@KlariskraysNHL wrote:@smugxb"Instead of hiding in the corner with your ball, your team should be engaged with the community as well as providing gameplay updates that are sorely needed. All you are doing is pissing off your customers. You are losing trust, not only because of the lack of any sort of meaningful updates, but also because of features (specifically around presentation) that were promised and never delivered."
You see we actually had that until people on these forums attacked the devs because the explanation wasn't what they wanted to hear. The higher ups probably put an end to direct communication and for good reason as things they could say might make them liable or whatever. The FIFA team doesn't bother replying on forums or other places to people.
Amazon Games recently is shifting away from forums and instead making a discord server. This supposedly allows them to have better communication but in reality it just allows for topics to get swept by faster because no real conversation can be read. If people want to act up there it's much easier to just ban people without worry because it isn't on their stuff.
@KlariskraysNHL, with all due respect, I get that, and I do remember when there was more interaction here. However, just because people acted out in egregious ways shouldn't mean that they should just pack up shop and go home. That's why they have forum moderators. You are always going to have people say crazy things online, and some people just like to cause trouble. Unfortunately, that is life in today's age of anonymity on the internet. That should not prevent interaction between the customer and the devs/pm about the direction of the game.
I don't think comparing this forum to another EA forum is appropriate. It seems these teams share similar mindsets when it comes to interacting with the community. So again, just because some trolls came in should not necessitate that all communication on these forums cease to exist. That is just an excuse to not interact.
I'm also not discounting @EA_Aljo and what other mods have done here trying to communicate, but in reality, they are just providing lip service and no real answers. Again, this is a business, not a popularity contest. Put your big boy pants on and face the customers who you are selling your product to.
Community ManagerI agree that our communication can be better. It's also something that not only I am aware of so hopefully, we'll see this improve with future games. However, I'm not sure that we'll see the devs posting here again. Their participation here was something they did outside of their normal duties of creating the game. Often, in off hours. Ben would spend a huge amount of his personal time responding here and going very in depth with game mechanics, but was also regularly told he was wrong. I definitely understand when there are going to be disagreements. That's fine, but the way some people responded just made it feel like all the time and effort they put in just wasn't worth the backlash. Yes, today's age of anonymity means this is going to happen, but that doesn't mean it's ok to be rude to someone trying to be helpful and giving very detailed answers on game mechanics.
I'm more inclined to respond to those with constructive posts. If someone is doing a lot of trash talk, but keeping within the rules, their chances of being taken seriously, having their feedback noted and getting a response are significantly reduced. I look at conversations here as if I were meeting someone in the real world. I'm going to want to engage with someone if they're being cool. Just having a good conversation about a shared interest. If they're complaining, at least it's constructive. Engaging with someone throwing out insults is just rewarding bad behavior. That and they usually don't have anything constructive to say. Constructive feedback is input we can actually use. As opposed to comments like, fix your game or your game sucks, you don't know anything about hockey, etc. I'd rather focus on the ones that actually care enough about improving this game through quality feedback.
I wonder if there could be a sweet-spot between no developer interaction and what Ben used to provide that would mostly satisfy the community. I can understand devs not wanting to come here and engage in back-and-forth interactions outside of their day job ( especially if the interactions are toxic ), but I wonder how they'd feel about the occasional blog-like post with an in-depth breakdown of a game mechanic that the community is concerned about or just doesn't have a firm understanding of how it works.
Something like that might scratch the community's itch without forcing the devs to go too far above and beyond.
Community ManagerThis is something I'd love to see happen with the next game.
I'd love to see features from 14 that were taken away and still haven't come back.. i.e stick flex, blade curve, skate blade size. Honestly all the extra customization options are ridiculous. For the grind of opening hockey bags, the items ypu get out of sed hockey bags aren't even worth it, imo. I've actually had fun playing recently, but gameplay still has issues that have been there for while, it's very disappointing that we're still getting punished for even trying to use stick lift. Watch a game, how many times do you see someone lifting their stick to try to get the puck and it's not an automatic penalty? But playing this game it's either a slash or High stick. There needs to be something where we can at least attempt to control our stick so we can use stick lift, and it not be a penalty every time. Thats one of the biggest things that slows game play down.
If 24 is gonna just be another tuner update for 23 (like 23 seemed to be for 22) you might as well just put it on game pass day 1. Let's be honest, EA is still gonna make money off of HUT Packs. But 23 definitely wasn't worth the full retail price, let alone doubling the price for both versions.. that's just kind of a slap in the face to consumers..
