We're working on this at the studio at the moment and it's an area we want to improve this year. Completely valid criticism.
Felt like I should drop in with a bit of context on what's up with this, and what we're doing about it given there's actual work happening on this at the studio!
So, a lot of last year was shaping our development effort to be more consistent on delivery of core content and involve players more where possible. We're in much better shape on that front, but we are still learning and improving how we go about it.
The casualty of that focus was a drop in our Patch Note output. Mod Yuey has been great at representing feedback on this within the community to the team and the team are responding. There's a bunch of stuff going on, but a couple of the key changes already have been:
- Fix It Fridays now happen once a month, which focus the entire development team on bug squashing for an entire day (on top of time for bug fixing as part of their normal workload). We've been running at a positive delta so far, meaning we're fixing more bugs than the ones that crop up in the development of content.
- Yuey and QA have set up a small Player Panel to help review and prioritise bugs based on player feedback, rather than what we assess is most critical to put our time into. This has worked great so far, and it's something we'll build on as we look to include more voices. (Personally, I'd love us to get this to a stage where it's entirely public, but baby steps).
It's early days and it will hopefully be something you begin to increasingly feel over the year. Keep letting us know how you feel on this, positively or negatively - it'll help us know if what we're changing is actually working.