Community Resource Council Launching Soon!

I am not always doing what I tell others to do, but a little diplomacy goes a long way.
If you criticize something, you better come up with a possible doable solution.

Nota bene: Community Council feedback is just that. The CC doesn't get to mandate changes. The CC can call things to dev attention, but that doesn't mean things will change. The devs are always going to have to consider the overall development plan and project manager mandates.

Who are you defining as lead devs? I know Gninja for raid stuff and Chrol for heroic/solo zones both tend to be very receptive as long as you provide a reasonable alternative (I can't speak to the other devs because I haven't interacted directly with them as much).

This is a really great idea, as long as the ideas are actually thought, talked, and presented so that we as THE COMMUNITY are heard. Because there are a lot of ideas I have heard and seen people say and discuss and post and to no avail. So maybe, JUST maybe this will be a great start.

Part of discussions like this is the requirement of being clinically impartial for them to work (especially from the Community side), and enough time from community rep disclosure to conversation is given. This ensures enough time for contemplation of the issues at hand and to form a rough mental model of how it would operate in the day to day gameplay.
Definitely hope it's chaired by someone with a very thorough grounding in logical fallacies and such, as that (deliberately or more usually completely by accident) is one of the major factors I've found in solid discussions going off the rails. Can be a hard role to do in 'real time' conversations, but worth its weight in gold to have a good chair at any gathering to keep the people who're concentrating on working through the detail of the content focused on that and not diverting all over the shop (very different frame of reference and cognitive focus).

Absolutely.. Don't forget the extra "better" in there, as they really need to come up with a better possible doable solution (that extra 'better' is the hard part, and needs all the effort to understand resources and risks involved in full detail first).

While I am confident the affore mentioned duo have excellent credentials,
Chrol has only defended the status quotient.
Gninja is generally concerned with addressing real topics, yet more often than not, his hands are just as tied.
Pointing toward an individual to fix anything in EQ2 could be tilting at windmills. It argues against the reason for the CRC in the first place. I would rather get back to how the population of customers has a voice with the service provider.
Be well

There does indeed need to be an advocate for the status quo in any debate that involves change. Change has cost and risk associated with it, so if there isn't a compelling reason to make said change when you take into account the global state of change requirements, then you don't do it. Even if it seems like something that an external group would very much like.

There are many reasons for being unable to direct resource at issues. One being current level of resource available to address all issues and continue progression (without which, the revenue stream would begin to fail, resulting in the collapse of this particular product), which I suspect to be the major source of the bottleneck.
Where a CRC is of value is to attempt to obtain a clearer design phase; in any successful software project (and pretty much most other disciplines), the initial design is where the major time should be spent, so that the implementation phase is performed to a clear spec, and with well understood boundaries. With opening up a well controlled and constructive dialogue via CRC, the proposed upcoming changes and designs are expected to become better understood as to impact. Not a perfect understanding (that is not possible), but clearer than without that extra signal.
This will in turn reduce the probability of oversights that require extra resource to change once live (which is a far more expensive task than addressing them at design phase). That in turn edges up the available resource post go-live to fix longer standing issues, as there is a lesser requirement to address design oversights, so, net gain to everyone.

Individuals were mentioned by player feedback. The explicit text that was given as the mandate of the CRC is to liaise with the development team. This would be driven by DB, but would likely involve many, if not all of the dev team over time, not specific individuals. It's also in the category of "experimentation", so the hypothesis is that to implementing a CRC with a clear responsibility will result in a clearer signal of impact at design phase, allowing refinement and potentially fixes to be made at that time in a more resource effective manner. Without experimenting with that hypothesis, beneficial change will not occur as easily, or in as controlled a fashion.
It's definitely not tilting at windmills, as the 'enemy' (resource bottlenecks and early signals to design phase) is very real.

There are two main ways to convey information at scale. One is with a mass voice (which you seem to be advocating), which is poorly focused and will contain a huge amount of 'noise', along with being largely reactive (it will happen post design and implementation phase once things are live). This won't help improve the development pipeline as it occurs at the wrong time. Attempting to put a scale 'voice' in at an early stage does not work as you're then relying on "the wisdom of crowds", which is usually costly, resource intensive, and signal poor for the kind of requirements needed. It is definitely used once live though, in the form of "incident and problem management", which is a well understood discipline and does have a feedback loop to development.
The other is to have a representative group that are able to convey approximations of impact across various layers of the game (starters, low end game, mid game, high end game, crafting and so on). This allows prospective exploration of concepts at the early stages, with the aim or reducing the scale of later problem management and the required resources for that from the development team.

