Spiral Knights - Secrets Unveiled: Is this something you realize?

Secrets Unveiled: Is this something you realize?

20 replies [Last post]

Fri, 01/03/2014 - 19:35

Vesperaldus

Many of you complain about OOO not explaining themselves on updates and/or changes. If not that, you surely must be one that complains about balance. Or perhaps a lack of content... even delayed content. I'm sure this covers the majority of you, if not all.

But let's peer into the view point of OOO. Let's pretend we are the Devs and have a complaining community such as what it is now.

We (imagining that we are devs) are planning some updates for our game. We're really excited about it and we hope that the community loves it just as much as we do. We're really happy that a lot of people are enthusiastic about it and are anticipating its arrival, but we are a little disheartened by the ones that shoot some negative comments about it. We try to rev people up a bit, try to uplift their spirits and get people more and more excited. The day finally comes are we are able to release the content and the updates. Imagine how anxious we are to see our player base discover the new stuff that awaits them! After all, we are game developers... we make games because we love games. It's our passion, not just a job that serves to bring home the bread.

Then the responses come flooding in. Negative comments, players hating, threats to quit the game. What a killjoy... We try to please our community... we do give them things they ask for when we can (when they don't ruin the visions we have for the game and are noteworthy enough)... but they always have something negative to say. We're down because of this. Each time we get excited about new content, the community dishes out a bigger killjoy than the previous. It makes us a little sad to see our community respond like this... it makes us not as enthusiastic as before. We try to uplift their spirits with goodies they might enjoy, but either it's not enough or it's too much. We've got a lot on our plate. Keeping the community satisfied and occupied while coming up with progressive ideas for the game and tweaking them to perfection isn't a simple task for our small team. But the community doesn't like how we do either of those things... and honestly, it makes us grow weary. I mean we love our game alright, but the people that are supposed to keep us going are only tearing us down. We're growing a bit bitter towards them and pleasing a stubborn community is just a bit too complicated. What are we to do? Well, I guess we could always try to avoid those negatives... But we're losing some of our enthusiasm towards the game and it's community. It's not quite as fun for us as it was before.

Now, back to who we really are. We the community have grown bitter of our Devs. We feel like they aren't listening to us. We all want different things. We all want the Devs to focus on something in particular. We all have our own opinion of what they should prioritize. We all want more than what they are giving us. As the players of this game, we do have the right to have a game we want to play... otherwise we won't play it. Something in us really likes Spiral Knights, otherwise we wouldn't voice our opinions so fervently.. or at all. We want to continue to like Spiral Knights too, that's why we complain when we don't like something about it. But sometimes we see things as a money grab or a lack of effort and that disappoints us... maybe even makes us angry. We're bitter towards OOO and their Spiral Knights' Devs. Individually, we don't have much of an impact... but as a community, we speak volumes. Without realizing it, we are contributing to the problem. And a cycle is made again and again:

Players aren't happy with multiple things -> OOO can't please everyone -> Community complains for a lack of content -> OOO gets disheartened and it shows in the quality of their updates -> Negativity in the community spreads -> OOO grows weary and tries to please the community with a promo -> The community complains because there's too many promos -> OOO comes up with new stuff and tries to uplift the community with anticipation -> The community fires negative comments about the new stuff before and after it is released -> OOO wonders why they are trying to please such a divided audience...
You should get the idea.

The point I'm trying to make is that each side is creating a reaction that continues their own action. This cycle is making it downward spiral for everyone. I'm not sure how many are aware of it, but hopefully I've made some of you aware that weren't previously. Do with this knowledge what you want.

Fri, 01/03/2014 - 19:58

Midnight-Dj

But I think there is something we can agree on:

They have posted way too many big promises in the past and never met the their OWN expectations, not ours.

They fooled us with way too many hoaxes in the past (dihydrogen monoxide confirmed, what?) and backfired, which most of them are unneccessary.