@KlariskraysNHL wrote:
@PlayoffErrorThis is the only middle ground we could have but with whoever is in charge of decisions they refuse to let them talk about future additions/changes so it would make it worthless too.
Apex has a nice layout.
https://trello.com/b/ZVrHV38P/apex-tracker
omg - this would be amazing for NHL.
I’ve been saying this for years, so I am going to bring it up again.
It would be nice if these forums had a separate XP that is only given out or removed by the people with an EA badge. When someone has the required XP they can participate in discussions with the dev team or representatives.
Of course, they could also very easily just give @EA_Aljo more information and not have any need for devs to be on here. There are simple solutions to the communication problem, it seems clear to me it’s more so a matter of not wanting the information out there at all.
That’s true, but that’s also related to offline modes and not gameplay. As long as I’ve been playing this game there has never been any insider dialogue or proper reasoning about the workings of an offline feature. At least there has been some dev interaction about gameplay in the past.
If I even remember correctly Ben and Clappy have done Q and A’s on Reddit of all places.
@EA_Aljo wrote:I agree that our communication can be better. It's also something that not only I am aware of so hopefully, we'll see this improve with future games. However, I'm not sure that we'll see the devs posting here again. Their participation here was something they did outside of their normal duties of creating the game. Often, in off hours. Ben would spend a huge amount of his personal time responding here and going very in depth with game mechanics, but was also regularly told he was wrong. I definitely understand when there are going to be disagreements. That's fine, but the way some people responded just made it feel like all the time and effort they put in just wasn't worth the backlash. Yes, today's age of anonymity means this is going to happen, but that doesn't mean it's ok to be rude to someone trying to be helpful and giving very detailed answers on game mechanics.
I'm more inclined to respond to those with constructive posts. If someone is doing a lot of trash talk, but keeping within the rules, their chances of being taken seriously, having their feedback noted and getting a response are significantly reduced. I look at conversations here as if I were meeting someone in the real world. I'm going to want to engage with someone if they're being cool. Just having a good conversation about a shared interest. If they're complaining, at least it's constructive. Engaging with someone throwing out insults is just rewarding bad behavior. That and they usually don't have anything constructive to say. Constructive feedback is input we can actually use. As opposed to comments like, fix your game or your game sucks, you don't know anything about hockey, etc. I'd rather focus on the ones that actually care enough about improving this game through quality feedback.
@EA_Aljo I don't really expect devs to be posting on the forums. If the PM is acting in the interest of the customer, I would expect part of that job would be checking in with the customers, or, providing the community managers with information they can share.
All we seem to get here is a flurry of information before a new game launches, a few cryptic notes on the odd patch, or a bunch of "we are aware" or "we have nothing to share at this point", of which I don't really consider any of this as great interaction with the community.
There are measures to provide info to the community without worrying about trolls. First, a post could be made on a locked thread. Second, blog posts could be written, and locked for comment. Third, a monthly newsletter could be sent out. All of these would mitigate a lot of the issues with open forum posts.
Right now it seems like the team is just creating a game without any interaction with the people they are creating the game for, which is us, the paying customer. This needs drastic improvement, and I really hope this will change going forward.
@smugxb wrote:
@EA_Aljo wrote:I agree that our communication can be better. It's also something that not only I am aware of so hopefully, we'll see this improve with future games. However, I'm not sure that we'll see the devs posting here again. Their participation here was something they did outside of their normal duties of creating the game. Often, in off hours. Ben would spend a huge amount of his personal time responding here and going very in depth with game mechanics, but was also regularly told he was wrong. I definitely understand when there are going to be disagreements. That's fine, but the way some people responded just made it feel like all the time and effort they put in just wasn't worth the backlash. Yes, today's age of anonymity means this is going to happen, but that doesn't mean it's ok to be rude to someone trying to be helpful and giving very detailed answers on game mechanics.
I'm more inclined to respond to those with constructive posts. If someone is doing a lot of trash talk, but keeping within the rules, their chances of being taken seriously, having their feedback noted and getting a response are significantly reduced. I look at conversations here as if I were meeting someone in the real world. I'm going to want to engage with someone if they're being cool. Just having a good conversation about a shared interest. If they're complaining, at least it's constructive. Engaging with someone throwing out insults is just rewarding bad behavior. That and they usually don't have anything constructive to say. Constructive feedback is input we can actually use. As opposed to comments like, fix your game or your game sucks, you don't know anything about hockey, etc. I'd rather focus on the ones that actually care enough about improving this game through quality feedback.
