[2019] CG's communication strategy is only for damage control, and that's why this community is so negative.

There’s a lot to say here but I agree with a good amount of the sentiment of this thread but I’m responding to this part because it’s basically identical to a calendar we are working up.

For a year we have been staffing to and making the case for why communication like this is needed. I usually make the MMO analogy. But we now have dedicated staff to handle cheating complaints, a community manager, a video artist, a 2D artist, a couple others working on the communications team. But the strategy is a ton of different vectors from Star Wars.com articles to talking to beta players to in-game messaging to the forum posts to a lot of single touchpoint complaints and concerns. Reddit and Twitter are supplementary, not strategy, and most of us do it to try to help but not in an official capacity. (Also it’s a little weird for me to think of it in terms of a quota.)

But it’s also been harder and harder to be on these platforms because the discussion is getting more volatile. I worry about every word I say here because there’s a lot of anger and criticism and it doesn’t stay constructive. Usually the tipping point for me personally to jump in is when things are so negative that I don’t see our perspective being made by other players. And also I personally do it because I don’t want to put anyone else on my team in front of the firing squad. But most days in a normal thread both sides are discussed and we don’t feel the need to chime in.

So while I agree we should do better and very much agree with regular cadence of things like Q&As and known issues etc., I respectfully disagree if you look at the output of communications from before a year ago. Our process around patch notes and official comms has gotten significantly more robust and there’s just a lot more of it. We do things regularly now that we never even did before. And we are constantly layering into that. But change comes by degrees.

The other types of comms we will continue to formalize, but it’s hard to do that and maintain the output that we do. (Again my job pertains to every aspect of this game, which involves a lot more than communication.)

But as we formalize, I’ll be honest that I think about reducing leaning on these types of forum response/Twitter communications because while I think it has been helpful to supplement and also helpful for emergencies, and I love to chat and provide our perspective, there have been a lot of down sides recently. And honestly, if the regular communications were more operationalized, maybe you all wouldn’t mind either? I dunno, I personally need to find a healthy balance.

Maybe there’s a communication channel where we can marry the regular posts and comms with some touchpoint ones, a number of players have reached out with suggestions and offers to help on how we utilize Discord servers and our beta Slack and Twitter all the other channels. So I’m sure we will refine this over time.

More input like this post would be super helpful though. Understanding that most of our communication goes through layers of approvals, and that we will always be limited vis-a-vis what you guys want/expect, what would be the most useful kinds of communication? What works, what doesn’t?

That’s a great example for us to compare notes. Crumb was at Celebration that week (along with a few other people) and running the booth at a convention is a LOT of work. So Leviathan was handling the day in and day out that week. Here’s where the note was posted. Is it because the forums are too hard to navigate?

https://forums.galaxy-of-heroes.starwars.ea.com/discussion/200259/flight-of-the-falcon-starting-april-12th#latest

IIRC, it was in the Malak build which we made the somewhat late call to give ourselves another day to work through some beta feedback. For a good portion of the 10th though, we still thought we would have it out on time. When we moved the build, we should have put the MF up anyway but it takes some work to create a separate build and QA it and we’ve been making decisions to de-risk where we can because we’ve had some build issues of late.

But it’s a fair point, the second we made the call to move the build out, we should have posted that the MF would be delayed a day as well.

One of the things we did fairly recently is put a DD over community (not sure what kind of Dev you are or if Development Director has the same meaning that it does at EA), but he’s basically building out better organization and structure for that group. Workflows, etc. I agree it’s been especially sloppy this year, and it’s not for a lack of effort. So we are now coming in with a big process machine over top.

Ask Erik how he feels about JIRA...

Great points. I think we don’t do ourselves any favors by diffusing communications. I have 300 unanswered PMs on our official forums. That’s just me, I know between a handful of other devs we get hundreds a week. Different people sit in different channels of testers and Game Changers etc and each outlet: individual person, group, forum - has a reasonable expectation of response. There’s just no way to keep up.

But because this team is made of people who care, we try to hit those individual touchpoints. It’s why I respond to people on Twitter sometimes, but then it highlights we aren’t saying enough. And that it’s been scattered.

Also, when we talk about intention, I think things can be misconstrued. It’s much easier to be either completely black/white or informal/low-key. Therein lies what I think the community issue is with us.

And you’re right. We just have to talk through it. But it’s challenging to face that head on. Two years ago I didn’t post ever. I don’t think I even had my Reddit account. I spent all my time thinking about Territory Battles/Wars and what they were going to be. And I had no white hairs. If it doesn’t feel different to people, then we need to go back to the drawing board. Because it feels very very different to me.

Yeah. I love this. It feels a little bit like we can’t get our head above water to do it though.

Here’s what I will do, I will not make the commitment to do this and if it happens to start happening at any point, hopefully it will be a pleasant surprise. :)

While I loathe JIRA (and overly rigid structure that inhibits creativity), I am pretty excited to hand off the stuff I dislike (scheduling, tracking statuses) and do the stuff I am good at (?, Carrie is welcome to dispute me) at (producing content, dreaming up new campaigns, publicly harassing Crumb).

I'm not really bagging on the tool. It's more a shorthand for my own PTSD about the times I've had people who knew how to wield a hammer (JIRA) see everything as a nail - and the hours and hours of arcane debates I've had about "what exactly constitutes an Epic vs a Story vs a Subtask?" and other esoteric conversations that would make a mystic blush.

JIRA (or any number of other systems) are great for tracking the status of tasks, features, bugs, etc. and can be incredibly powerful tools if you do the work to configure it in a way that works with your team's workflow. I'm personally much more of a visual/tactile learner, always want to jump up and diagram stuff on a whiteboard, make mind maps, user story mapping, move sticky notes around, etc.

I remember early on in my career as a Producer on a different title, a Technical Director sat me down and told me the only way I could communicate with the engineering team was to deliver a flat list of user stories strictly in the form: "As a _____, I want to be able to do ______, so that _______." He had me spend weeks writing user stories that covered every aspect of the game (as far as I could conceive of it at that time). I ended up writing hundreds and hundreds of stories. Only problem was nobody else on the team had gone along with me on that journey and the mental bandwidth for them to come up to speed was so great I ended up blowing away all that work, building some visuals heavy powerpoint decks, covering walls with user story maps. It was certainly clarifying for me as a product owner, but it didn't help the team understand where we were going and why we were going there.

/rambleSesh