Hello Community,
recently there has been some commotion about the news that part of the development team has had a voice chat conversation with a small group of players from the community, namely players who won the World Championship in the past.
This has caused the impression for some players that there is unfair or privileged treatment among players, and that there is a select group that is being favored by us, the developers. I’ll address these concerns and clear up any misconceptions.
First, let me state that the mentioned conversation happened between developers of Envision Entertainment and a group of players only, there were no representatives of EA involved or aware of.
Participants in that voice call were, as developers, @enigm and myself; and on the other side the previous winners of WCS 2015 and WCS 2017 @nuubal , @kOeGy and several others of their fellow players. That call happened around noon of February 27th 2019.
This meeting was initiated by nuubal who invited us. We have had conversations like these in the past with players who approached us directly and we accepted this invitation to connect with players and get insights that were not shared on the forum. This has happened after the WCS 2015 and in the recent past when the post combat lockdown mechanic was subject to exploitation strategies. We have gained some valuable intelligence by this and therefore we acted in good faith.
I want to let the community know that we understand that they take issue with such practice, or rather specifically that this was not disclosed in any way before. I apologize if this is indeed a concern to players. It did not occur to us that there was any more interest in disclosing this any further than in direct messages send to us on the forum.
We have these channels so that players can share their thoughts with us directly and we appreciate it as an effective way to relay information to us in the same way we also appreciate public discussion on the forum.
Regarding the contents of the TeamSpeak conversation mentioned, I can tell the community that the players involved have provided some valuable feedback regarding the changes we made with Patch 19.1, specifically they were able to confirm that there currently is a bug with the distribution of resources. I want to state that we did not approach them specifically for feedback, they invited us to join and listen to them. I think this is a detail that was missed during the previous discussion, we did not pick these players out of the community to specifically give us feedback. We try to involve as many sources as possible for our development efforts.
Another concern that the community voiced was the upcoming World Championship and the timing of this meeting. In hindsight this might come at an unfortunate point in time with the WCS at the horizon. But we did not want to delay further development and wanted feedback quickly.
The only question they asked during the TS conversation was about the WCS was when we would make the official announcement. To this we replied vaguely with a timeframe of “today or tomorrow”. That was the everything that was mentioned in the direction of that topic. We posted the full announcement of the WCS rules on the following day, February 28, for everyone on the forum.
As I said multiple times in the past, we are still open to feedback from any direction and we do want to continue to have different channels open for players to approach us. This will also include voice chats. Those are a quick way to get feedback and are done by various developers across all sorts of games.
We do not favor any player of group of players over another and while we listen everyone’s feedback, we also try to make sure to balance everyone’s viewpoint and maintain a view on the bigger picture.
Currently we are planning more changes to address issues that have been raised about the changes to loot distribution that we introduced recently. At this point I want to restate that we do not rely on single sources or suggestions for feedback and there is simply no point for us in tailoring solutions to a certain group of players.
With this statement we would like to get back to a more constructive discussion on how to work together, as a community, and to improve of the game.
recently there has been some commotion about the news that part of the development team has had a voice chat conversation with a small group of players from the community, namely players who won the World Championship in the past.
This has caused the impression for some players that there is unfair or privileged treatment among players, and that there is a select group that is being favored by us, the developers. I’ll address these concerns and clear up any misconceptions.
First, let me state that the mentioned conversation happened between developers of Envision Entertainment and a group of players only, there were no representatives of EA involved or aware of.
Participants in that voice call were, as developers, @enigm and myself; and on the other side the previous winners of WCS 2015 and WCS 2017 @nuubal , @kOeGy and several others of their fellow players. That call happened around noon of February 27th 2019.
This meeting was initiated by nuubal who invited us. We have had conversations like these in the past with players who approached us directly and we accepted this invitation to connect with players and get insights that were not shared on the forum. This has happened after the WCS 2015 and in the recent past when the post combat lockdown mechanic was subject to exploitation strategies. We have gained some valuable intelligence by this and therefore we acted in good faith.
I want to let the community know that we understand that they take issue with such practice, or rather specifically that this was not disclosed in any way before. I apologize if this is indeed a concern to players. It did not occur to us that there was any more interest in disclosing this any further than in direct messages send to us on the forum.
We have these channels so that players can share their thoughts with us directly and we appreciate it as an effective way to relay information to us in the same way we also appreciate public discussion on the forum.
Regarding the contents of the TeamSpeak conversation mentioned, I can tell the community that the players involved have provided some valuable feedback regarding the changes we made with Patch 19.1, specifically they were able to confirm that there currently is a bug with the distribution of resources. I want to state that we did not approach them specifically for feedback, they invited us to join and listen to them. I think this is a detail that was missed during the previous discussion, we did not pick these players out of the community to specifically give us feedback. We try to involve as many sources as possible for our development efforts.
Another concern that the community voiced was the upcoming World Championship and the timing of this meeting. In hindsight this might come at an unfortunate point in time with the WCS at the horizon. But we did not want to delay further development and wanted feedback quickly.
The only question they asked during the TS conversation was about the WCS was when we would make the official announcement. To this we replied vaguely with a timeframe of “today or tomorrow”. That was the everything that was mentioned in the direction of that topic. We posted the full announcement of the WCS rules on the following day, February 28, for everyone on the forum.
As I said multiple times in the past, we are still open to feedback from any direction and we do want to continue to have different channels open for players to approach us. This will also include voice chats. Those are a quick way to get feedback and are done by various developers across all sorts of games.
We do not favor any player of group of players over another and while we listen everyone’s feedback, we also try to make sure to balance everyone’s viewpoint and maintain a view on the bigger picture.
Currently we are planning more changes to address issues that have been raised about the changes to loot distribution that we introduced recently. At this point I want to restate that we do not rely on single sources or suggestions for feedback and there is simply no point for us in tailoring solutions to a certain group of players.
With this statement we would like to get back to a more constructive discussion on how to work together, as a community, and to improve of the game.
Published 6 years ago
Version 1.0
