Ev1n_NA

I absolutely see that in your replies and the replies of others. If players were not passionate about the game, we would not all be here. However, as I've said in other threads in the past few days, not all qualitative feedback always makes sense. This is absolutely normal, especially in the context of how the SM landscape changed in the last few years, but this type of feedback is also included in the communication stream. This is why we always say that the more factual and detailed feedback is, the bigger the chance that we will know what to do with it.

I am always happy to have a reasonable discussion.

We previously thought, based on our conversations, that we were on the same page about what was being asked, or we would not have announced Huron publicly. Now it seems we did not understand the main points after all, so we will reach out and try again.

As we have said in a previous thread, we will reach out to LWM to try to reestablish a dialogue and mend the relationship.

I appreciate your point of view on this and respect the level tone. I do agree that we need to be held accountable for promises broken. However, we also need to draw a line between that and changing development plans and evolving the game. This is one communications challenge that we are addressing with this.

Console platform operators require us to disclose drop rates.

Which is why i commented with that stronger wording. We have to plan all of this stuff to make it happen - nothing fishy.

Its not about size or speed - quite the opposite, those are mostly influenced by the fact that there is a huge audience which consists of multiple player groups. Each of those has different priorities and engages with different parts of the game more or less.

Case in point - for you it's all too much, while for others it's not enough.

With all respect to the stellar analyses LWM has always done, she only sees the final bit of the pipeline for certain content releases. The development and publishing process are much bigger than that and require more QA steps where the community cannot be involved.

As a general statement this is unfair - whatever issues we have had with the game, or made players unhappy, let's not forget that overall we have an overall good game and a healthy community. If we mistreated them on a general level, the servers would be empty, so please don't make sweeping generalizations like that.

Look, you can read into linguistic nuance all you want, but we are trying to give you guys information and commitments. Other than that we do expect you to hold us accountable, within those commitments.

We will do our best to make our balancing process more visible, so that when feedback is given it's clearer on how we look at it. However, we will not abandon the core principle of balancing - we still need to confirm with data whether something needs a buff or nerf.

Yes, of course there are QA processes relevant to every step of the development and publishing pipeline. Some of those will be updated or revamped. It's obviously not the same team working on each part of the pipeline.

We understand, and we will do our best to show you evolutionary changes on a smaller scale with a shorter horizon.

We will disclose drop rates. However, this is not a technical choice or problem (of flipping a switch or writing code) - it's a legal and logistical one. We need to make sure that a change like that is consistent across all the jurisdictions we publish the game in - which includes China, a region regulated very strictly. We also need to be sure that we understand the implications of this change on all of those regions and the business model we are operating in them. It's not a simple matter.

Thank you!

Well, we committed to what we can right now and we will start turning our rudder to steer the course. Unfortunately, we are a battleship and organizational change takes time.

We do make balance changes to ships even when people do not riot. Sometimes we also do not make balance changes, when people riot for no reason.

As I've said in another thread last night, we need to contrast feelings with data, to get an accurate picture of what should be changed.

Dear players,

Lately a lot of you have been upset with various incidents, our decisions, as well as a general state of things in the game and community. Before we continue, we want to apologize to all of you, players, content creators, moderators, testers, and other volunteers, to those who support us and those disappointed with us. Everything that happens within the game and the community is our responsibility, and we are sorry that we let the situation come to its current state.

We want to take this opportunity to be more transparent about how we will take actions to improve our internal processes and our relationship with you. It will be a long read, you will see items of different scales and with different times required to see results. No doubt more news and announcements will follow, so please don't treat this as a final plan and the ultimate solution to everything. Instead, please treat it as a list of things we're currently working on and a w...

We do have a "feelings" objective, but we need to quantify it. The same goes for gathering that type of qualitative data - we gather it, but we need to match player responses to quantitative data describing their behavior to make it actionable.

Just getting a response that says "i don't like it" is not actionable, because we don't know which of the multitude of factors created the sentiment. If the cross-reference shows that the player consistently dies first and has more miles on average than other people who died in a similar time frame (over many battles), then one of the conclusions you could make is that the ship is too fast. It's just an example, but the more data we gather, the higher the chance that we will have enough different behavioral trends that cross each other to be able to narrow the problem down to a relatively small area.

We also routinely see player behavior not matching their answers. This also increases the need to have a lot of ...

Ranked is the closest in terms of player behavior to Randoms, while Coop has much lower stakes and is played a bit differently.

This doesn't mean we'll go directly to Random Battles from here. We'll look at the data we got and see if it paints enough of a picture for us to be able to predict general trends for introduction into Randoms. It's not always just about checking whether current balance state is ok, but also about how behavior changes over time, with different balancing factors being applied in the timeframe. Eventually, if everything goes well, subs will see Random Battles, but we'll also be looking at what accompanying content should be in that patch, as well as the neighboring ones. It's all important.

It's going to be Maredraco and Karmatika. The stream schedule should be updated now.

No, they will not answer any of the same questions. As both me and Sub_Octavian have said we are working on addressing those and asking us before we're ready will not make that process any faster.