The CRC is an experiment (based on many successful implementations of similar bodies; I've served on research ethics boards for many years, and they function in a very similar fashion; REBs/RECs do not get to determine direction of research, merely feed back to the researchers on ethical impact while they're in the design phase of their experiments/research plans, so they can be altered sufficiently to prevent forseeable issues). If it doesn't work in this case, then it can be changed or discarded. Without the attempt, then the status quo will persist.
As a bonus, this is an extremely resource efficient experiment, so there will not be a huge impact on the dev teams to implement.
Is it a magic bullet? Nope. Much as though it would be lovely to have one that'd fix everyone's problems overnight, they really don't exist in most cases.
Will it improve the game? Probably, over time.
Will it be noticeable? The problem with having metrics for this is that the user base will be unlikely to see it; people notice things that don't work, and very rarely pay attention when they do (that's just how minds work, and lets us get on with doing things efficiently in absence of problems). If it works well, then you'd have to notice your lack of noticing things, which is difficult to measure.

They ignore feedback in a full beta. Even when it's drawing attention to game-breaking issues, like the scout/mage issues in VoV. The test server is where changes are supposed to be tested and feedback gathered. This isn't taken seriously either. What makes you think that a CRC is going to be even minutely effective when there is no culture of testing and feedback here? How is a CRC supposed to give feedback when everything is theoretical and untested until it goes live anyway? Changes to mechanics are communicated in language deliberately designed to confuse the players. That won't change either and mechanics is where EQ2 has the very vast majority of its problems right now.

This is a waste of time (although admittedly not too much time for the devs), and the only purpose I can see for doing this, is so criticism of changes which ultimately turn out to be unpopular can be deflected from the devs to the CRC as they "approved them".

You'll most likely dismiss what I say as being extremely cynical. But I'm afraid there's a reason for that. It's called history. A leopard doesn't change its spots.

No, it's not an experiment. Many of us have served on prior EQ2 Community Councils in the past. This is just a reconstitution of the CC. Having active players of all playstyles who can provide respectful feedback works.

"__________What does that even mean?"


Er... tyvm for your well written comments. - You certainly master positioning around a missive anyway necessary to support your priority. Full marks there.

However, as always. my points still stand, Selecting (or banning) any one or two individuals alone regarding improving the game experience may not be productive.

You are too smooth of an operator for me to cross blades with. You have the field. Come back with your shield or on it.

Anything you people can do to become better appraised with customer satisfaction is a good thing.

Providing feedback only works if it's listened to and taken seriously. This dev team (apart from a few without the power to change very much) has a very very poor track record on this. Also, as I said before, what will you be giving feedback on? Will you be testing proposed changes? No, of course not, you know as well as I do that doesn't happen here. And ultimately that is what the (barely functional) test server is for. So it'll be feedback on stuff that's theoretical or has already gone live. If changes are made and you don't like them, do you think you'll actually be able to get changes made? You're dreaming if you do.

Good luck to you though.

I believe we have a community manager right? I'm sure it could be up to him to report our ideas gleaned from this forum. I don't really understand this 'new' principle.
Apart from perhaps hiring a free workforce, attracted by a great idea making these lucky ones feel that their words will carry weight.
Either way I find it brilliant, I should ask my workers the same thing, take time, for free, to help me improve my business, thanks to their ideas

This is absolutely news to me. I guess the 1 person I had removed from Discord who wasn't a scam spammer really tipped the scale. If you've been led to believe otherwise, I would reexamine what you've heard.

One point, Kaith is not my name, nor have I ever gone by it. Mayhaps, you mean someone else?

~ Kaitheel

Count me in.

Is this ignoring (which is an exceptional claim, which in the realms of debate and analysis will require exceptional evidence) or is it a prioritisation? Given the scout/mage issue (which did have a significant impact to the player base) was comprised of issues and different behaviours in different areas of a legacy code base, where in an old Kander's Candour episode it was admitted this area is poorly understood currently, I'd anticipate that Occam's Razor would point at this being a case of "We can solve 90+% of the trivial problems that people will have issue with at release and leave this glaring one to think through and try and do right, or we can prioritise this big issue ahead of everything else, maybe not get it right and have to do it again, and still have that 90% of trivial issues there at release".
This is of course speculation, but based on a lot of similar things I've seen occur.

