One thing that comes to mind is that often times there are questions we (the community) raise on the forums or in other places (ie Discord, Reddit, etc...) and they never get any Dev response. Yet when the time comes for these kinds of AMA's the questions that come up never seem to be the ones people have been asking consistantly on the forums.
One would assume that you Kilsin (and other community managers) as part of your job moderating the forums would be aware of most of these commonly discussed things and I would hope that you keep a document of notes of these things that should/could be asked at these AMA's even if none of us community think to bring them up with such short notice when the AMA time comes.
Do you have such a list of these burning questions that have never had a direct Dev answer to that you have passed on to those who will be answering the questions at this AMA?
I only ask because in the past when they answer questions on the Streams it only seems to be whatever the random people in chat happen to think to bring up at the time and only the ones that happen to catch the eye of whoever is watching chat. This means that the really common and most anticipated questions never actually get asked when the Team is in the mood to answer questions.
We the community then find ourselves talking afterwards saying things like.... "I wish somebody had asked such and such..." or "Why did nobody think to ask about yadda..."
This is especially frustrating when the questions that do get asked are from new people who ask the same old questions that have already been answered a dozen times or more not realizing that this info is already common knowledge.
Perhaps you could remind the Team that they should avoid answering any questions that are already common knowledge and only focus on questions that haven't ever been answered before, unless of course the answers to those older questions have fundamentally changed and need to be revisitited.
Anyway, just some of my thoughts and hopes for some good answers for some of the questions that we might not think to ask on the day of the AMA.
GoofyWarriorGuy said:This is especially frustrating when the questions that do get asked are from new people who ask the same old questions that have already been answered a dozen times or more not realizing that this info is already common knowledge.
Perhaps you could remind the Team that they should avoid answering any questions that are already common knowledge and only focus on questions that haven't ever been answered before, unless of course the answers to those older questions have fundamentally changed and need to be revisitited.
This happens every Q&A. It would be nice to avoid all of the previously answered questions but it might be easier said than done? In their defense I'm unsure if they know/remember everything that has been talked about before? That's a pretty massive list that goes back 8 years at this point.
But yes, agreed. Hopefully we can avoid some of the repetitive questions.
GoofyWarriorGuy said: ...Do you have such a list of these burning questions that have never had a direct Dev answer to that you have passed on to those who will be answering the questions at this AMA?
I only ask because in the past when they answer questions on the Streams it only seems to be whatever the random people in chat happen to think to bring up at the time and only the ones that happen to catch the eye of whoever is watching chat. This means that the really common and most anticipated questions never actually get asked when the Team is in the mood to answer questions.
We the community then find ourselves talking afterwards saying things like.... "I wish somebody had asked such and such..." or "Why did nobody think to ask about yadda..."
...
IMO:
I've been part of MMO communities in the past within which this Q&A process was formalized as a weekly or monthly process. The community of fans would submit questions to the developers, the community manager would find the right developer/designer/coder to answer them, and the answers would be provided.
Except.. it didn't work. Why not? Ultimately, regardless of the means of collecting the questions (likes, repeats, voting, whatever) the questions that were always at the top were the questions the developers would not answer. It wasn't that the community couldn't come together to nail down the most 'burning' questions that the majority wanted answered. That part worked very well.
The breakdown was entirely with the team that had the answers, but would not provide them. I'm not trying to be adversarial, I'm just telling you how it went. It wasn't a matter of time. We're talking, in some cases, as few as 5 questions per week or 10 questions per month. One word or one line answers were all that was required. The intent was to take these answers and populate a fan FAQ or Wiki.
I had the opportunity to meet some of these developers face to face (via various fan events) and asked them why this process wasn't working, and the context boiled down to: " We are not inclined to answer those questions ". Ok, fair enough, but why not? The responses came down to a few things.
In one case, the developers wouldn't agree to the Fan Q&A without a veto option. The fan who set it up (he and I consulted a bit, because I had done it in the past and knew some of the pitfalls) said he didn't want to be the failing party of getting it set up, so agreed to the veto, which nullified the value of the process entirely. They could choose to ignore any question for any or no reason. And they did. So the community went to enormous effort, and the team just exercised their veto.