They turned a blind eye on the binding and the RSS update, is it for the better? According to Draycos, binding stops ppl from buying to the end game, so? They are still doing it now days, it is just that now, OOO gets the profit, not the veteran players (which explains why they rage)

They own feeling of sadness is their own personal choice, not ours, they can feel happy if they choose to.(and of course ignore us if they choose to too)

Nothing is perfect, and since I am a harsh critique, I am going to always pick holes on their seemingly perfect (not) work.

This is a F2P game, when the players give you money, then that means you, as the devs, should improve the game for them, it is logical. Why would you pay money for a F2P game unless you want somekind of benefit from it? Even WoW is slowly merging into a F2P game, it is the future.

If I was ever a dev, I would post actively on forum and tell the player what we are up to, and pull out daily polls to see who like and who dislike the changes and update the game accordingly, and if the poll is trying to make the game earn less money, I could always say that sadly this update cannot be done as it threatens XXX part of the player base, or establish a compromise and see what the ppl feels. And also, it doesn't kill anyone to mail all players in game to join the poll, ultimately it is up to them do decide whether or not they want their voice to be heard,

Fri, 01/03/2014 - 20:15

Thunderskull

@Midnight-Dj CONFIRMED FOR THE FUTURE OF ALL

Do not be fooled dihydrogen monoxide is a truth greater than the "eye that does not spiral" can see of course I'll end up being forum banned for posting spoilers... :P

Fri, 01/03/2014 - 21:07

Zopyros-Il

Beep Boop

Negativity is something that all content creators have to deal with one way or another. Whether it be their own negativity eating away at them or from others, content creators need to learn to take the good from their interactions, persevere, and continue to create.
I have no doubt that it is discouraging for OOO to hear certain things from the community, but after two years they should have learned to filter out the useless negativity and focus on the constructive criticism, the positive feedback, and the joy that parts of the community still has with the game.
There's been a veritable gold mine of solid criticisms, good ideas, and unique suggestions from the community. Sure, not everything can be used due to how outlandish they are or their engine restrictions, but look at all the good these people want for the game they've created. Not giving any acknowledgement to them because there are others who would rather spew hate due to inexperience or ignorance is rather ignorant in and of itself.

There's also the factor that OOO is a small team and so don't have the time or personnel to assign to gathering feedback. As unfortunate as that is, it still doesn't justify only checking in on the community once every couple of months and not even comprehensively at that.
What they could do is more simple polls that are easy to tally (we STILL haven't heard back from ANY of that equipment survey, nor seen any effects from it), assign dedicated community leaders to help congregate information and feedback, or get their own GMs to host mini-events where they can get feedback.
There's a dozen and one ways to garner feedback and information from the community. Only making use of one and then never acting on the information gathered from that survey isn't proper communication with the community.

And most importantly of all, OOO is a group of professionals. I sincerely doubt a bunch of gamers badmouthing them is what's stopping content and communication from being established.
It's more likely what they want to do themselves. If they want to cut themselves off from the community and not acknowledge whether they're listening to criticisms and feedback, that's their choice.
But we see how that's turning out, aren't we?
A disgruntled community that feels ignored.
A game that focuses on pulling in new players instead of the ones they've already established.
An arsenal of severely imbalanced weapons and armor.
I don't think OOO is doing things the right way and that they need to change the way they interact with their community, namely by starting to interact with their community.

Fri, 01/03/2014 - 23:48

Hexzyle

Not me, I see the game as what it is: a game. I don't worry about what's coming in the future, who's in the background pulling the strings, or what's happened in the past. We play the game for what it is now.

If you want things to change, that's fine. But don't grovel about it. Preoccupy yourself with things: fanart, playing parts of the game that aren't effected by what you don't like, and even other games. You being upset isn't going to make anything come any faster.

Sat, 01/04/2014 - 01:43

Xtweeterx

Basically everything I think about SK and the complaint side of the community pretty much TL;DR-itized

Sat, 01/04/2014 - 04:19

Thunder-The-Bright

gods ain't gonna help you, son.

when an update hits, there is always someone complaining and someone quitting. the forums aren't the whole community. when big updates hit, complaining posts on the forums are valuable as in-game surveys, not more, not less. they're just a bip on the radar, not something bigger. unless it's an elaborate post saying what's good and what's wrong, that's valuable.