Maybe, maybe not, which is why I class it as an experiment at this point in time. Will it work in current conditions and achieve the desired aims. This is a management issue.
If you don't try to do it, the certainty is that it will not succeed. If you try to do it, there is the potential that it might. There are also partial successes where positive impact happens, but (as I pointed out in my original post) no magic bullet that fixes everything now.

I definitely don't dismiss a word you say. I've been on both sides of the software fence (I'm a bit long in the tooth these days, so I've had plenty of time to seem most aspects involved, including the management chain), and I tend to think of these things (rightly or wrongly, as they're very specific, and I'm only considering in general terms, as that's the limit of where my information has direct accuracy) as issues with frames of reference.
Having long streams of things that aren't fixed, or seen to be being fixed correctly is intensely disheartening when you're at the side of being an end user that has to put up with them. It results in exactly the sentiments that you're expressing (anger, frustration etc.). What would be both miraculous and simultaneously extremely unhealthy would be if there were no outspoken tirades about this.
About the only things we differ on are the precise reasons for why it occurs, and whether the creation of a CRC can be part of a plan to mitigate this. Given the hard information available, we're both working on hypothesis here.
I'm very much in the camp of exploring options where gains can be obtained without major investment of resource, when in conditions where resource is very hard to come by. And making sure that those investments of resource are sustainable (it's easy to mandate a burnout level of work and enforce it; quite a few places do that and achieve minor gains in the short, sometimes medium term. However they usually suffer significant setbacks when the inevitable occurs later and they lose domain knowledge that is difficult, or almost impossible to regain in any sensible time frame).

This does dovetail in with why I marked the CRC as "experimental" in this particular instance (and garnered a response from Sigrdrifa, which I heartily agree with that the general entity itself is not experimental). The concept of a CRC is not experimental. I've seen it work in many fields (and been part of it in many different fields), and I consider it core to getting the design phase right. Where I consider it experimental is its inclusion in the design/development pathway at this point of time, and with the initial body of CRC, and the current management chain inside DB. If this is the wrong time to implement it, or the internal structures and processes surround it are wrong, it will fail. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and a "Fail" with a capital F, it's merely gathering experimental information "What went wrong, why did it fail, from data obtained, what do we need to do to make it work, how do we successfully make those changes without destroying operations etc.)". This is basic science (most of which is slogging endlessly to examine something, which then doesn't behave the way you expect, having repeated failures until you either exhaust all possibilities, meaning you were possibly wrong with the hypothesis, and you've learned a very important piece of information; "Things don't work that way", which is vitally important to future work. Sometimes you do get a "Ahh.. Success, so this is how it works." and you then start improving and refining).

Sounds exciting

I don't believe they were pointing at you even though you were named.

I think what Tanto is driving at is this council will most likely have no influence and very little impact and I will agree with him on his perspective. Here's why I think this is true. Whether we like it or not, this game is floundering badly on so many fronts, it's difficult to pin anything down to start the fix. Do you think the players (mostly paying customers) are really happy with what's taking place in game atm? Or is your assessment that the majority of players are close to the brink of throwing in the towel?
My sense is the latter and it's evidenced by the overall tone of the forums here. Why a council and why now? I think this is some corporate person's attempt to soothe the masses. It's basically going to be a checkmark and then will disappear. Why do I think that? Because we've had one before and it disappeared. Now, with the majority of the player base very unhappy, my sense is it's mostly a PR thing. There are already forums where players vent frustrations about literally every aspect of the game. As Tanto indicated, there are test servers, but they're dysfunctional. Feedback is pretty much ignored and changes to classes, mechanics, etc. are introduced with virtually no testing--and often with disastrous results, denial or players are fed the ludicrous statement "working as intended."
Most of us love this game despite what you might read or think otherwise. The real problem you have at EQ2 is a few people running amok with virtually no supervision or accountability. No where in the real business world would the kind of fundamental mistakes being made be tolerated for long. And I'm tired of hearing "we're understaffed." If you've got the staff to screw it up, then create an environment where you don't throw it out bugged to begin with. Start rewarding, compensating and promoting people who get it right and start moving people out of positions who consistently are getting it wrong. Granted, some of the players in this game could use some counseling in behavior modification. You see it in game, in general chat and even on the forums. I know there are employees and devs working on this game that take a great deal of pride in their work and want to do the right thing.
Unfortunately, with the current environment in place, I really don't see this concept working until there's a compete turnaround in attitudes--on both sides. Sorry for the long winded response. I wish you the best on this idea, but frankly, until both sides of the table have a change in environment, I don't see much chance for success.

fix LoL server bugs or it will die off due to poor mechanics and bugs