We hope to have more information for everyone within a few days.

Best,

Thanks for that. It's well written.

I understand your perspective on the MO, but it was not "nerfed all around". What I said is that there are further technical benefits of moving her credit earnings bonus to another mechanism that weighed in on the decision.

Maredraco was trying to account for the same and I've already stated this before. As we promised, the boosted earnings bonus for the original MO will stay permanently. Right now it has been moved to a mission and we are working on making sure that the earnings match expectations. However, we also need to have the flexibility to later switch this earnings bonus to another mechanism so that we can operate on the economy of the game.

You are absolutely correct that we need to be precise in our communications and that there are too many examples of where we were not. This is an organizational struggle we will always have as a huge and distributed team, and we will probably have some ...

I wasn't calling you out for that - no worries. Just commenting on the need to address specifics that relate to the experience of the player, not how we run a business.

This is fine. This is a free-to-play game, so you are part of the majority. Contrary to popular belief we don't expect everyone to pay.

I'm sorry you didn't like the stream and that I couldn't meet your expectations for messaging. I don't mind that you don't care who I am - that was not the goal of my appearance. As I mentioned earlier, you will have to wait a bit longer for that, but this doesn't mean that we will stop our streams. So yeah, we'll keep going.

As for the term whales - it has become standard in the industry and in popular culture. Even here on the forums players have referred to themselves this way or stated "that they'd whaled". However, we'll not refer to that player segment this way in public, at least outside of professional settings like GD...

Thanks for the comments, guys.

First of all, the nerfed average earnings are not an intended outcome. As we've said, we will fix those.

As for the "original MO" point - we obviously knew that there would be groups of players with different motivations. Those who want her for the historical aspect, those that want her purely for the earnings and those that care about both. However, not releasing the ship (in any form, whether original or clone) with the original boosted earnings was a requirement so we knew we simply would not be able to make that group of players happy anyway. The reason we chose to do it this way is purely technical - its the only ship which has a modifier built in, so being able to move that into a different area of earnings calculations gives us more freedom to work on the credit economy as a whole, without always having to check whether we didn't break Missouri either way. I'm sorry the chosen implementation might not be fully eq...

Only runs until Wednesday morning though, so you gotta hurry.

Good luck!

I absolutely agree with the assessment on perspective coloring the communications channel. It's very obvious that we have different goals from each and every player, and that each of those players has a different goal than the other.

Unfortunately that's also why its difficult for us to agree with players on general statements like "not enough attention to the game's health", because every player has a different understanding of what makes the game healthy, because those ideas are not related to the business model of the game in 99.99% cases (accounting for potential gamedev among us), and because for most of them the game's health is not the objective anyway.

The game is generally healthy from a business point of view. It's an interesting subject to talk about in general, but players would have to accept that we know how to operate it successfully, which is an unreasonable expectation for me to have at this time.

It's an opi...

This is always going to be the case though – this topic would still exist without Yuzral, because someone would be happy about the fact that they got “1st pull” or annoyed that they got “41st pull” and this in turn would draw in others. This is what communities do.

He is just trying to harness and focus that into a semi-meaningful direction. We did the same thing when we saw people streaming our game in open beta – we created the CC program to support them, because they would have been doing that anyway.

In any case, he has no reason to be a shill for us, because we currently do not have any relations with him.

It’s worth pointing out that you are part of this community. Even then it does not “deserve the worst”, though I fully agree that everyone should absolutely decide for themselves in the end, regardless of whether the forums say it's good or bad.

We don’t think players are dumb. In fact, we believe it’s reasonable for us to assume that players will generally be able to identify the ship by using its name and description. It’s also worth pointing out that while you seem to generally dislike the idea of cloning ships, the player you are quoting is saying that doing that would have been better. With Mo we chose not to clone because we thought that players would want “the original Missouri”, rather than a clone – we saw similar comments with Belfast.

Also, your example with Vampire II is curious, considering that is an actual surviving vessel. https://www.navy.gov.au/hmas-vampire-ii

Not sure how to address the fact that you’re confused by its similarity to the other Vampire.

As for your characterization of effort, it’s worth pointing out that the two examp...

CCs rarely know what is ahead for the game more than 1-2 patches out, except in rare cases when content is in non-public testing stages for extended periods. CC Summits were designed to give a longer development view, but the pandemic put a stop to that for an indefinite period.

Also, It’s fine to change your mind and have a different opinion than in the past, as long as both positions are constructed around facts and make sense. Unfortunately, as with the majority of modern online user-generated content (although this category stops being accurate anymore), it is up to the viewer to analyze whether what the content creator says makes sense, because they are mostly opinion pieces. The best and closest example is that even in this thread there are users who characterize Jingles’ content very differently and it’s likely that none of these users can claim that they actually reviewed all of the content stringently to be able to claim that their position has all the fact...

Hi guys. Sorry to hear the bug cheated you out of a devastating strike.

We hope to have it fixed in the next update, 0.10.8. So far everything seems to be working correctly on Public Test, but if you want to try it there and give it a go it would help us validate that.

Fair winds.