter how close you might feel to the game that they work on.
The community feels season 3 has been delayed because of the “we never said season 3 starts when season 2 ends” issue. Very few people here believe that the intention was to have a gap between season 2 and 3.
Ah okay. We didn't delay it though, and we should have addressed the timer/countdown gap earlier to manage that.
This is the same song and dance you guys pulled with the anti-cheat. Claiming the lengthy time to deployment that went beyond previous estimates was a "secret plot" to tag the cheaters before they got wise to it. And everyone knew it was BS then too.
Just admit you f**ked up. Stop making excuses or cover stories for how every issue or delay was "part of the original plan", it's completely transparent and comes across as very disingenuous.
Is it really so hard to say, "Hey Fall Guys community, we're running into some schedule issues due to the holidays and unforeseen bumps in the road with new level development. We're gonna need another week or two before Season 3 is out to deliver the level of quality you'd expect, here's a couple free crappy costume recolors to tide you over." Most of us would probably find that mildly annoying, yet more acceptable and refreshing compared to what you guys are trying to pull here.
I'm sorry - I really am not sure what you mean about the EAC stuff as I wasn't here for that, but Season 3 hasn't been delayed, that's just the truth, I can't tell you a truth that doesn't exist.
It would be nice just to be up front with the community and say when season 3 starts instead of keeping it a secret until some award show. That just feels like a fan-unfriendly marketing decision. I think the fans would appreciate being told when the season starts ASAP and if it has to be delayed to make the game better so be it.
Absolutely understand that and we'll keep in mind from now!!
I think a "rough timer" is a good thing you just need more emphasis on it being an estimate. It's going to be near impossible to pin down an official release date for the each season but that's why the double exp until release is a good incentive.
If the community misunderstood the countdown and thought Season 3 would start at the end of the countdown it's because it needed more explanation.
You can understand why players would believe that the end of season would naturally mean the start of a next.
Plus if the timer ran out and players were suddenly recieving no experience points, no levels and no loot that will turn players away from the game because they are essentially playing for nothing.
Maybe instead of a countdown in days to could just have something along the lines of "Season 3 Coming Mid December" so it's more vague but playes get the sense of urgency to unlock their loot before the time comes.
When I said there was misunderstanding, I meant it was because of the poor design, not that it was the communities fault.
I try really hard not to blame things on the design or Devs, they're trying their best, and this is just a case where a feature wasn't really done in the best way.
When players unanimously don't interpret something in the way it was intended, the feature is flawed and not communicating what it's supposed to. The fix for that is changing the feature, or removing it. We're leaning towards changing it now - and making it more obvious what it actually means.