[2021] Lack of communication

Hey all, I just wanted to chime in to re-enforce that we hear your feedback and appreciate everyone wanting to hear more about New World and the team’s plans for the game whether it be through fixing bugs or providing new content in the future or general status updates. As Mugsy’s linked post above says, we’ve been busy addressing many of the critical issues the community’s experiencing but that doesn’t mean that we stop communicating on other fronts. In the future, we want to implement some other forms of communication like a bug tracker, for instance, so everyone can stay updated on our top priorities.

Again, we really appreciate hearing everyone’s feedback; we’ll work to improve our communications across the board.

Hey @Wolfchadren I guess I’m just confused, we respond to every bug report made on this forum and are active on our social media and other threads here on this forum as well.

If you look through threads made both before and after you created this thread you can see me actively communicating in a variety of threads from bug reports to feedback.

We also post multiple blog posts each week.

There were multiple responses to the UI and PVP feedback.

I suspect you have an issue or feedback request that you made personally that may not have received a direct answer rather than this being an overall communication issue like you’ve suggested?

TLDR; Everything is a maybe and nothing is scheduled until we tell you if it’s accepted or rejected and give you a date - if you have no communication about the feedback assume there’s no answer and no date scheduled - this doesn’t mean we will be able to give you a yes/no answer or an eta if we just make the time to reply - the reply will be “we’ll consider it and we have no current plans” - this is not a yes or no, it’s an acknowledgement - we’re not going to spam every thread with this answer - you all hate it when we give the same answer over and over and it will take time away from other things we need to handle (like answering feedback and bug reports that do have solid answers).

Answers generally are given to an “audience” not 1:1 - and only for the biggest feedback points, we don’t have the time or capacity as humans to answer every piece of feedback we receive as there is A LOT.

@Elfin Sure we’ll look at trying to give a bit more notice in future for the beta sign ups!

We can take a little feedback on our social media but as I understand it you post your feedback there every day so were directed to come here to the forum which is the best place to have feedback discussions.

We simply cannot have 1:1 conversations about game feedback, so you will often get directed to the forum here to discuss it in a group so we only have to answer once.

When we have info on what feedback will be used and when we share it.
We were quite active in the UI discussion board here on the forum which is officially where we reply to feedback, even though we collect it from all platforms.

Our development schedule is scheduled months in advance, and we start work on the next-next update before the next update has even been released, which is why often feedback won’t be addressed immediately in the next update as it may already be about to get submitted to the stores for approval - live service games and especially Gems of War operates at a crazy pace and there’s no getting off this train

Basically, if I know, you know. Things can change quickly, so first of all I make sure of all the details and make sure as much as reasonably possible the plans won’t change before we make an announcement or post about it. We try to acknowledge that we’ve seen the big feedback points - we can’t do this for all feedback posts - it’s not feasible to answer every post.

We receive a LOT of feedback every day from all our communication platforms. We can’t possibly implement all of it or reply to all of it but we also don’t say no to half of it. If there’s no yes, and no no answer, it means we’re actually going to consider it but we don’t have a clear answer for you and we don’t have anything scheduled for it. I know you want answers, but in the amount of stuff waves vaguely in every direction sometimes there is no clear answer.

If you don’t receive an answer to feedback and you’ve checked the forum for dev posts about it and found nothing, you can assume the answer is a solid maybe - with no plans in place or ETA. But we’re only human and we literally can’t respond to every post everywhere about everything and a lot of the feedback is reposts because the person didn’t know it had already been suggested or answered. Much like you didn’t know we’d replied to the UI feedback with what we were doing and when. We don’t expect anyone to be all seeing and all knowing (if you are that’s super cool and we’d like to hire you), I guess just try to see what discussions are going on in the feedback section here if you’re super keen and keep an eye on all the news.

Hopefully this helped? I feel like I’ve just given you a brick wall to run into.
Totally open to improving comms but we literally cannot reply to all feedback all the time everywhere. I’ve spent time writing this reply already not doing bug reports or actually posting more feedback to the team - everything has a time cost and every time we do anything, something else loses that time. We cannot infinitely hire more staff - that’s not how business works even if we are called Infinity Plus Two

As that role is a paid CM position (here we call it CX), it’s not legal to have a volunteer do it.

The best you can do is compile the feedback in the forum in one place where it’s easy for a staff member to grab the information, which is why we direct everyone to the forum to give game feedback.