Sat, 01/04/2014 - 08:06

Blazzberry

I have no mouth and I need to scream

Does anyone else wonder if the coworkers of OOO have...disputes?

Sat, 01/04/2014 - 09:27

Skayeth

^Pure Genius

New Theory
I bet none of you guys have thought that the coworkers of OOO has disputes

Let us think this over
Let us pretend we are the devs again. My name is Annil, and I work under Nick. Nick suggests an idea, but I don't like it. I complain to Nick. Nick gets mad. (So let us just pretend he has anger issues.) Nick comes close to firing me. Nick sends idea out. Community gets angry. Nick gets sad. I suggest idea. Nick says my idea won't work. I get mad. Then Boswick comes in. Then all the other devs come in. Updates have been delayed. Many things delayed. The community gets impatient. We finally release a puny update. Community turns into the Hulk. We get sad. Players quit. Our salary gets lowered. We can't food on the table. We die.

Sat, 01/04/2014 - 10:19

Zopyros-Il

Beep Boop

I'll reiterate.
OOO is (supposedly) a group of professionals.
They've worked on other projects and with other people. If they can't work together with their small group, a group that they've worked together with for TWO years, there's clearly another problem.
They're also a smaller group now, seeing as Boswick's and Bifurcate's name is now crossed off of the dev list on the wiki. Smaller groups means a smaller opinion pool, so there really shouldn't be that many disputes.

If disputes are really what's holding back the dev team, that not only speaks very poorly of Nick's abilities as lead designer, but also of his team that can't see eye-to-eye or find a middle ground on their own ideas.

Sat, 01/04/2014 - 10:31

#10

Autofire

You are experiencing a PICNIC ERROR!

Woah woah, so it really is that hard to remove invinciticks off Shard Bombs? Or nerf the Brandishes a tad? Or make Vana a bit more immune to constant blitzing?

While I'm not a dev of this game, I think that it wouldn't be too hard to do. They could just swipe some code from other stuff or something. No, I think who ever is in management of balance likes things sideways.

Sat, 01/04/2014 - 11:04

#11

Zopyros-Il

Boop Beep

@ Autofire

That's one possible reason for there not being any attempts at balance changes. Though, I don't want to think that they're that incompetent when it comes to looking at raw numbers, especially when parts of the community are practically handing them back their own numbers and explaining why things are messed up.

The other reason I'm thinking of is that it's because of the way they coded the weapon stats and engine. Coding is a hard task and there's always bound to be problems with it. Changing one thing in one area of the game can have an adverse effect in a completely different area of the game. If it were simple for OOO to change the numbers on their damage equations, I'd like to think that they would have at least attempted it more than they have.
But then that's speaking bad of their coding skills. Being unable to change very minor numbers because of the way you wrote the engine is pretty... amateurish.

Still, either one could be what's possibly going on. It's not like OOO has said anything about why they don't balance things so all we have to work off of is the assumption of that they either just don't care, don't know, or just can't.

Sat, 01/04/2014 - 11:03

#12

Vesperaldus

We don't know their full

We don't know their full perspective, and I've said before that we can't possibly know what goes on in their office and meeting rooms. We can assume that our complaining does add stress to the load they already have. Is it so hard to fix this minor problem here or there? Maybe not, but those minor problems add up. They can't do them all to satisfy all. Especially if those aren't the big picture or their priorities.

Sat, 01/04/2014 - 11:24

#13

Zopyros-Il

Bep Bop

You'd think they could at least fix the ones that break the game. The fact that you can still get stuck in FSC with those statues is kind of ridiculous, especially now that we have a gate that stops movable items from passing it.
The GMs have to be the most patient souls to be able to put up with that one bug for two years.

