Yet another week of running in the dark.

[Blackdog_kt]

Originally Posted by ZaltysZ

Some of you want too much. Devs won't give you premature changelog, because it can backfire (i.e. it turns out that something isn't fixed when it has been announced as fixed). In addition, game is "heavy" as software product, it takes sometime to prepare a snapshots for testing, and you need to do enough changes so that snapshots will be worth a testing. You can't just handle a new snapshot to testers every time something small is fixed - it is not effective way to work.

What do you want from devs? I am sure they can write: "We are fixing game..." every week or day, but is that really necessary? They can't always give more details. Hoping for patch every week is a bit optimistic.

P.S. If programmer gets a list of task and required time for completion, but manager constantly asks to update him on progress in detailed manner, programmer can't usually work effectively. People don't like "are we there yet?" question to be repeated endlessly.

+1, that's pretty much my take on things.

Communication and feedback to the community is needed, but it shouldn't be the job of the guys doing the coding because it takes up A LOT of time.

Half the people here continuously post about issues that are mentioned in threads just 2 spots above their own and they manage to miss it because they're too impatient to read.

I've been actively trying to help by sharing my observations on how certain things work in the sim, guess what, i had repeated the same things at least 4-5 times within a week because people just can't be bothered to read. They expect to pop in here, ask something and get a response within an hour or so.

I actually started to copy-paste all of my posts to a text document and compiling some sort of FAQ because, i kid you not, it actually saves me time when someone asks the same question for the umpteenth time: i just paste a wall of text from my .txt file and tell them to use the forum search function, which saves me enough time to test more features and possibly answer something that hasn't been answered a million times already.

I'm not complaining mind you, it's not a job for me and if i was unhappy about it i would stop doing it. What i'm saying is that it's too time consuming.

So, is this what we want them to spend their time on, or fixing the sim?

Then how do we ensure that the needed communication exists?

1) A full-time community manager to babysit these discussions. This is what they said they'll do.

2) A weekly dev update, but don't expect much in that because of the reasons above.

I agree it's not much to spend 5-10 minutes per week on such an update, i really do.

I just don't trust half the forum population to be content with the amount of information a busy coder can provide in the span of 10 minutes. Specific changelogs and bug lists will be demanded and then, if a feature slips past the deadlines and doesn't make it to the patch everyone will be all "torches and pitchforks" once again.

Having a full-time community manager is the more effective solution.