Idea for a Community Manager

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by macnlos, Mar 23, 2019.

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  1. Humbert_Humbert

    Humbert_Humbert Avatar

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    Why pay them anything if people are willing to do it for free as volunteers? Seems like a pain trying to figure out what in game items are worth in real dollars and 1099 people for that.
     
  2. Alley Oop

    Alley Oop Bug Hunter Bug Moderator

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    accountability. the same reason bug brigade doesn't have access to jira: we have no legal commtment to the company.
     
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  3. Feeyo

    Feeyo Avatar

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    A lot of mmorpgs out there have respected, trustful players as community managers, forum mods and even in game GM's. Some players love to do this for free.
     
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  4. kaeshiva

    kaeshiva Avatar

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    If we can get past the legislative issues, having someone who actually plays the game giving feedback to Portalarium about the player experience would be of tremendous benefit. A lot of things that look good "on paper" do not translate well into practicality from a player's perspective.
     
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  5. Earl Atogrim von Draken

    Earl Atogrim von Draken Avatar

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    I got an idea:
    What about a real fulltime professional AND paied community manager ^^
    All this ideas are nice and cool and a couple of them ARE really good. Non the less that all can only be addition to a real CM.
     
  6. Humbert_Humbert

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    I was always annoyed by this. Yes the devs log in a run around but none actually seem to play the game.
     
  7. macnlos

    macnlos Avatar

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    Because they don’t have the money for it. Geez, read the OP.
     
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  8. Earl Atogrim von Draken

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    *facepalm*
    I read the OP. I just don't agree with your assesment.
    Your punchline just proofed that a CM from the community is a terrible idea.
    We are, one and all, extremly biased.
     
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  9. Feeyo

    Feeyo Avatar

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    Why would they play the game, they start with 300+ GM skills and are god mode :)

    Also the problem is, if you are a dev and are doing development work on a project. "Playing" your project over and over again is pretty boring and tiring.
    It is very different to how we look at the game.
     
  10. Katu

    Katu Avatar

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    If you can't play your own game, because its boring and tiring, there might be some problems right?
    I get what you are saying, but many aspects of the game would definitely be different if they would seriously start level 1 character and run the main quests and level to atleast 70-80. Add crafting, with aiming to get even one decent item with their character and they would definitely re-order their tickets.

    I don't expect them to play the game everyday and to be super high levels, but if they have not actually ran the main quest, from start to finish recently, I would definitely recommend it. ( They have good idea where to go and when, so it should not take 40 hours and if they are really hurry, they can add some xp, to get to 50-60 lvl)
     
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  11. Feeyo

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    That is _not_ exactly what I said. And also not what I meant to say.

    This I agree, replaying the quests and main quest line should be done many times. And maybe they do, who knows.
     
  12. Katu

    Katu Avatar

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    I'm just now watching Chris stream, where he did the Jack's challenge and the honest questioning he did for the process, is golden. It also made it clear, that he has never done any batch crafting. Glad he did it now, maybe it raised some internal discussion.
     
  13. kaeshiva

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    I think if they got the devs to actually try to make, from scratch, including the level up process, a basic set of twice enchanted/masterworked tier 2 gear with the actual effects they wanted on it, lets say carapacian for a laugh, which is fairly mid-range as far as such things go, and had them fight with the nerfed mining respawns to get enough silver/gold to do it, (not to mention the XP to level it up) - say a week or so of that, 8 hours a day. Then we'd watch them spend over 100 hours hunting cotton bushes to get the amount of beetles it would need to even have a starting point. . Oh, and then they'd have to grow a bunch of cotton as well. Oh and grind more cash for cottonseeds/water or to buy cotton outright. Then spend some time fighting things just for cash to afford the 20-30k in coal/wax you'd need as a starting point.

    Then we could watch them spend 40 hours staring at refining bars to refine the stuff. They'd get to do the 'replace the ingot mold' dance every so often too.

    Then we'd get to the really fun part of watching all the materials you'd spent the last 2 weeks getting be wasted with poor rolls, nonexceptionals (which dont have enough dura to be useful, at all, except possibly the chestpiece). We'd see bad roll after bad roll, as each beetle and ingot you painstakingly got disappear before your eyes. And after all is said and done, you realize you only got 2 pieces even close to how you want them, and those aren't quite right but you're just too frustrated to care. But, the objective is to finish it, so go do it all again and hope you get luckier this time.

    And if you want HIGH end gear? Multiply this dance times 50.

    Honestly, I think the removal of RNG from crafting, the speeding up of refining timers (or making the skills actually do more than they do now...which is precious little/nothing in terms of speed) - these JIRAs should be at TOP of list and absolutely would be if a dev actually went through the pain that players do.

    Mindless farming of materials only to watch them be wasted is not fun, or engaging. It does not add challenge, or difficulty, a crafter in sota is not measured by their skill but by their tolerance for tedium.

    And its not just crafting. I'd love a dev to actually try and farm a specific item with the laughable drop rates they put in. Seriously. They have to fight this creature until it drops. After 40-50 hours of killing something and not getting it, perhaps they'd revise this nonsense.

    My point is its not just the quest system. Artificial obstacles (such as pointlessly long gather/refine timers, bad respawn rates, etc) force the player to spend a lot of time 'just standing around'. Waiting for the ore/mob/whatever to respawn. Standing around is not engaging gameplay.

    The new player experience has gotten better, the early outskirts scenes etc. are good at keeping the player reasonably engaged / doing stuff. But once you actually sit down and want to do something other than 'fight random stuff' you start running into a lot of problems and its no surprise that, when faced with the daunting prospect of trying to craft one's own gear or acquire a particular item needing hundreds of hours of enforced tedium to achieve, that people get bored. Anyone would get bored. This is bad. I think the only reason I've lasted as long as I have is that I made a second account to deal with the refining tedium at least.

    So yes. Please. Lets get someone who actually views the game as a player to bring a dose of reality to the team. It would absolutely be worth every penny. I'm not talking about someone who logs in and runs around in godmode or who fiddles with the game for a few hours a week and says "everything is fine." I mean seriously approach the game as if you were playing it day in and day out. Hire someone who has no previous experience with the game and see what touchpoints they get stuck at, what systems confuse them, and where they get frustrated/bail. You can't test this stuff by spawning a bunch of materials and crafting a few items and saying yeah its working. You have to sweat for those items in the game so you need to add that aspect to the testing so the true impact of how bad it is can actually be felt.
     
    Last edited: Mar 28, 2019
  14. jiirc

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    He’s said over and over and over again that he doesn’t craft, he’s not responsible for crafting, and doesn’t want to craft. If he wants an item, he just finds it, dups it, and he’s done. He has n3ver claimed to be a crafter not eants to be one, so he lets bus do his thing. Unfortunately blues is on the critical path for many different things and the lowest priority is usually crafting. So I doubt that even he does much.

    Did the little bit he did raise discussion, maybe. But some things he wants to change includes design changes and may not be the easiest to implement quickly, ie lets make wood pulp batchable. Do they make all production recipes batchable? That may not be that easy to implement ‘right now’. Do they move wood pulp to refining? Maybe but does that cause other problems with their definition of what are refining versus production? And will it change minds, especially Darkstarr’s and Bzus’s opinions. Or even Richard’s opinion.
     
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