@EA_Aljo I don't really expect devs to be posting on the forums. If the PM is acting in the interest of the customer, I would expect part of that job would be checking in with the customers, or, providing the community managers with information they can share.
All we seem to get here is a flurry of information before a new game launches, a few cryptic notes on the odd patch, or a bunch of "we are aware" or "we have nothing to share at this point", of which I don't really consider any of this as great interaction with the community.
There are measures to provide info to the community without worrying about trolls. First, a post could be made on a locked thread. Second, blog posts could be written, and locked for comment. Third, a monthly newsletter could be sent out. All of these would mitigate a lot of the issues with open forum posts.
Right now it seems like the team is just creating a game without any interaction with the people they are creating the game for, which is us, the paying customer. This needs drastic improvement, and I really hope this will change going forward.
Well said.
It does feel that the most consistent form of communication tends to be from the HUT team regarding HUT specific issues. We all know why that is ($$$$$)
Community ManagerI have been locking new threads that are informative and letting people create their own feedback threads if they want. Going forward, I really hope to see communication improve. It's absolutely on the minds of the team. I've reported this specific feedback many times and it's been acknowledged. We'll have to wait and see what happens though.
What consistent communication are you talking about? The updates regarding new content? When there is an issue though, it's typically not a fix that requires a patch so they are a lot easier to handle in that sense. If the gameplay issues being reported were that easy to address, they most likely would be. Gameplay is an entirely different issue though.
@EA_Aljo wrote:What consistent communication are you talking about? The updates regarding new content? When there is an issue though, it's typically not a fix that requires a patch so they are a lot easier to handle in that sense. If the gameplay issues being reported were that easy to address, they most likely would be. Gameplay is an entirely different issue though.
We used to have gameplay tuner adjustments that didn't require a patch. A small but very vocal minority of players, who don't understand what a META is, successfully convinced EA to stop doing so by way social media faux outrage.
Players not finding success online were convinced it was because "tHe bEtA waS bEttEr" and not because they hadn't simply taken time to learn some of the new nuance that comes with a new release and/or adapted to an evolving META.
Community ManagerIt wasn't just a small, vocal part of the community. There were also complaints that we changed things when we didn't. I'm not saying we'll never go back to having tuners. It's possible that could happen, but we've avoided this for the last couple of years due to the community feedback.
You're absolutely right that a meta develops and that is what causes the complaints that the game was better during the beta/launch. People are gonna believe what they wanna believe though regardless of what the patch notes say. Or don't say, in this case.
@EA_Aljo wrote:It wasn't just a small, vocal part of the community. There were also complaints that we changed things when we didn't. I'm not saying we'll never go back to having tuners. It's possible that could happen, but we've avoided this for the last couple of years due to the community feedback.
You're absolutely right that a meta develops and that is what causes the complaints that the game was better during the beta/launch. People are gonna believe what they wanna believe though regardless of what the patch notes say. Or don't say, in this case.
I believe this is a case of the team not seeing the forest for the trees. The issue was not in the tuner updates. The issue here, and I hate to keep harping on this, is total lack of communication. When you make changes to a game, followed by a minimal amount of information as to what has changed, why it has changed, and how it has impacted the game, will generate a ton of speculation from your community. Leaving people to guess at what has changed causes these speculative posts about those changes, e.g., "my guy is faster now", "my guy is slower now", "it's harder to score", "it's easier to score", "defense is harder", "defense is easier", etc.
This speculation is eventually going to turn into truth from the community, especially when there is a lack of any qualitative rebuttal from the those who make the game. The selective secrecy around this game, and the total blackout of information about features, and how they work, is the main cause of this. It is not because tuners changed. It's unfathomable that in today's day and age, a game that is almost a year old, has received little in terms of gameplay adjustments.
I'll take your word about the team being aware of the communication issue, but actions speak louder than words, so I guess we wait and see.
Community ManagerThat's a fair statement, but we also haven't released anything that really needed further explanation since these updates stopped. Going forward, should these updates resume, I'll do my best to get finer details from the team in regards to gameplay. I know the patch notes previously could be open to interpretation and it would be nice to at least provide more accurate details. Not that it's going to stop the speculation on changes that didn't happen, but at least we'd be getting the correct details to you all.
