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Developers In Discord: Bad Idea
Wargfoot
Member EpicPosts: 1,406
I'm starting to think that developers participating in Discord is a bad idea, and that perhaps, Discord is little more than the low point of the internet that collects all the runoff from much higher ground.
Thoughts to consider:
How did developers release fantastic games in the past with next to no community involvement?
How many times have you seen a few toxic players destroy a community?
How many times have you seen developers chase a few vocal community members instead of their initial vision?
I think Discord is a great tool for players to connect, but I think we get better products when we see less of "how the sausage is made".
I think too many indie developers get bamboozled by loud mouthed streamers and content creators.
I've seen too many dumb ideas take root in Discord.
At least use a freakin' iron clad Community Manager as a firewall.
A developer should NEVER be in Discord.
Fight me.
Thoughts to consider:
How did developers release fantastic games in the past with next to no community involvement?
How many times have you seen a few toxic players destroy a community?
How many times have you seen developers chase a few vocal community members instead of their initial vision?
I think Discord is a great tool for players to connect, but I think we get better products when we see less of "how the sausage is made".
I think too many indie developers get bamboozled by loud mouthed streamers and content creators.
I've seen too many dumb ideas take root in Discord.
At least use a freakin' iron clad Community Manager as a firewall.
A developer should NEVER be in Discord.
Fight me.
Comments
Some actual things I've seen in my career when this happens in no particular order:
1. Developers are trained to write code not have good customer service skills, so the potential for inserting feet into mouth is high.
2. Customers start working directly with their pet developer to get features they want in the software without product management knowledge throwing timelines to the wind and causing all sorts of unintentional consequences because there's no coordination with the rest of the team.
3. Developers get frustrated and warn out feeling like they have multiple bosses. The customer yelling at them on one side and their managers yelling at them on the other often with conflicting priorities. See #2 above.
4. The codebase becomes spaghetti with all these bespoke custom features introduced that only satisfy one user or a small subset of user needs. This leads to a fragile code base with easily introduced regressions when enhancements are made.
That's just the negative consequences I've personally seen. I can only imagine the train wreck an Indy game studio is with developers talking directly to the players.
The funny thing is when you go to industry conventions, you get to talk to other health systems and find out they would like to see the same features implemented, have asked the company and been told the same thing as us. Also at these conventions you get dined and boozed by vendors and it's common for the software companies to bring a developer or two to wow the customers. At my most recent convention, I found myself at one of these events sitting at the bar with a developer from our EMR company. We got to chatting about all the options we the users would like to have in the software and he admitted they are all good options which would not be difficult to program he flatly state management decides which features get implemented or not and that they are not allowed to receive input from customers or really encouraged to communicate directly with them.
Now while your point above help explain the reason for the seperation of the developers from the customers, I can't help but feel that it's a missed opportunity for developers and customers to collaborate and improve the product for the benefits of both the user and the company. Just my 2 cents.
Oh but this does not applies for games. Game developers should stay away from Discord and the like. In fact, I recommend they don't engage their player base in direct conversations.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
I wouldn't be surprised for that to happen more often than not.
I've seen that play out to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Also everything said about devs shouldn't talk to the plebs is on the nose to many games have gone sideways from dumb suggestions that in the end have nothing to do with the core game.
Have a suggestion thread and if its a good idea put it in but @
Johnnyloudmouth should never have the ear of some feature designer.
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
To bring this back on topic of this discussion how this can play out in game development on discord is the players ask for some feature, and a rank and file developer chimes in "oh yeah, that's easy". Then, down the road for some reason it turns out not to be so each and the feature gets dropped, deferred, or redesigned. Now you get these posts (and I've seen them) about how the developer LIED and promised things that they didn't deliver, and how they're horrible people and should all die in a lake of fire. You have to be very careful about what exactly you say to gamers as they sit there and review the tiniest detail of every word you say and invent crazy ideas in their head you never intended. I wouldn't leave that interaction up to a no-filter developer, personally. I'd have a dedicated CM/Marketing team who is trained on messaging and how to deliver it deal with that and keep my developers writing code.
I be eating colours when my days are grey
Clicking on my profiles just gonna give you music links galore so enjoy
Fishing on Gilgamesh since 2013
Fishing on Bronzebeard since 2005
Fishing in RL since 1992
Born with a fishing rod in my hand in 1979
I be eating colours when my days are grey
Clicking on my profiles just gonna give you music links galore so enjoy
These days when you need money you have to engage directly especially when your team is small. If you have someone like Sandy you don't need anything else.
You can get feedback in far more manageable ways and there is the keyword 'manageable'; which is what the foundation of any sort of project is built upon.
You have to survive long enough as a game to find your audience - but you don't do that by changing direction with every complaint in Discord.
If you have a full loot open world PvP design, that may or may not be a bad idea, but what you need to do is follow through with your vision and tell the PvE crowd to take a hike. Same with a PvE game. (Those are just examples).
Sure, small UI changes or other solid ideas - that support the vision - should be considered - but trying to change audience mid-stream is bad.
We had a bunch of people in there that were calling for a server wipe because it would revive the game - they couldn't tell us how that would work, exactly - but after an initial release bump the numbers are cratering again.
A post that set me off this morning was basically saying that under no circumstances should people be allowed to transfer characters from the old server because things happened there -regrettable things - that won't happen again. Basically, made my character out to be some kind of contagion that shouldn't be allowed on the "pure" server.
People for whom the enjoyment of the game is dependent upon deleting hundreds of hours of other people's work are the ass cancer of any community.
A developer who cannot see that is unworthy of my trust.
I'm only mildly upset that developer deleted my characters and hundreds of hours of work - even though they said that wasn't supposed to happen. This is because these developers are pouring their lives into the game and making a substantially greater investment than I'll ever make. I don't think they wanted to destroy my efforts, I'm guessing they feel they had to do it (and aren't happy about it) - or didn't have the ability to make it work another way.
I get that.
They've got a job - families -bills to pay.
No worries.
What I'm raging against is the retarded community member who somehow cannot enjoy a game unless other people's efforts are destroyed. Not one of these mouth breathing morons could explain to me how a million in gold in my bank box made killing trolls less fun for them.
i hAvE a GuILD wITH 40 memBerS THat WIlL RetuRN if THere IS a wiPE
^-- These bozos have already come and gone.
So when you ask: How does my bank box impact your time on Tutorial Island again?
*silence*
That's what I thought.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Then they said they'd keep the old server up and running - it hasn't come back up after they took it down two months ago.
Again, a small indie company - so I get the limited resources and such - what I cannot forgive and will not forgive is giving in to destructive members of the community. Most of those guys who called for wipes have already left.
I'd still be playing - even after significant rule changes, because I like the game. But cannot, because no server and I ain't starting over.
Hopefully, the developer will learn some members of the community are idiots.