Quote Originally Posted by dust906 View Post
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.
I'm generally supportive of open communication between staff and community.

We have a number of challenges on the Q&A front:
  1. Trolls
  2. We're all volunteers and on five different timezones world-wide.
  3. All of us have day jobs so scheduling is tough (yes some work on the weekends)
  4. Currently there is very little to discuss, we're very clear on our goal and it's set in stone.
  5. Managing Q&A is stressful, and in this context most Q's will be off topic because of our clear milestone.
  6. People who's Q's don't get addressed feel like we're not listening or being defensive.
  7. 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).
  8. Given 1 hour to code vs 1 hour of Q&A which would you really rather our devs spend time on?
  9. 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)