132 replies to this topic

[Adamski]

Please stop doing Town Halls.

They are an incredible waste of time.

Please DO go back to doing ASK THE DEVS, with community sourced questions.

All the Town halls seem to do is waste 3 hours with Russ, and inflate NGNG viewer numbers.

All of the information that is provided could be better communicated through some Press Releases, or Announcements. And the questions could be better asked and answered in more detail with more authority / sincerity when they are known in advance and can be properly researched then given a detailed answer.

Seriously, Russ, please stop wasting everyones time as well as your own doing these overly long Town Hall sessions that have next to no structure and almost never address community concerns.

[SkyHammyr]

The Dev VLOGs were nice, too.

[cazidin]

I really think that they should just include every announced feature in the roadmap instead and listen to the players for what they'd like in the next patch, it'll take them a month to implement any request changes regardless unless it's an emergency - and such a fix can be done via hotfix.

[Felbombling]

Agreed. It is painful listening to Russ answer the same questions over and over again. I like the NgNg guys, but they have zero memory when it comes to what was asked last month, two months ago, etc. What burns me is that you can read chat and see some really useful questions get asked, and they somehow manage to skip over all of them. "Hey, Russ, any word on decals?"

[FupDup]

It's not about Town Halls being bad as a concept, it's that they are being used poorly.

The good/hard questions rarely get addressed, it's mostly a mech pack announcement party. Handpicked, generic questions get boring real fast.

[Kaveli]

I have to agree the only time I look at the town halls is to skim for revealed art work for new mechs . It's a terrible experience skimming through the 3 hour long chat session. Last time I listened to the chat ngng asked you a bunch of questions that were pretty much dodged anway.

A Dev vlog where we see behind the scenes work or just prerecorded press releases would be great. I've never seen 3 hour long shoot the **** sessions with developers before.

[Mister Blastman]

Not wasting my time--I don't go!

I feel like they are a low-pressure, low motivation sales pitch and nothing more.

[Kaveli]

And can we not call the same two people interviewing you a town hall? That's not a town hall.

[JediPanther]

I long ago stooped paying any attention to town halls. They can be summed up as this: "yak yak yak buy new mech pack yak yak yak..."

It only needs to be a thirty second video of some art and buy new mech on date xx at xx price. How I miss the old media section and the awesome videos they had for hero mechs in action using their stock load out instead of the wall of text bs they do now.

[Nightshade24]

Adamski, on 30 April 2016 - 06:52 PM, said:

Please stop doing Town Halls.

They are an incredible waste of time.

Please DO go back to doing ASK THE DEVS, with community sourced questions.

All the Town halls seem to do is waste 3 hours with Russ, and inflate NGNG viewer numbers.

All of the information that is provided could be better communicated through some Press Releases, or Announcements. And the questions could be better asked and answered in more detail with more authority / sincerity when they are known in advance and can be properly researched then given a detailed answer.

Seriously, Russ, please stop wasting everyones time as well as your own doing these overly long Town Hall sessions that have next to no structure and almost never address community concerns.

Sadly if Russ doesn't do town halls. He will be plagued by people on Twitter by tenfold asking all the Town hall questions and the normal announcements in TH (CW update? next mech? next hero mech? ai's? etc)

TH is already like an Ask the Devs as they collect questions a few days in advance as well as get questions live (and questions live is very important, if they do not know what you mean you can elaborate, explain, etc).

I personally enjoy watching through the townhall and it really gives an insight onto the behind the scenes.

If people wait for the official announcement of mechs and stuff then people will be more agitated as they have to wait much longer then what they would have for a townhall announcement... or on the topic of a 'Press release', PGI doesn't really have the staff to do stuff like that ever since IGP left (who had members heavily involved in community manger, announcements, updating the forums interface, etc). Maybe in the future... but for now. Not the best idea.


Removing TH will just make issues worse and wont' free up Russ's free time. He'll spend all that time more trying to cram into 140 characters (which even that is generous as he needs to take characters up to reply to people reliably) and respond to the typicall stuff over twitter instead of TH where he can explain, elaborate, say something that wasn't asked (ie. new physics update!) etc.


