TL;DR: RPG need to step up their game with the community, hire a Community Manager ASAP and stop stretching their staff to breaking point.

Preface

Hello everyone. Let me preface this by saying I've been playing this game for the better part of 6 years, and I'm significantly invested in this community (I've created PS2Alerts and I'm leader of one of the largest outfits in the game [DIG]). I've had the privilege of communicating with the developers directly on a variety of topics, and I wholeheartedly appreciate their work and understand the strains that they are under right now. However, there are key points I must air.

The Problems

Andy Sites - Responsibility & accountability void

Since Andy left the team in I believe January now, there has been a distinct lack of effective communication from the RPG team, both publicly and privately. Publicly, we have no idea who is running the Twitter account at RPG, the community has no official point of contact except Wrel, who I'll move onto further down in this post. Privately via direct comms with the devs, they are often not answering emails, and when they do, their tonality is shall we say... abrupt, suggesting high stress levels. In discussions with other community members (primarily the streaming community) they share this opinion, and what should be standard requests are going unanswered.

There is an open position for a Senior Game Producer, but it is located in Massachusetts not San Diego (which is where the PS2 offices are), so I assume this is unrelated to PS2.

Community Manager Void

I'm aware that there is a job posting for an Associate Community Manager, however this position has been advertised for months now and there's been no change. Since Justin left (and to be honest, he wasn't doing a great job as he too was clearly overwhelmed) there has been literally no-one manning the post.

Are RPG really struggling to get a CRM on board? If someone has been chosen, RPG need to announce that there's a person coming in.

Wrel

To Wrel's credit, he has a LOT of sh*t on his plate right now. I'm personally amazed he's holding it together, if he isn't, he's putting on a very brave face. There's also been instances where he's "blown his lid" when interacting with the community (I've been on the receiving end of this). However rather than critiquing the person, lets think about this from a birds eye view, there is a single person who is in the following roles:

• Lead Designer
• Dev Team Leader / Producer
• Co-Head of business with Chris Fararr (according to previous official comms)
• Official spokesperson (which is not his primary talent)
• Unofficial whipping boy (who everyone pesters)
• Firefighter (attempting to deal with community bug reports, which are mostly going unanswered)

Now I don't claim to understand the inner workings of RPG, however to me this sounds like a f*cking lot for one person to be doing. Andy leaving has left a void, and according to RPG's job page, that void is not being filled. It's like the position has been nuked from high orbit and is not being replaced.

RPG / EG7 - you need a head of the dev team. You need a person who is skilled at co-ordinating resources, teams, communications and to take ownership of mistakes. Wrel is not your guy for this, he already has too much on I feel.

The fallout

Outfit wars 

Let's take a look at Outfit Wars. It was clearly rough, rushed and very inflexible in its design. I'm not going into the problems of outfit wars here, it's out of scope of this discussion. However, there are a few points to make here:

1) Feedback from the community was not taken on board. Features are released to PTS a week or two before go-live, which is not adequate time to make any changes and adjust before release, this'll likely be down to fears of breaking things. 2) The community was not asked what they wanted to see. Before even alpha 3 was conceived, a serious discussion with the community should have occurred, bringing in known and constructive community representatives (which we did have in the past) to discuss what the community would like to see. 

I know RPG has their own objectives as well (money, whatever you wanna cite), but releasing features for us to basically be your alpha testers just causes massive frustration for a game that's already struggling for population.

Firefighting and Failures

Firefighting

I've seen so many instances where the developers are very slow to react to issues, and I suspect why - only a few of the dev team are actually watching their socials to pick up on issues. Again, this is down to a lack of a community manager who it's literally their job to watch socials for issues.

Official mouthpiece posts have also been extremely lack-luster, non-frequent and non-responsive to people asking questions. 

Failures 

There's been multiple instances of failures recently which were poorly handled. Firstly, the initial outfit wars timings being literally as people are working. The rationale behind this was to avoid impacting prime time, which is very illogical reasoning.

Secondly, more recently, how did no-one in the dev team recognise that daylight savings is coming up and not handle it appropriately? This just screams lack of foresight for the most basic of implementation.

Thirdly, there are ongoing issues with the continent openings. No-one asked for them to be adjusted, yet the game is struggling to properly open the continents up. Roll back the change (which I highly suspect is just server configs with thresholds) and look at it again. This is being addressed - https://twitter.com/WrelPlays/status/1372561513655926784

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Summary

RPG - this is unsustainable. We cannot keep operating like this. Sort your CM position out, it is desperately needed, and Wrel needs to be relieved of the extreme workload that he's already on.

Additionally - Where is Chris? No-one knows who he is (only I do because I've spoken to him). He's a very good guy who knows how to talk to community members correctly and with respect, however we've not heard a single thing from him publicly (and I don't blame him right now), but considering he's apparently co-head of the business, it really doesn't invest much confidence.

You have an opportunity to change this around RPG. Make it count, or some key members of the community are ultimately going to leave. Stop the bleeding.

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