In another case, the developers stated that answers to those questions would narrow their target audience in the future. The mystery or lack of specificity would continue to maintain or expand the target audience, because customers would fill in the blanks and stay potential customers. Once those questions were answered, and the hard questions especially, many potential customers response was "I'm out!" and so they felt it was better to stay silent.
Another development team said those questions would expose the details of how MMOs worked, and that keeping that information secret from customers was vital, otherwise customers could make their own. I countered with the fact that there are many open source MMO projects and MMO/Multiplayer frameworks, but they wouldn't be convinced, stating that their implementation was better than all other implementations, so answering those questions was harmful to them. In that particular case, their implementation was objectively terrible, but they were guarding the golden goose, from their perspective.
A few other team members on various teams said they had no time to type out the responses, or felt that their responses wouldn't be understood without more context, so chose to abstain from answering rather than be 'misunderstood'. I pointed out most of the questions only need a confirmation or denial, but they wouldn't budge.
I recall from May 2017 , this:
Kilsin said: we are not taking feedback or suggestions on this ... Yeah, I agree man, these forums were great to start with for the first couple of years but then it became impossible to maintain so many ideas and suggestions due to us implementing our own and tweaking them to include a ton of community feedback on some of our systems and giving us new and exciting ideas to implement, which we have done, but now we are pretty much at the point where we have nearly everything in or set to go in and it is impossible to change anything until it is tested, so switching to game forums and removing the need for ideas/suggestion posts will be good for both the team and the community as then everyone will know where they stand, what we have planned and been able to test it for themselves and provide feedback but until then, we are in a kind of limbo :) ...
Which, now 4 years ago, summarizes the attitude of the VR team pretty well, I think.
Bazgrims recent project clearly shows it's not an impossible task to maintain so many ideas and suggestions. It simply requires picking the right product (there are many) or a database with timestamps.
In most IT projects I have been involved with throughout my professional career, scope is estabilished with requirements gathering, and good project managers don't change the scope because it affects the budget and timeline, both of which are fixed within certain boundaries with consequences. Clearly, coming up on 8 years of effort in February 2022, that's not the case with Pantheon, as scope is an often-changed variable, not a static value.
The missed opportunity, from my perspective, is that there was (in 2014) twenty years of history to learn from, with all the other MMOs that had been built up to that point. Establishing and maintaining the scope of the project would have permitted meeting every internal and external milestone, yet, they didn't. They could have, for example, communicated entirely via wiki updates, if they wanted one-way interaction with their intended demographic. Yet, they chose public videos and posts instead, but don't extract and maintain the value from the community responses in a public repository.
If they had maintained a public repository, it would be a living FAQ covering every possible Q&A topic that's been discussed. In fact, the current forums could be data mined for this express purpose, if desired. So, again, it doesn't come down to a lack of data, or a lack of process, or anything like that. After years go by, to me, it's simply a lack of desire or competence, and neither are positive. :)
vjek said:GoofyWarriorGuy said: ...Do you have such a list of these burning questions that have never had a direct Dev answer to that you have passed on to those who will be answering the questions at this AMA?
I only ask because in the past when they answer questions on the Streams it only seems to be whatever the random people in chat happen to think to bring up at the time and only the ones that happen to catch the eye of whoever is watching chat. This means that the really common and most anticipated questions never actually get asked when the Team is in the mood to answer questions.
We the community then find ourselves talking afterwards saying things like.... "I wish somebody had asked such and such..." or "Why did nobody think to ask about yadda..."
...
IMO:
I've been part of MMO communities in the past within which this Q&A process was formalized as a weekly or monthly process. The community of fans would submit questions to the developers, the community manager would find the right developer/designer/coder to answer them, and the answers would be provided.
Except.. it didn't work. Why not? Ultimately, regardless of the means of collecting the questions (likes, repeats, voting, whatever) the questions that were always at the top were the questions the developers would not answer. It wasn't that the community couldn't come together to nail down the most 'burning' questions that the majority wanted answered. That part worked very well.
The breakdown was entirely with the team that had the answers, but would not provide them. I'm not trying to be adversarial, I'm just telling you how it went. It wasn't a matter of time. We're talking, in some cases, as few as 5 questions per week or 10 questions per month. One word or one line answers were all that was required. The intent was to take these answers and populate a fan FAQ or Wiki.
