I find your lack of communications disturbing
Hey Guys! We are here, but where are you? What are you working on? This community is waiting for the news with holding their breath. News? Announcements? Anything! Believe me, we are interested...
Forum Discussion
It doesn't take long - maybe an hour or two - to type up a summary of where CG is on concerns currently expressed on the forum. CG has a full-time employee that is supposed to manage communications with the community - which is to say, CG's customers. If you're paying that person for 40 hours of work, spending 1-2 per week putting up a post on Friday mornings (or end of day Monday) isn't much. Then there could be something that takes maybe a half-hour, maybe less, that follows up in the case of some misunderstanding or other need for quicker feedback than waiting a week.
Now, obviously the community manager also has to spend time speaking to other people at CG or they would have no info to report, so some of that work isn't going to be visible to the community, but organizing some devs to show up for a Q&A doesn't take a month of effort. Also, they have forum mods here that read a lot of the content present, so the paid employees at CG don't have to read all day just to catch up with the issues: things are sorted and important threads or comments are already brought to their attention by mods (as evidenced by, e.g., Kyno stating he will ask people at CG about something or other).
And it might be that if they try this once-a-week comment on the forum, not a big thing, just "we've heard you on X" or "no update yet on y" or "that's going to require dev input from someone who's currently on vacation, so you won't hear anything until date z", that it won't even require as much time as I've suggested once they're in the rhythm of it.
Seriously. This forum was created for customers to provide feedback to CG and for CG to get info out to customers. Most of the chat here doesn't need any input from CG. Even if someone hates the GA$ art, that doesn't require a CG response. People are always suggesting new toons or asking for strategy advice and the other players will chime in (usually helpfully) and there's no need to address any of that either.
Once a week providing a couple sentences each on a few ongoing concerns would go a long way to alleviate a lot of community frustration and distrust. Maybe that same comment could even include a link to the dev tracker and a standard copy/paste statement that they don't comment on the status of bug fixes because that's what the dev tracker already does. That would make it easier for newbies to find the dev tracker and the info they're looking for since most people showing up here wouldn't have any idea that it exists or where to find it. And after you write the link for the first of those weekly updates, you don't even have to write that bit ever again - it takes all of 12 seconds to find the last weekly update and cut and paste, and they're probably going to want to have the last weekly update in front of them anyway just to make sure that they don't forget to provide an update on anything that's important but unfinished.
Really, it's a couple hours work the first couple times, and after that it's hard to see how it takes even an hour. Why can't we have something like that?
Now, obviously the community manager also has to spend time speaking to other people at CG or they would have no info to report, so some of that work isn't going to be visible to the community, but organizing some devs to show up for a Q&A doesn't take a month of effort. Also, they have forum mods here that read a lot of the content present, so the paid employees at CG don't have to read all day just to catch up with the issues: things are sorted and important threads or comments are already brought to their attention by mods (as evidenced by, e.g., Kyno stating he will ask people at CG about something or other).
And it might be that if they try this once-a-week comment on the forum, not a big thing, just "we've heard you on X" or "no update yet on y" or "that's going to require dev input from someone who's currently on vacation, so you won't hear anything until date z", that it won't even require as much time as I've suggested once they're in the rhythm of it.
Seriously. This forum was created for customers to provide feedback to CG and for CG to get info out to customers. Most of the chat here doesn't need any input from CG. Even if someone hates the GA$ art, that doesn't require a CG response. People are always suggesting new toons or asking for strategy advice and the other players will chime in (usually helpfully) and there's no need to address any of that either.
Once a week providing a couple sentences each on a few ongoing concerns would go a long way to alleviate a lot of community frustration and distrust. Maybe that same comment could even include a link to the dev tracker and a standard copy/paste statement that they don't comment on the status of bug fixes because that's what the dev tracker already does. That would make it easier for newbies to find the dev tracker and the info they're looking for since most people showing up here wouldn't have any idea that it exists or where to find it. And after you write the link for the first of those weekly updates, you don't even have to write that bit ever again - it takes all of 12 seconds to find the last weekly update and cut and paste, and they're probably going to want to have the last weekly update in front of them anyway just to make sure that they don't forget to provide an update on anything that's important but unfinished.
Really, it's a couple hours work the first couple times, and after that it's hard to see how it takes even an hour. Why can't we have something like that?
