if i was to voice my first thought after reading this.
It would be that i think the entire dev community should come out and just do a QA live one night.
we don't hear from you guys enough in my opinion and if you want us to pull together, it would just be nice to see that from the devs, even when not in a bad spot.
just looking for more communication with the base.
Intrepid born and raised
IGname : Dust
I would be down to host such a thing... like a livestream with staff on Discord or something. I think it'd be too difficult to get everyone together at the same time though.Originally Posted by dust906
I actually used to irritate the devs about that very thing quite a lot back when i was on-staff, even trying to organize something with less pressure (like a Newsletter) to augment the Year-End-Updates.
But in retrospect, i came to realize not only how impractical it was but also how unnecessary.
Reason being: Most, if not all, of the entire current Dev Team is readily available for questions 24/7 in IRC & Discord, as well as on these forums.
----
Bingo ^ , therein lies the main hurdle. RL time management.
We all have to remember that these are not paid SOE employees required by corporate to do 'Stratics live chats' periodically for PR. These are noble volunteers, working in their spare time. And 99% of that spare time is typically spent coding & testing.
Letting them work in peace seems to indeed be the best method for consistant progress.
Last edited by nee2earth; 12-17-2018 at 05:06 AM. Reason: Stratics link
I'm generally supportive of open communication between staff and community.
We have a number of challenges on the Q&A front:
- Trolls
- We're all volunteers and on five different timezones world-wide.
- All of us have day jobs so scheduling is tough (yes some work on the weekends)
- Currently there is very little to discuss, we're very clear on our goal and it's set in stone.
- Managing Q&A is stressful, and in this context most Q's will be off topic because of our clear milestone.
- People who's Q's don't get addressed feel like we're not listening or being defensive.
- We often make a lot of technical decisions but we make very few if any design decisions because we're trying to emulate a point in time, not fix it (yet).
- Given 1 hour to code vs 1 hour of Q&A which would you really rather our devs spend time on?
- See #1
One of my concerns is that the people on the forums are not the bulk of people in the game.
Lots of people in the game, login, play, have fun, logout, live their lives, come back again later.
Only a small percent actually make it the forums. And we also have a lot of people in the forums who never play the game.
This imbalance makes communication here biased in a way that is not easy to correct for.
All this said as you may have noticed I've been trying to carve out more time for the community. All of us on staff know its important, however it is incredibly time consuming and challenging.
Perhaps we could start with the community voting on a couple questions (NOT IN THIS THREAD) and we can try to have a thoughtful answer to the top couple of questions on a weekly basis.
(P.S. If you try to get Q&A questions started on this tread I'll ask the mods to delete your post)
LordKator
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This is 100% accurate.
That'd be a great new thing that should only take a few minutes of your time each week. =D
SOE devs told us the same thing back in the day. Quiet people are happy people.
Regardless, I don't know what good a QA session would do. If people want to ask questions, the staff here does answer. The tone of some of those answers may sometimes be an issue, but that's entirely different than them not being available to us to talk to.
What if we had list of questions sent to you in advance and mobyus could do a podcast of some sort on his stream or youtube video.
That's true, it does seem that individuals whom are more 'vocal' on the forum don't make up the entirety of the population playing/testing on SWGEmu servers... Even though there's a requirement to read forum threads before proceeding, someone can create an account and not even use the forums before logging in.
I think account creation/management systems definitely need a revamp since cRush initially wrote them, but of course just more work to detract from the end goal of a 14.1 SWG emulation. I know it's a lot to consider in all points fully, but Bas has been up for many years now, but it's kind of a decision on revamping registration processes to make things more uniform/concise with the user experience, or focus all efforts into making 1.0. Perhaps some sort of systems could be brainstormed on how to keep players more engaged with the forums and ask for their opinions on things. I feel like there's some kind of correlation between players that are swayed away from wanting to playtest on SWGEmu servers and what could be done about account management, such as further systems to help prevent multiple accounts, but that's another issue for another time.
I do want to say I appreciate all the outside answers you and other SWGEmu team members give on a constant basis about advanced questions on what you all have learned, such as compiling opinions. I think a rift between dev/team members of a project and a community, in a scope similar to what SWGEmu does is detrimental to the project as a whole, but of course you can only do so much for a community on what each member has on their plate inside and outside of SWG-related matters.
I feel that a weekly basis Q&A could be ideal, but maybe make it monthly instead, and pick & chose a few questions a team member could issue a response to in a monthly update based off questions submitted/screened due to time restraints (instead of weekly as suggested.)
This ^^^^^ sounds like a great idea, at least to me it does. One team member a month (weekly seems like alot of work) interviewed by Mobyus (if hes willing and can coord times) or just self videoed by the team member answering several community posted questions they want to address. Maybe have a question thread dedicated strictly to this process. It would cover several bases at once, i.e. allowing us to get to know the team (and vice versa), using community posted questions (Emu or otherwise), posting the session in a dedicated thread for the interviews/sessions (no additional comments for the thread).
Something like this doesnt seem like it would be taking alot of time away from the proj and the time it does take away I think is worth it. The interview/video could be scheduled in advanced, it doesnt have to be coordinated with several ppl at one time and the team member answering the questions can take as long as they like. Maybe every so often Mobyus could do the interview like thing for an extended session...idk, but i do like the idea of getting the know the team better and not just concerning the Emu, but other things that goes on in their lives as well. Maybe a tester could have an interview some time to turn the tables a bit. Nothing wrong with that either and lets the community AND the team get to know each other a little better as well.
I know not everyone uses the forums, just throw out a system wide msg, email or maybe even a statement linked to the launcher stating when the next vid will be posted. Then at least everyone has the opportunity to look if they so desire. I bet if more ppl knew what the forums were for, more ppl would come look.
:::steps down from mic and podium, deposits two cents in piggybank on side of stage and slowly moves away keeping an eye on the crowd:::
Cheers!
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