DayZ Dev team communication with the community

[Yuval 221]

I think its time to give them a good word for that no?

I mean look at this:

They totally deserve it and I wish they keep it going.

Edited October 22, 2015 by StanleyWasHappy

[stinkenheim 249]

I've always been pleased with the amount of information the Devs share with us, but I will admit the last week or so has been phenomenal. The Q+A session with Hicks at the weekend through to constant videos and muses in the dev tracker has been fantastic.

 

Cheers to you guys.

[BCBasher 2465]

Was nice to see them talking on their own forum for a change, I don't understand twitter or redit nor do I want to.

 

Thank you none the less. 

[Mookie (original) 799]

At the risk of being flamed, I'm not so happy about it lately. Two points:

 

Things happen that can't be avoided/are simply not BI's fault - like the stash wipe last month, or the DDOS attacks. But I do think players could have been better communicated with these cases. With the DDOS attacks, for example, hard information about whether it was safe to login was, to say the least, sparse. No one expects hour by hour updates when the team is working to fix the problem in the first place, but very large chunks of time went by. At one point we were told (again via Twitter) that it was good to go. It wasn't.

 

The dev comms tend to involve new funky features - "x is coming", "y is on the way!", etc, etc, helping us all to live in hope. But in the main, they are not great at talking about issues that really affect how the game is played. It's the opposite of a big deal, but case in point, there were several glitches or features of 0.58 that were not in the patch notes and we had to find out through trial and error.

 

It's been said here before (not by me), but there is sometimes a real sense that the devs do not care much, if at all, for the time that players sink into the game. That time represents how much we enjoy DayZ because it has so much potential. Perhaps things are improving on the comms front - I hope so.

[q.S Sachiel 470]

I see a purple from time to time, but I'm not sure of their position/status.  I think they may be of the Euro team.  That said, just as happy to talk to you guys (or any purples! :)) but indeed Hicks and the rest of the dev/com crew have been quite absent from the forums, established as a means of community engagement between community and the devs.  So, indeed not a whole lot of direct communication.  You could argue that Hicks and co don't have a community liason portfolio, yes, but then why engage in so much drip-feed social media marketing?  Can't play both sides of the fence.  It is a risky walk to play though, because I'd prefer not to see a giant hypetrain / marketing team built up ala EA, but I'm sure a reasonable peer to peer communication is not out of the realms/finances of BI, even if it's just a quick scan through some of the stickies / boards 1ce a week for an hour or so.

 

Maybe BI has a contract with twitter?  Probably more likely that tugging on the social media string gives them a better opportunity of broader potential customer engagement so they stick just to that, although I'll never use twitter and rarely FB for anything other than contacting foreign cousins, and i'm 25.  If it is a case of 'being heard' rather than informing, then BI should consider a better cross-platform strategy that targets internet, reddit, twitter and the much larger and interconnected FB.  I'd be interested what BI's communication on the steam forums is like.  I'm guessing (ignorantly) close to zero.

 

I'd side with you Mookie for the most part.  I've seen evidence of developer companies that are very engaged in their community.  They've put out some great games too (like Unknown worlds : NS2). Despite the 'x is out , y is coming' releases being informative and exciting/proof of investment worth, they do ultimately feel like a marketing drop, and greater communication with customers/potentials at their level would definitely be more welcome here (and may even quench the hungry thirst of some to tear the place down with 'where's my xyz' or 'when are we going to see abc damnit?' threads.