[2021] SEND Your feedback PLEASE

Hi folks -- I've been out and pretty seriously ill for the last week, so I've missed out on a lot of big conversations that I see have popped up here over the last week, so I wanted to drop in and chat frankly about a lot of player pain and frustration.

The community team for Rogue Company - that's me and Avi - read a lot of player frustration and pain on a day-to-day basis (Reddit, Discord, Twitter, etc), and have to make decisions about how we can cover as much ground as fast and as efficiently as possible. We know that many of our players are feeling not just frustration, but outright anger about the issues that they're running into when playing Rogue Company.

When I came on board back in April, one of the goals I had was not only to improve communication of community issues to the development team but also work towards improving transparency with the player base.

To that end, whether or not I am commenting on something here on Reddit, I am often reporting it internally. For instance, reports of server lag are a top priority for us and one of our best engineers has been working on this issue (you may have seen him pop into some Reddit threads about the issue). Communicating that is tough though when we have a lot of players across several platforms. To put it bluntly, responding to Reddit threads can be a lot like playing whack-a-mole with communications. This thread will rapidly fall off of the front page and another with similar frustrations will take its place in a few days, and the cycle repeats. It's an issue of scale. It's one of the reasons I adopted the Rogue Company Trello board again as a way of centrally organizing (and communicating) known issues, bugs in progress, and what has been released.

Obviously, bugs aren't everything, but currently, they seem to be the biggest cause of player concern, so they're what I spend the most time on.

Over the last few months, the QA and Engineering team is more informed than ever on issues impacting players, and I meet with them weekly to ensure that we're prioritizing the right fixes, because we as developers don't play the game the same way as players, nor do we perceive bugs the same way. To us, rag-dolling may be the top priority, but for players, it's Xbox not saving your settings each update. These meetings have been integral to getting issues resolved and are why some long-standing issues have been resolved in the past few months.

Over the long term, I'm looking at ways we can communicate things out more effectively than playing the Reddit or Discord message whack-a-mole and hoping that you (the player) find a message about an issue that you're dealing with. As a player of several games myself, this.... well, it sucks. It sucks to have to go Googling for an answer to an issue and only find it on some random message board as a "they addressed this" message, with a link to a Reddit thread.

No solution is perfect - I think there will always be a degree of telephone when looking for answers on issues - but I think we can do better in communicating with players about what is frustrating them and the long-term goals we have to solve them.

EDIT: Oh, and yes, please do send us your feedback!

It's linked on Discord and at the top of the subreddit, in the weekly bug threads! :)

Is it only you and Avi reading the feedback? Honestly maybe there needs to be more people looking at feedback and working on this game based on that.

Stakeholders across the company read player posts on Reddit, surveys, and across Twitter, but unlike Avi or I, it isn't part of their full-time job. They may spend four or five hours a week on a place like Reddit, while I spend at least two hours a day on those platforms. We read feedback constantly and distill it down to the major points for teams to be able to act.

Sometimes there are issues that aren’t on Trello, but are still issues. I think just acknowledging them on simple comment that you’re working on them internally gives some clarity, however there’s been as example issues that have been said they were looked at but never got exactly resolved (take MM for example).

This is tough because something like matchmaking, for instance, is a huge system with a lot of moving pieces that sometimes take months to overhaul, with many incremental changes along the way. And for many players, communicating "we're changing matchmaking" creates an expectation that something is changing in a huge way. When that doesn't happen, it creates a lot of disappointment and outright anger. Communicating player issues is much tougher than just "talk about the thing."

As for Matchmaking itself, we are making some changes to it, which were discussed in the Cannon Update Notes Show.

This makes somewhat sense except there are some other games community management do communicate through reddit, even Roco has QA post over year ago, where people could ask questions. Communication doesn’t necessarily mean answering every post, but it would be good maybe if there were similar things hosted other than the automod bug thread.

Many members of the team do come to Reddit to respond to player threads, especially about player issues. Unfortunately, many members of the team have expressed to me a reluctance to do so because of being treated poorly in the past.

If possible I’d love more transparent patch notes, because lot of times there has been things that have changed (aiming in several patches) that hasn’t been mentioned beforehand the update.

Can you elaborate on this? In the last few patch notes, we've captured a lot of the designer's intentions and thoughts on changes they're making in an effort to add context and transparency, but we are always looking at ways we can make this better.