Next game discussion: Communication

[Iron_Guard8]

@Positronic-Rift  asked me to cover 2 things; mechanics and communication. This one will be about communication.

Prior to BfN, the communication was decent. It might be on Reddit or Twitter instead of here on the forums, which a lot of us have never been that happy with, but at least we had those options. Other things I consider part of the communication includes the many, many dev videos for GW2 when they presented things about the game and playing the game themselves, which always felt good, like we were enjoying the same experience together.

When BfN first went live, the dev team were communicative and I often to had watch the Twitch streams after work instead of live, but I was still glad they had those, even if they had some disappointments like not adding in damage attenuation over range. They were communicating with us and keeping us in the loop, sharing art and also posting fairly often on the forums as well as tweeting a lot.

When they went silent, things felt even darker than they were, and they were very dark as the game felt ignored; the lack of videos, the decline of YouTuber coverage, and the dead silence on the forums and Reddit depressed the community that were already worried or had left over the issues that plagued BfN. Even if things are not going as well as the devs planned, communication is so important. Again, I don’t expect them to reply to every post, but more engagement with the community is very good for a game and to keep the community involved and feel appreciated for spending time and money on the game.

One thing I want to be sure of to point out is that attacking the devs, forum team, or other posters is never acceptable. Respectful disagreement is fine, asking questions is fine, being upset that the game isn’t working or transactions didn’t go through is fine, but avoid calling the devs lazy or anything else like that (for the record, I have a rotten temper and have destroyed several controllers over the years and even a  flat screen monitor during an awful session of World of Tanks, but I always try to respectful in my communications). I’m willing to bet that a ton of work went into BfN and despite the problems and incomplete aspects of the game, the devs are not evil, lazy, or other negative connotations. I really like the PopCap folks, and as just one example, am sad Justin Wiebe is no longer part of the team as he was always the fun Twitter face of the GW series.

I know there is a lot of frustration with the shooters these days; the lack of support to deal with hackers and add the more interesting events to the town hall in GW2, the state of BfN and lack of news of a new game, the monetary system of BfN (especially when the game was still plagued with bugs and they released that Feastivus pack), and other things like technical issues; all combine to leave a lot of people upset and justifiably to be sure; and I fully understand being unhappy with these things, I still am with a lot of this myself, and this needs to be handled better by EA/Popcap, and would go a long way with scoring some good will with the community.

It’s important to note that we want to support these games, but one aspect that helps with that support is solid, respectful and responsive communication. I wasn’t big on the forums during GW1’s heyday, even though I still play it now, but I started being active during GW2 and then BfN, and while imperfect, the communication during GW2’s main life was much better than it was with BfN. A lot of people left the game early for various reasons, but as time went on it seemed more and more like the game was abandoned before we had any idea what was going on. Remember #Repairville? I certainly do. At the time it seemed achievable and I was sure the devs would have been happy to see so many of us willing to stick around and give the game a chance to improve and hook us in like the GW games did, but that day never came and after months of silence the game was cut off with barely any acknowledgement at all. For all BfN’s missed potential and continued issues, I still enjoy it and would have enjoyed it more with Berry Brigade, Iceberg Lettuce, new maps, Ops phase 3, and so on. No one person has all the answers for how to fix things, but certain things not being changed always did confuse us; I’m thinking mostly of damage drop off here, but other examples exist as well.

I do want to see more reasoning behind certain changes, more sharing of information about how things are going, and more videos and Twitch streams to show the devs are engaged and to promote the game. BfN’s promotion had a few decent videos but GW1 and GW2 especially had so much more. This bleeds over into marketing but is also a great way to show folks that the devs are engaged with the game and the community.

This one will be short (for me that is) as it’s a fairly basic idea. To boil it down; communication needs to be better from the dev team, communication should be respectful at all times from all avenues-remember that you’re talking to other people here, the forums should be the focus of this communication but having other avenues like Reddit, Twitter, and Twitch are good ideas as well, and we’d like to see more data and insight into why things are the way they are.