I had the opportunity to meet some of these developers face to face (via various fan events) and asked them why this process wasn't working, and the context boiled down to: " We are not inclined to answer those questions ". Ok, fair enough, but why not? The responses came down to a few things.
In one case, the developers wouldn't agree to the Fan Q&A without a veto option. The fan who set it up (he and I consulted a bit, because I had done it in the past and knew some of the pitfalls) said he didn't want to be the failing party of getting it set up, so agreed to the veto, which nullified the value of the process entirely. They could choose to ignore any question for any or no reason. And they did. So the community went to enormous effort, and the team just exercised their veto.
In another case, the developers stated that answers to those questions would narrow their target audience in the future. The mystery or lack of specificity would continue to maintain or expand the target audience, because customers would fill in the blanks and stay potential customers. Once those questions were answered, and the hard questions especially, many potential customers response was "I'm out!" and so they felt it was better to stay silent.
Another development team said those questions would expose the details of how MMOs worked, and that keeping that information secret from customers was vital, otherwise customers could make their own. I countered with the fact that there are many open source MMO projects and MMO/Multiplayer frameworks, but they wouldn't be convinced, stating that their implementation was better than all other implementations, so answering those questions was harmful to them. In that particular case, their implementation was objectively terrible, but they were guarding the golden goose, from their perspective.
A few other team members on various teams said they had no time to type out the responses, or felt that their responses wouldn't be understood without more context, so chose to abstain from answering rather than be 'misunderstood'. I pointed out most of the questions only need a confirmation or denial, but they wouldn't budge.I recall from May 2017 , this:
Kilsin said: we are not taking feedback or suggestions on this ... Yeah, I agree man, these forums were great to start with for the first couple of years but then it became impossible to maintain so many ideas and suggestions due to us implementing our own and tweaking them to include a ton of community feedback on some of our systems and giving us new and exciting ideas to implement, which we have done, but now we are pretty much at the point where we have nearly everything in or set to go in and it is impossible to change anything until it is tested, so switching to game forums and removing the need for ideas/suggestion posts will be good for both the team and the community as then everyone will know where they stand, what we have planned and been able to test it for themselves and provide feedback but until then, we are in a kind of limbo :) ...Which, now 4 years ago, summarizes the attitude of the VR team pretty well, I think.
Bazgrims recent project clearly shows it's not an impossible task to maintain so many ideas and suggestions. It simply requires picking the right product (there are many) or a database with timestamps.
In most IT projects I have been involved with throughout my professional career, scope is estabilished with requirements gathering, and good project managers don't change the scope because it affects the budget and timeline, both of which are fixed within certain boundaries with consequences. Clearly, coming up on 8 years of effort in February 2022, that's not the case with Pantheon, as scope is an often-changed variable, not a static value.
The missed opportunity, from my perspective, is that there was (in 2014) twenty years of history to learn from, with all the other MMOs that had been built up to that point. Establishing and maintaining the scope of the project would have permitted meeting every internal and external milestone, yet, they didn't. They could have, for example, communicated entirely via wiki updates, if they wanted one-way interaction with their intended demographic. Yet, they chose public videos and posts instead, but don't extract and maintain the value from the community responses in a public repository.If they had maintained a public repository, it would be a living FAQ covering every possible Q&A topic that's been discussed. In fact, the current forums could be data mined for this express purpose, if desired. So, again, it doesn't come down to a lack of data, or a lack of process, or anything like that. After years go by, to me, it's simply a lack of desire or competence, and neither are positive. :)
That's completely out of context mate.
Some topics are off-limits and range from security risks, investor privacy, business protection etc. sometimes we're not 100% set on an answer and therefore don't want to speak about it publicly where we will be held accountable, even if we thoroughly explain it's not set in stone and sometimes we just don't know the answer.
We don't intentionally withhold information or answers from you folks just to be secretive, there is always a valid business decision behind the release of information.
Most game development companies don't make an MMORPG with the doors and windows open and everyone watching, offering advice and judging everything we do mate, it's a very different style of development that we have had to adjust to and learn how to best manage over the years and I think we have made good progress but it's still not perfect.
We've shifted into a more traditional model over the last few years of taking the majority of feedback through our testing phases with the exception of all of the feedback I collect and pass on from my community interactions and CM content across all official (and some unofficial) platforms.
