Communication needs to improve

DBG need to get their communication sorted and fast.

My suggestion here is we get a weekly 1 hr state of the game session that discusses current and upcoming changes with the community. A twitch feed would be fine. Also make sure you answer some player questions in this as well as discussing what you are doing. Player questions live in the last say 10 minutes would be good.

There is alot of frustration from the community at the moment because there is ZERO visibility of whats going on and LOTS of problems affecting players.

Good COMMUNICATION will fix this. You will get alot more support and goodwill from the community if you just learn to COMMUNICATE with your clients.


During KA beta the best communicator amongst all the Devs was Holly if I remember correctly doing the Tradeskill line. All the Devs could learn something from this. The TS section of the beta forums was much more behaved and much less frustrated just because we got regular and good updates and answers to player questions.

The communication between davs and players has been poor at best for the best part of 10 years, why on earth do you think it is going to change now?

They didn't even give us an hour during the live stream showcasing the new expac. I don't think asking them to give us an hour each week is realistic

Not to mention how uncomfortable they seemed when answering the questions that people actually wanted answers to.

Apologies to Domino. It was actually Domino doing the KA beta questline for tradeskillers not Holly. So kudos to Domino for great communication skillz.

I still think part of the communication problem is the reliance on Discord, instead of the official forums, as the primary means of communication between developers and players.

Discord has been used for a very short time frame. Are you saying communication at the forums was adequate before discord and is now is not?

I do think that Discord has improved communication on some things. For example, when one or all servers suddenly crash, people on discord let the devs know and it gets checked on quickly. However, you don't get a state of the game type talk there.

It would be good if someone would consistently update us on what's going on. What is missing is someone who likes interacting with fans and has the job of communicating to the fans as their specific job. This can't be someone who is actually creating things for the game because they already are short handed and that might not be their strength. It was done best (in my opinion) by "Luperza". The frequent twitch chats with developers went well. But I'm sure she organized it all and minimized the time required from the dev. Given that there are much fewer employees now, I doubt they can spare someone from working on the game to organize these things.

There is a difference between being a forum policeman and a communicator to fans. Right now I don't think we have a designated communicator.

I didn't say it was good before Discord, but I shouldn't have to go to a third party site or, worse, have people post here what they say they heard on a third party site in order to get official news from Daybreak.

I thought they weren't using Twitch any longer, and that's what Discord is for.

Forgive me, but the last producer's letter reminds me of this video:



Watch that and then decide what is the future of that business and what is going to be showcase soon...

The upside to Discord is bugs that are pointed out while the devs are active in channel are being fixed a lot faster, which is awesome. But at the same time it highlights just how bad the community team has become. Those same bugs could have been posted on the forums days even weeks prior with no action. There's clearly no one trawling the forums and passing on bug reports to the devs.

im glad someone finally brought up the communication issues, kudos op.

While it's not ideal, discord does have another plus.
It's up and available even when the game & forums logins crash and burn horribly (which has happened way to often in the past). I'm glad we have another more direct means of communicating.

It has many drawbacks of course, being an active chat channel. Information gets lost or only reaches the small number of people who happen to be on there at the time.

I really do miss Lupernza.=( She was so hands on with communicating information to us players.

I couldn't tell if that last producer's letter was a play on a Trump speech, or if that's the level of communication we're going to receive from here on out. Either way - it certainly didn't inspire confidence in me.

"And we are ready to keep on keepin’ on! We are well into our planning for 2017 and have some exciting plans, including a very cool concept for our next expansion that we are running through now. Big plans for Norrath! "

HUGE plans, BIG PLANS and we're going to do stuff and things with cool concepts and you will be amazed! smh.

My favorite part of all of it, are the game update notes that don't list for the players every change that was implemented during that particular patch.

Nobody wants to be held accountable - its all about plausible deniability.

The communication problem is they have no strategic vision or guidance it would seem. They can't communicate when they are unsure what they will do next or if what they already did was worth it. Plus they don't care what we think. They just want the money.

So everyone that plays EQ2 only play during DB office hours do they? If that was true then discord might be slightly useful.

Considering that we have seen the devs at work evenings and weekends consistently, then yeah, its slightly useful.
I checked just now (Saturday, Jan. 14, 2017 at 12:21 pm CST) and saw two developers on discord.

With discord, they can be working, and have the Discord CHAT program open in the background and when something blows up and all of a sudden @("dev") gets many many personal messages, then they assume something serious happened. They check and see what they can do. Otherwise, often when they take a break, they check to see if anything has come up that they can answer or put on a to do list. Sometimes someone comes in and asks for folks to check on something in game, to see if something is still happening or whatever. It is a way to quickly deal with something and then move on.

Some of you seem to be acting like Discord is somehow taking away from the forums. It isn't. It is entirely different. It serves a different function. Like email serves a different function. Both are communication methods, neither replace forums.

Also, I wouldn't call Discord a Twitch replacement unless you think teamspeak, raidcall, and similar programs are twitch replacements.

More on point, what exactly are you asking for? Or is everyone wanting different things?

• I would like a producer's letter that gives more details on the state of the company and what is planned going forward.
• I would like for whoever is the communication person (Roshen?) to give us more frequent updates on things, organize more twitch or twitch replacement chats, and have a posted schedule at the top of the forums stating when we can expect things to be communicated. What we are lacking at the moment is consistency and in some cases substance.

I agree that the producer's letter we got was lacking in content. Why was it lacking? Was it due to lack of time to write something up? Was it due to not being allowed to say more? Sometimes things are controlled by PR departments that don't allow you to say anything. I don't know why. I'm just trying to think why. I didn't like the previous producers letters though. He promised the sun, moon, and stars. The people who knew the program limitations and what was possible probably facepalmed every time he promised things. I'd like something in between. More detail than we got this time and no pie in the sky it will never happen promises.

On the contrary, the communication from players to devs is at an all-time high. I don't see them responding any "less" on the official forums here than they always have (which admittedly could be more often) but since the devs joined discord, theres never been a way (or in any other major MMO I know of) to pose a question directly to a dev and (likely) receive an immediate response.


They do have day jobs, too, and they are also a pretty small crew.


That being said, I would like more heads up and explanations on patch notes and states of the game etc.

The communication by the devs in this game far exceeds pretty much any other MMO out there I have played. Just because they do not respond to you does not mean they are not reading things. I have seen a number of issues fixed that are reported on forums that the thread had got no response. The dev team is much smaller than it was in the past so weekly updates seem a little overboard. Time taken out to respond, or give weekly updates takes away from time fixing or making changes.

An HOUR every WEEK....go lord, you don't work in a corp. environment, I presume.

I would guess that to give players the hour, it would take much more time and effort, involving multiple people, to "produce" the hour. An hour that would essentially give no benefit.

Does communication need to increase, sure, that isn't news. Could we use a more "thoughtful" Producer's Letter, yep, agree there too. However, asking a team with ever diminishing resources to devote time and energy into some implementation of "State of the Union" every week would simply be fraud, waste and abuse of current resources.