However keeping both TH and doing Ask the Devs would be great. the Reason Ask the Devs slowed down to a hault was that there were no more new questions. Just repeats from earlier and people using 'questions' as an excuse to flame out onto PGI...

And funnily enough -users complained about the later Ask the Devs the same way you are complaining about Town hall meetings...
Saying it's a waste of time. No useful information given... etc.
ie:

[color=#B27204]Rebas Kradd[/color] said:

I did appreciate the Dev Insights section, but wow...near zero information in there. It looks like there's little more to discuss until CW is announced, and that's waiting on UI2.0.

That's how Ask the Devs died. People thought it was a waste of time and they started running out of questions. If we end town hall we won't be reviving ask the devs. It'll just tell Russ that we do not want much player-dev interaction in terms of stuff like questions and stuff.
however if us as a community we can work together to ask meaningful questions and stuff and ask on the next townhall or twitter to revive it we can revive ask the devs without killing off TH. It may happen less frequently but it'll exist.

[Nightshade24]

JediPanther, on 30 April 2016 - 07:20 PM, said:

I long ago stooped paying any attention to town halls. They can be summed up as this: "yak yak yak buy new mech pack yak yak yak..."

It only needs to be a thirty second video of some art and buy new mech on date xx at xx price. How I miss the old media section and the awesome videos they had for hero mechs in action using their stock load out instead of the wall of text bs they do now.

I'll be damned impress if they can fit...

Explaining new CW update/ overhaul

• talking about new game modes
  
• new changes to mechanics
  
• reward system
  
• freelancers, meres, loyalists, and interactions between them and to CW

Status of Melee and knock down physics and death from above

highly likely engine upgrade or change in the future

• Changes to the game rather in physics, engine cap, etc

Changes to MM and how it'll allow new game modes / more then 3 game modes

• introducing new game mode and explaining new changes
  
• explaining new changes to all game modes

New mech and changes to mech packages and prices.

Announcing the first Hero mech for clans/ first hero omnimech and explain the new details on the mechanics of who a hero omnimech will play out.

Status on future tech such as heavy lasers, ATM, etc and status on the timeline

• announcing the Raptor (first IS omnimech, 3052) will most likely come out after CW 3.0 and possibly before the end of the year. [later part is from twitter]
  
• Mad Cat mk II will not be coming anytime soon
  
• Mechs before 3053 but have variants after 3053 can be added. ie kodiak, shadowcat, etc

QnA with people for an hour+ both live and questions asked before TH on forum


Because That condensed list removing most explaining and stuff is more then a 30 second read. will struggle to see how that can be condensed to anything under 2 hours.

StaggerCheck, on 30 April 2016 - 07:03 PM, said:

Agreed. It is painful listening to Russ answer the same questions over and over again. I like the NgNg guys, but they have zero memory when it comes to what was asked last month, two months ago, etc. What burns me is that you can read chat and see some really useful questions get asked, and they somehow manage to skip over all of them. "Hey, Russ, any word on decals?"

really? I feel like every time a repeat question is asked it goes...

"haven't we already answered this question already last town hall?" "stop asking the same questions please guys (at players)" etc...

They have memory. However the playerbase doesn't seem to...

[Adamski]

Twitter is just as bad as Town Hall, I don't think anyone anywhere suggested utilizing a personal twitter account for announcements. It just encourages Russ to pay attention to the people who are already inclined to agree with everything he says to maintain their access to him.

But requiring Russ to find 3 free hours to shoot the breeze with NGNG, is much more time intensive then spending the 10 minutes to write up the press release, then another 5 minutes to proof read it for clarity.

Ask The Devs allowed players to forward questions, Russ could then pass them on to whatever department / person was in charge of that aspect, then relay that answer back to the players.