But it's not fair to hang us out to dry like that with an out of context quote saying that it summarizes us, especially from a casual interaction between myself and other community members. Things like this are what stop companies from posting so openly and freely because something taken out of context like this can seriously damage our reputation which is sometimes unrecoverable.
GoofyWarriorGuy said:One thing that comes to mind is that often times there are questions we (the community) raise on the forums or in other places (ie Discord, Reddit, etc...) and they never get any Dev response. Yet when the time comes for these kinds of AMA's the questions that come up never seem to be the ones people have been asking consistantly on the forums.
One would assume that you Kilsin (and other community managers) as part of your job moderating the forums would be aware of most of these commonly discussed things and I would hope that you keep a document of notes of these things that should/could be asked at these AMA's even if none of us community think to bring them up with such short notice when the AMA time comes.
Do you have such a list of these burning questions that have never had a direct Dev answer to that you have passed on to those who will be answering the questions at this AMA?
I only ask because in the past when they answer questions on the Streams it only seems to be whatever the random people in chat happen to think to bring up at the time and only the ones that happen to catch the eye of whoever is watching chat. This means that the really common and most anticipated questions never actually get asked when the Team is in the mood to answer questions.
We the community then find ourselves talking afterwards saying things like.... "I wish somebody had asked such and such..." or "Why did nobody think to ask about yadda..."
This is especially frustrating when the questions that do get asked are from new people who ask the same old questions that have already been answered a dozen times or more not realizing that this info is already common knowledge.
Perhaps you could remind the Team that they should avoid answering any questions that are already common knowledge and only focus on questions that haven't ever been answered before, unless of course the answers to those older questions have fundamentally changed and need to be revisitited.
Anyway, just some of my thoughts and hopes for some good answers for some of the questions that we might not think to ask on the day of the AMA.
Yeah, good thinking mate and you're spot on, I do keep track of questions asked/answered/can't be answered yet etc. but it's tough because sometimes new people ask randomly without reading through old forum posts to find this information and we want to reiterate or clearly state answers on an official platform for all to see/hear but we also want to minimise repeated content.
I find myself disagreeing with some of vjek's critisism
In one case, the developers wouldn't agree to the Fan Q&A without a veto option.
There are not many companies anywhere that would give full and open answers about everything to do with a product for a lot of reasons. I think is it very reasonable to not answer specific questions directly as long as they state why. "We cannot give a details on this as it will ..." might seem unhelpful, but it still reasonable for a company to do so.
Once those questions were answered, and the hard questions especially, many potential customers response was "I'm out!"
Why would a company intentionally alienate their customers if they think an answer could result in a loss of customers. Some systems need to be experienced and can be difficult to explain in full if not shown in context? Again, as long as VR say why they cant answer a specific queston, and the reason is reasonable, then this is not a problem.
As far as answering every question anyone has is a bit of a tall order, really. The questions that tend to get asked a lot are generally answered in some form. "When is the alpha?" is a classic. When they are ready to tell us. I dont like the answer, but I respect it and wait for when they can tell us.
...Clearly, coming up on 8 years of effort in February 2022, that's not the case with Pantheon, as scope is an often-changed variable, not a static value.
Yes its been a long time, but the current system does seem to have a fixed design now and is proving to be a very flexible system from what I can see, so I would argue that your observation is incorrect.
I do wish there was more, but I understand the limitations VR have.
@Kilsin,
Would it be possible (perhaps for the next AMA since such short notice now) to get some kind of "Next Month's Community Forums Top 5 AMA Questions" poll, comprised of some of those topics that you have kept track of but may not be asked during the live seesion to maybe answer in between live questions?
I understand that some topics are covered in different threads throughout forums or perhaps on Discord, and that time is a consideration during a live stream, but I don't think the community would mind at all if we interjected a handful of "30 seconds of Dev input on some of the top forum discussions" (especially ones that have been addressed in the game, or have concrete goals that perhaps the community seems to still be debating - i.e. dev opinion on damage parsers, yay/nay, caveats, "we don't like them, but we'll put it up for vote, etc").