What OOO should have done over the course of these two years is to slowly work on those bugs and problems in smaller patches. They've had a LONG time to work on them with multiple people telling them that something is wrong here and there.
Instead, they work on huge glamorous updates and rarely fix the little things, letting those little things become a tremendous pile of not so little things.
In my opinion, they need to work on that pile as soon as they get done the Arcade redux. It's been growing for far too long and makes the overall game more unsightly because of it.

The "big picture" of their game shouldn't override the need for quality control and bug maintenance. Delivering a rich experience should be foremost in their mind and their work. If their game is riddled with bugs, imbalances, inexplicable lazy art, and a huge portion of the community that can only be described as grumpy, they're more or less failing on part of their job as game creators.

Sat, 01/04/2014 - 12:14

#14

Thegreatpiggy

Well then......

Throughout the world of this corrupted wasteland, where to the haters roam, there are to others, who may make a stand, and fight for the game, fight for the creators, for the people, for the order. Though, one could justify, the actions of one such a company, one cannot do it alone, and only does it as united. Why look at the things that have bothered us of only one? While some glitches may remain intact, they don't truly shine in everyday life, for everyone, everyday. Appreciate it, the Game, for all through it has come. May it rest silently, or in a fierce battle of, hate, it shall stand through, for others who enjoy it, and its afterlife will fill memories of them.

Sat, 01/04/2014 - 15:15

#15

Klipik-Forum

This has to be one of the only threads on the entire forums with an actual legitimate discussion about something.

Sadly, it's impossible to reach any sort of conclusion from this particular discussion and no one's saying anything that we haven't heard at least ten times before.

Sat, 01/04/2014 - 21:05

#16

Vesperaldus

I think it would be more

I think it would be more helpful if we tried to sympathize with OOO rather than antagonizing them at every chance.

Sat, 01/04/2014 - 21:51

#17

Zaffy-Laffy

I sympathize with OOO, heck I sympathize with all game developers out there. The point is, there's a difference between how we point out negative issues about the game, and how we just curse at OOO because they didn't give what we wanted.

Bugs, unbalanced gear that forces players to use the same weapons, these are negative issues of the game that has yet to be resolved. No free energy, no free stuff, grinchlin assault too hard, game too easy with FSC farming, heck, these are the type of nonsense that OOO shouldn't be receiving, but yet these are the type of stuff that gets addressed anyway because more people complain about these stuff than the actual negative issues in the game.

I would like to see the gunner update, but I'm a little skeptical because OOO hasn't told us anything yet.

Sat, 01/04/2014 - 22:00

#18

Zopyros-Il

Beep Boop

Sympathy would require us to know if there were anything wrong. Something that's holding them back, stressing them out, or is detrimental to their progress.

If you want to be sympathetic for OOO because parts of the community are being mean or critical of SK, please keep in mind why a lot of them are disgruntled in the first place. OOO barely tries to communicate with the community in any meaningful way, practically disregard any feedback given them (especially feedback given during their own betas), and hasn't focused on building their end-game in far too long among quite a few other things.

Also, asking for sympathy also doesn't help solve any problems in the game anymore than being antagonistic or critical of OOO does. Frankly, it solves less.
Antagonism can often be lead to getting banned.
Criticism may sound harsh, but often aims to help.
Sympathy can cause complacency and may not even be proper motivation for them.

But whatever floats your boat and spins your snipe. You can be sympathetic if you want. I'll continue to be critical of practically every game I play and SK is no exception.

Mon, 01/06/2014 - 13:34

#19

Krazzyhapps

I dont mind much about the game. Keyword much

Only thing i get annoyed about are the Alchemy Orbs. But other than that i have no problems. I dont wanna see the game die. Dont want the game to lose its player base. Yes people will get made about this and that. But they cant please everyone.

Mon, 01/06/2014 - 13:36

#20

Skayeth

You know

You know one time someone said that one day OOO will put a 60$ retail price on SK. Go figure. That nostalgia is coming back once again.

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Secrets Unveiled: Is this something you realize?