Mavairo, on 05 June 2016 - 12:44 PM, said:
It's bad when you can not watch meetings for months, and hear the same crap answered again.
It's a combination of poor management on PGI's part for not being willing to utilize people whom would ask tougher AND better questions, and NGNG's lack of willingness to step up their editing, and interviewing skills.
NGNG reminds me a lot of STOked back in the STO days, and that's not a compliment, not even a little. It always felt like amateur hour, obvious shilling, and that's never a good combination.
The difficulty comes, in part, from the specific agenda of the town halls - in that there is NO agenda. There is no regular format or purpose. Most often, you have NGNG leading Russ through a reading of the upcoming month's roadmap, will a little color commentary and inane questions thrown in for measure. Often, NGNG are more impressed by the number of players they have logged onto their stream or whatever crappy craft beer they have available than anything Russ has to say.
Realistically, a brief overview of the upcoming roadmap is probably vital to a state-of-the-game address such as the town hall, so that's fine. Making early announcements for mechs is fine too. That's what gets most people to tune in anyway. But the purpose of the town hall is to encourage debate and learning through community involvement. It should be, by and large, about the interaction of the community and the devs.
In order to get that right, just as you would in political town halls, you have to know which people to allow to steer the dialog. Which people you allow to talk, and which you keep quietly in their seats. It takes prep time. I means the host has to craft a narrative between the message the speaker wants to get out, and the concerns the community want addressed. NGNG seem complete incapable of crafting that narrative. They chose poor questions from the audience, often with completely conflicting narrative directions.
For instance... remember in the last town hall when NGNG chose to relay a question to Russ regarding the drop-off in Steam players after launch and how that might correlate to MWO being too complex a game for most casual players - of course suggesting PGI make the game simpler to appeal to a larger demographic. Then, they immediately turned around and asked a question as to whether PGI was considering adding additional mechanics to account for individual equipment destruction for actuators and other fixed equipment that would have a tangible impact on in-game play - thus suggesting that PGI make the game more realistic and complex.
I could sympathize with the exasperation I heard in Russ's voice as he asked (to paraphrase) "well which is it? Do you want a game that's simplified to appeal to more gamers, or more complex to make the game even more niche? You can't have both!"
Realistically... these town halls need an agenda. There has to be a specific topic we intend to discuss, in addition to all the usual monthly announcements and news. Weapon balance, map creation, community warfare changes, Dekels... one real topic a month. The Dev Logs actually did the "1 topic per event" thing pretty well. You get better community interaction with a narrow focus. Keeps people on-task.
And then we can take questions from the community to expand on that topic. Or then maybe at the end questions related to anything else that's been discussed, or small topics in general. But really, those questions should largely be prescreened... none of these random questions pulled off the first 2 minutes of the town hall chat window.
There are lots of ways these things could be way better for everyone involved, but it's mostly on NGNG to step their game up.
8
If true, I might even start to buy stuff again 