I would add that the search functionality of these forums is a bit lacking (in my opinion). When people have a question about something that has previously been discussed, finding that thread(s) isn't the easiest task unless you know where to look. So some of those topics with multiple threads could be in the polls that add to the community AMA list if time permits.
@vjek & chenzeme on scope management. Scope can be both static and dynamic depending on if you're talking about project or product scope and if your scopes are defined or are categorizing some work as intentionally being "out of scope" but necessary for product success... an example of this would be marketing/advertising. It may not have been part of the scope statement (game goals/design) but it has to fit into the development timeline and may have an unknown impact on income which could impact productivity +/-.
But overall, you want to be able to have a static scope for things like development mile markers/timelines which I believe they have when you see things like Faerthale... as their resources change, their overall project scope can continue to change too though.
We all would love to have more insight, but some things we just can't know.
StoneFish said: Where again can I find this if I missed the live show and I'm Champed?
You're really 'champing at the bit', eh? You haven't missed it yet as it's about 5 hours away from now.
But in case you do, I'm sure that Kilsin will post a "in case you missed it" post here in the Announcements Forum, probably tomorrow (though I think he already lives in 'tomorrow', so maybe that means 'today' for him)
Or you can just look for it on VR's Pantheon youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4MbaiykerIrjKWRA6407tQ
So, what questions(hard, dodged etc.) are being asked that aren't being answered? I'm not understanding some of the comments here. If it is something that can be answered it would have been answered right here on the forums when it was asked. If it wasn't answered then it's something they are not ready to answer. I'm assuming there is more to this?
Dikenzu said:So, what questions(hard, dodged etc.) are being asked that aren't being answered? I'm not understanding some of the comments here. If it is something that can be answered it would have been answered right here on the forums when it was asked. If it wasn't answered then it's something they are not ready to answer. I'm assuming there is more to this?
It's not so much that things are being dodged. It's more about the fact that most of the Dev's don't respond on these forums at all since these are the General forums for non-VIP testers. There is an entirely other Forums where the VIP testers in Pre-Alpha are able to discuss things with the Dev's behind their NDA, and so the Dev's spend most of their time responding to things over there rather than here for us Chumps... I mean Champs and lower.
My post was mostly pointing out that many times us Non-VIP have some valid questions or discussions that need official input from a Dev and we never get that kind of input. Other than Nephele in the Crafting/Harvesting section there is almost no Dev responses on these forums anymore. Only Kilsin and Nephele seem to talk to us much... unless it's an announcement in the News section.
Yet when the 'off the cuff' question periods on the Streams happen it just happens that many of these discussions or questions never get brought up when things are happening Live.
My hope would be that Kilsin (who is the one Dev who always reads and pays attention to us chumps... er champs... because it's his Job) would be able to make note of some of these topics and the Dev team could pre-plan an answer period. Like Darch suggested in his post above: "30 seconds of Dev input on some of the top forum discussions".
Maybe like once a week Kilsin and/or Minus could get one of the Dev's to record a 5 minute response to one of the questions or topics us non-VIPs might have that they don't normally get a chance to answer.
And these should be questions or topics that aren't commonly answered.
This is one reason it would be good if we had an up to date official FAQ so that some of those common questions don't get repeatedly asked.
GoofyWarriorGuy said:My post was mostly pointing out that many times us Non-VIP have some valid questions or discussions that need official input from a Dev and we never get that kind of input. Other than Nephele in the Crafting/Harvesting section there is almost no Dev responses on these forums anymore. Only Kilsin and Nephele seem to talk to us much... unless it's an announcement in the News section.
philo said:I agree with this and I want to take the time to thank Nephele and Kils for interacting with the community on the forum. I know it's kind of Kilsins job to do just that but Neph seems to go out of his way to interact with the community here. So thanks guys. We appreciate it.
Agree with this 100%
Thanks guys.
Darch said:@Kilsin,
Would it be possible (perhaps for the next AMA since such short notice now) to get some kind of "Next Month's Community Forums Top 5 AMA Questions" poll, comprised of some of those topics that you have kept track of but may not be asked during the live seesion to maybe answer in between live questions?
