Developer To Player Communication


(TepidJesus) #1

Buckle In Folks This Is Going To Be A Long One

Ever since I started playing Dirty Bomb back in mid-2015 I have really loved the way the developers interact with the community and I feel that that @stayfreshshoe and the rest of the Dev team are properly down to earth genuinely nice people, and it is not them that should change it is the way they communicate with the community as a whole .

When the Dev videos first started coming out I really liked them, I thought they were a good way to communicate large events or significant updates with the community, and I still do, but now as I have sunk well over 600 hours into the game I feel that the videos, for the amount of work I’m sure they are to produce, don’t provide enough actual information to the people that really want it, which is the people of the forums. This is the main area feel the Devs could improve on.

A game that I feel has Developer to Community communication pretty well sussed would be Rust. They have very consistently put out weekly Dev blogs, which contain all the information that the forums crave for, and I feel something like a Dev blog for DB would do the same thing to our community. These blogs provide plenty of information for the forums to discuss over the week until the next blog, as well as screenshots of something that the Devs are working on, I’m not asking for any trade secrets of Splash Damage, but these screenshots of unreleased in-game assets and pre-production drawings, provide the perfect items for the forums to decipher and talk about. Another thing that the Devs of Rust do really well, is the tell the community exactly what they are working on, but for a Dev team like SD which is considerably larger than the one for Rust, that would be a bit difficult, but even something as broad as listing the different departments of the DB Dev team, saying “Most of the Map Design team are working on revamping dome i.e new textures e.t.c” or Paul Wedgwood (CEO Of SD) “is busy flying in a $18m helicopter”.

It is things like this that would do wonders for the community, because the people that really want info on what is happening behind the scenes are the people right here on the forums, and would rather have an averagely laid out Dev Blog bursting at the seems with info on what is happening, than a well polished Dev video that only seems to drip feed us tiny amounts of info on stuff that the forums has probably already picked up on.

This is just my (Very Long) opinion, this is merely what I think, but I think I voice what the community wants pretty well.

  • TepidJesus

(TheStrangerous) #2

What a misleading title, or was it just me, after experiencing so much rant vids on DB? :wink:

Sure, a smaller game company usually is more prone to better communication (Yeah I know garbage like Digital Homicide and other asset flippers [their birds] kind of devs).


(AlbinMatt) #3

@TheStrangerous said:
What a misleading title, or was it just me, after experiencing so much rant vids on DB? :wink:

Sure, a smaller game company usually is more prone to better communication (Yeah I know garbage like Digital Homicide and other asset flippers [their birds] kind of devs).

Ah yes, DigiHom and the meme that is their lawsuit.


(Chris Mullins) #4

You are right and I 100% agree with you. The main issue at the moment is that we’re currently in a transition period which makes things a little trickier to communicate. At the start of the year we had a lot to do when we took the game back from Nexon. Now the dust has settled on that, we’ve been adding a ton of new devs to the team. This is awesome, but also means that our production schedules need some time to acclimatise while we get those new devs up to speed and our work flows improved.

There is a huge difference between keeping you guys in the loop on what’s being developed and teasing upcoming content which will be released in the next couple of updates, and we need to and want to get better at both of these.


(hawkeyeguy99) #5

This whole post sums up my feelings the last few months perfectly. Wow. Thanks for posting. And thanks for responding Shoe! Sorry I’ve been so bitchy lately lol