Another bonus to the Ask The Devs format, if a question keeps getting brought up, players can easily be redirected to where it was answered, instead of just a generic "I'm pretty sure we answered that before somewhere, feel free to comb through 12+ hours of Town Hall jibber jabber to find the answer". That is assuming it was actually addressed in a Town Hall and not some private / non public conversation.

Edited by Adamski, 30 April 2016 - 07:37 PM.

[Team Chevy86]

Not to mention how hard it is to go onto the forums to convene with your customers.
Hell, we have a community manager that's basically non-existent.
It would be a nice if a dev would drop by once in awhile and comment on stuff, make some kind of relations with the players.

[Vossiewulf]

Tomorrow's thread: PLEASE HAVE MORE TOWNHALLS

[carl kerensky]

The only thing I got from this townhall is reasons why mwo can't become more in depth or cant get an improved heat scale.
It's so frustrating hearing all about what can't be done with this game. Mwo suffers from a lack of vision. We have tepid developers running this show that are afraid to take a risk or too. So we are left with the same old stuff. Same problems same issues. When mech 2 was being developed by activision they took a huge risk and scrapped the original engine to create an amazing engine that was ahead of its time. Mech 2 did incredible. To me it's an insult to my intelligence to be fed the excuse mwo needs to stay simple and very FPS to retain players. At least that's how I see it. Proof is in the pudding. Mwo is nothing but a FPS. Closed beta started out more sim than FPS. The reason they dumbed it down was because they were fearful that people would lose interest or little Johnny won't play because he is used to halo or cod. Essentially they created mwo for the wrong player base. That's why there was a huge exodus of the founders. Those players that invested in the sim quality that was initially released. What a waste. I guess I've become jaded. I'm glad there are players that enjoy it the way it is but for me I've lost interest because it's gotten card board thin to play. Decisions based on fear or loss will never create a visionary game. not going to happen.

[JaxRiot]

Most of the time there really isnt much information in those Town Halls and the tough questions never get asked.

It always seems like the same stuff. PvE? Coming.. sometime. Balance? We are working on it but its technical. CW? We have plans. And heres a new Mech you can buy!

The only real Town Hall I liked was when Russ was talking about Phase 3 and was talking like he was against Seal Clubbing and how Phase 3 was going to change it. He seemed to be kind of passionate.

Then he does a complete 180 with a double twist back flip and a somersault just one week after the Phase 3 release.

[Death Proof]

I enjoy listening to the Town Halls.

I hated the other mediums they've used in the past.

[Adamski]

JaxRiot, on 30 April 2016 - 08:22 PM, said:

Most of the time there really isnt much information in those Town Halls and the tough questions never get asked.

It always seems like the same stuff. PvE? Coming.. sometime. Balance? We are working on it but its technical. CW? We have plans. And heres a new Mech you can buy!

The only real Town Hall I liked was when Russ was talking about Phase 3 and was talking like he was against Seal Clubbing and how Phase 3 was going to change it. He seemed to be kind of passionate.

Then he does a complete 180 with a double twist back flip and a somersault just one week after the Phase 3 release.

To be fair on the total 180, every planned solution that Paul / Russ came up with completely missed the mark.

Players wanted a solo queue for CW.
PGI Plan: implemented it so that only players not in a unit could join it, then also made it so the same players couldn't form groups or join other groups to play in the Unit queue.
Correct Plan: all solo players go in the solo queue or group queue as desired, all grouped players go in the group queue. No more than 2 players from the same unit can be in the solo queue at the same time.

Players wanted something done about the supersize units in CW having control over faction balance
PGI Plan: implement scaling recruitment fee that does nothing about units that are already created, and then gives MC rewards to units that tag planets which requires the largest unit possible.
Correct Plan: Give MC rewards to Units that have the best Win / Loss ratio on the leaderboards, not the Units that are tagging planets. This encourages units to split up and spread out to get higher on more leaderboards.

[MechWarrior319348]

The devs when you try to complain about what they are doing.

[Adamski]

Finished polishing your armor and come to white knight for your damsel PGI?