I understand that some topics are covered in different threads throughout forums or perhaps on Discord, and that time is a consideration during a live stream, but I don't think the community would mind at all if we interjected a handful of "30 seconds of Dev input on some of the top forum discussions" (especially ones that have been addressed in the game, or have concrete goals that perhaps the community seems to still be debating - i.e. dev opinion on damage parsers, yay/nay, caveats, "we don't like them, but we'll put it up for vote, etc").
I would add that the search functionality of these forums is a bit lacking (in my opinion). When people have a question about something that has previously been discussed, finding that thread(s) isn't the easiest task unless you know where to look. So some of those topics with multiple threads could be in the polls that add to the community AMA list if time permits.
I'm not sure about a poll but the team and I are gathering and putting together some missed questions in the next Newsletter, so for any future AMA's we will consider doing the same but I like your idea, leave it with me and I will see if we can put aside a few community voted/selected questions to make sure we answer if we can.
GoofyWarriorGuy said:Dikenzu said:So, what questions(hard, dodged etc.) are being asked that aren't being answered? I'm not understanding some of the comments here. If it is something that can be answered it would have been answered right here on the forums when it was asked. If it wasn't answered then it's something they are not ready to answer. I'm assuming there is more to this?
It's not so much that things are being dodged. It's more about the fact that most of the Dev's don't respond on these forums at all since these are the General forums for non-VIP testers. There is an entirely other Forums where the VIP testers in Pre-Alpha are able to discuss things with the Dev's behind their NDA, and so the Dev's spend most of their time responding to things over there rather than here for us Chumps... I mean Champs and lower.
My post was mostly pointing out that many times us Non-VIP have some valid questions or discussions that need official input from a Dev and we never get that kind of input. Other than Nephele in the Crafting/Harvesting section there is almost no Dev responses on these forums anymore. Only Kilsin and Nephele seem to talk to us much... unless it's an announcement in the News section.
Yet when the 'off the cuff' question periods on the Streams happen it just happens that many of these discussions or questions never get brought up when things are happening Live.
My hope would be that Kilsin (who is the one Dev who always reads and pays attention to us chumps... er champs... because it's his Job) would be able to make note of some of these topics and the Dev team could pre-plan an answer period. Like Darch suggested in his post above: "30 seconds of Dev input on some of the top forum discussions".
Maybe like once a week Kilsin and/or Minus could get one of the Dev's to record a 5 minute response to one of the questions or topics us non-VIPs might have that they don't normally get a chance to answer.
And these should be questions or topics that aren't commonly answered.
This is one reason it would be good if we had an up to date official FAQ so that some of those common questions don't get repeatedly asked.
Not only am I always reading and replying to you folks, I am constantly passing on links to your posts to Devs to get answers or them to give input if they can, sadly they are very busy and also need to reply to the PA forums as that is a direct help to our ongoing development with live testers and feedback but you're being heard whether you see a response or not.
That is not to say you folks don't have great suggestions and discussions, it just means our priority as a lean and mean team must lie with those who have access to the game and can give direct and experienced feedback.
You folks are definitely not chumps and are very much Champs! We appreciate the support from everyone and will make an effort (time permitting) to include you a bit more. :)
philo said:GoofyWarriorGuy said:My post was mostly pointing out that many times us Non-VIP have some valid questions or discussions that need official input from a Dev and we never get that kind of input. Other than Nephele in the Crafting/Harvesting section there is almost no Dev responses on these forums anymore. Only Kilsin and Nephele seem to talk to us much... unless it's an announcement in the News section.
I agree with this and I want to take the time to thank Nephele and Kils for interacting with the community on the forum. I know it's kind of Kilsins job to do just that but Neph seems to go out of his way to interact with the community here. So thanks guys. We appreciate it.
It is my job but I would do it regardless, coming from the community makes me appreciate you folks that much more as I am constantly putting myself in your shoes and trying to give as much info as possible so you folks don't misunderstand or worry about something that could have been explained better, I am by no means perfect and am always striving to be better in my role but you guys are my priority and the future of our success and I treat you all with that deserved respect.
You're very welcome and thanks for the kind words mate <3
Jothany said:philo said:I agree with this and I want to take the time to thank Nephele and Kils for interacting with the community on the forum. I know it's kind of Kilsins job to do just that but Neph seems to go out of his way to interact with the community here. So thanks guys. We appreciate it.
Agree with this 100%
Thanks guys.
You're very welcome mate! <3