[stukapooka]

@Iron_Guard8I feel like communication with popcap overall dropped off a cliff after heroes as they started to stop talking to the community and just randomly came back for tale of the taco for gw2 with no real indication that they were doing so for a long time.

With bfn it got much worse as the team started doing strange balance changes such as the unnecessary grody goop buff that made it op. Despite outcry from day 1 lets remember how long it took them to fix imps invincibility and all 20 other issues with him still remain.

Their twitter is really weird nowadays as it usually just updates on copy and pasted pvz 2 updates or acknowledging fan works every few blue moons. How ever if any question about the pvz 3 rework, that weird rpg, and the state of the gw franchise seems to never reach them and its frustrating especially after an entire studio was repurposed which is usually sign of financial trouble for a company and its no secret that bfn was most likely rushed. Its frustrating to ask things to a brick wall that doesnt awnser back and I cant blame people for wanting to angrily knock that wall down.

[TheSprinter85]

As always, great post! 

The Communication that we received from the game developers in Battle for Neighborville started out really well, every month the developers would do a livestream which showcases what is upcoming for the game for the next month, and on top of that, we would generally get an update every month as well. I would always get really excited to see what was coming next, I remember one of the things I really looked forward to is Rux's shop opening. We got some balance changes and content additions quite early into the game's life cycle as well, such as the Oozevoir map. I never watched the livestreams live, however I would watch them at some point, generally with my brother, nevertheless. 

It was always cool to see what was going on with the game and staying informed on the game and the developer's plans. However, at about the beginning of last year, the communication between the developers and the game community really started to dwindle, until the communication eventually evaporated (basically). We were not getting informed and kept in the loop about what was planned in the future. We had the Trello Tracker board that we could refer to, but that did not help all that much because the developers were not communicating with us, and they completely stopped their livestrems as well (which was quite sudden actually). We would only get very few updates every few months or something. The Lost and Found event that happened in BfN (quite a long time ago now) was not explained at all, players had no idea what was going on, having communication on that would have been really useful.

When EA cut support for the game, it was actually really suprising as it sort of happened out of nowhere and it was not particularly expected. The news that the game was going to stop being updated was not expressed very well either, as it was only written at the bottom of their latest article (at the time), and it was not clearly there to see, unless you read all the way to the bottom of the article, you could possibly miss it entirely. This announcement came out of nowhere and most players were shocked to find that it was going to lose support, which is not good at all, as apparently it was planned that BfN would still have years of development to come, and there was some updates and characters that were really close to being fully developed, but did not even end up being implemented, even though they looked or are really close to finished (or finished completely, possibly). The lack of communication did not really help with any of this either.

Another one of my favourite games (Terraria) are made by Re-Logic and Re-Logic had (and still has) great communication with their community. They do State of The Game posts every month, which covers almost everything that is going on the game on every platform, the developers communicate on a number of platforms (such as Twitter and the official game forums, for example), they answer questions that the community asks (mostly through Q&As) and much more. Even then, their game (Terraria) has stopped getting major updates over a year ago. I made a post on this quite a while back now (https://answers.ea.com/t5/General-Discussion/An-Insight-to-Another-Set-of-Developers/m-p/9462189#M26...). For BfN, the communication was borderline the exact opposite, where we got basically no communication, which started a short while after the game was released.

In a potential future shooter, I would really like to see improved communication between the developers and the community. The thing that probably harmed BfN the most was the lack of communication. If there were issues with the game but we had notice on it, the game could have probably turned out better. Communication is always important when developing games as the community wants to be kept in the loop with what is going on. If the developers communicated with their community well and allowed for constructive feedback, overall, that will make a more positive community and a better game overall. 

In Conclusion

Communication is always important through games. In a potential future shooter, communication is one of the main things that need to be addressed. BfN did really suffer with its major decline of communication throughout the game's abnormally short life cycle, and the lack of communication is what basically led to the early downfall of the game. If communication was a lot better in BfN, the game could have potentially been saved. It is exciting to get communication as well since players can get hyped for what is coming to the game. The community really appreciates this communication and it will really help with supporting the PvZ games.

That's everything now!