Wargaming, communication and this board.

[Thracen]

Honestly I quite like the forum. There are good people on here, and when I'm stuck with something that can actually be fixed I often get good advice. 

 

However as a tool to communicate with their community, does wargaming actually use it? 

 

Would we be better off on the reddit board? or Perhaps other social media?

 

With wargaming announcing the restriction of information to super testers and community contributors (who also seem to be ignored?) I get the impression they are limiting feedback to be only "spreadsheet" based.

 

What do you guys think?

[DFens_666]

4 minutes ago, Thracen said:

However as a tool to communicate with their community, does wargaming actually use it? 

 

Its probably as much as use as reporting someone for poor play in the game

[ColonelPete]

1 hour ago, Thracen said:

However as a tool to communicate with their community, does wargaming actually use it?

They use it all the time.

This only a part of their posts of today:

 

[Humorpalanta]

33 minutes ago, Thracen said:

Honestly I quite like the forum. There are good people on here, and when I'm stuck with something that can actually be fixed I often get good advice. 

 

However as a tool to communicate with their community, does wargaming actually use it? 

 

Would we be better off on the reddit board? or Perhaps other social media?

 

With wargaming announcing the restriction of information to super testers and community contributors (who also seem to be ignored?) I get the impression they are limiting feedback to be only "spreadsheet" based.

 

What do you guys think?

It's like you expect them to want to have feedback. Oh sweet summer child.

[Wischmob_von_Eimer]

18 minutes ago, ColonelPete said:

They use it all the time.

This only a part of the their posts of today:

They make announcements.

 

However, communication with the community or interaction with it does not really happen in either the EU/NA forums, reddit and most likely Discord.

 

You will need to learn some russian to actually get some form of limited communication with Wargaming. Everything else is just a newsfeed with nice graphics.

[HMS_Kilinowski]

1 hour ago, Thracen said:

However as a tool to communicate with their community, does wargaming actually use it?

 

I'm sure WG would say they use the forum. They use it to get feedback on the general opinion on things they change and introduce. They use it to explain things beyond their official statements. And most of all they use it to let the community spread information on how this game works, which they otherwise needed to document using internal ressources. Just imagine their support getting tickets from people asking if they should use IFHE on a certain ship.

 

But I also get the impression the communication is mostly aiming at sedating the players into accepting changes. The feedback process is not transparent. Most suggestions are either dismissed by saying the spreadsheet indicates everything is fine, where nobody knows what is in there and what math is behind the models that say it's fine. Or they are shrugged of saying something will be changed in the indefinite future.

Both strategies are imo not suited to deal with suggestions. Even if a change happens some time in the future, was that due to a suggestion? Would it have happened anyway? Did it happen sooner because of feedback? We can't tell, cause there is no transparency. That has been successively discouraging me to give feedback.

 

At some point I wonder how people still are so active in the forum and share every minute thought. I struggle to see how one can be so enthusiastic about things that have been talked over and over. There is so few things that are worth discussing and even less that are worth fighting over, but none of them seem to progress over time.

 

 

Maybe the forum is just like a warning light, that starts blinking when something goes wrong. And then some old guy slaps on the light and says: "Don't worry, it blinks all the time, the machine is fine." Maybe the forum is just like karma, a venting tool. Obviously it works, right?

Just ask yourself, when did you really feel heard?

The only instance where I can remember the communication really affecting the outcome, also the biggest manure storm I can remember was the planned Naval Training Center, where you could give your ships buffs mandatory for any competitive play. Wargaming announced they understood the upset. They threw in a carrot by announcing they would soon make premium consumables available for free. Nobody fell for it. Strange, we never heard of that again. Then they renamed it to Reseach Bureau. Now we are about to see Legendary Modules in the Naval Training Center ... Research Bureau I mean. All it now takes is to make Legendary Modules an effective buff, maybe offering different LMs for one ship over time, that upgrade the ship and are increasingly expensive. That's all it takes to get the original idea behind the Naval Training Center into the game. The biggest reaction of the community is so close to being undermined just by eroding our perception in slow motion. Say for yourself, is that communication really bidirectional?

[ColonelPete]

6 minutes ago, Wischmob_von_Eimer said:

They make announcements.

 

However, communication with the community or interaction with it does not really happen in either the EU/NA forums, reddit and most likely Discord.

Then I suggest to read more of their posts.

Their answer questions all the time.

[lovelacebeer]

I don't get the impression that WG take the forum very seriously however in all fairness to WG I can somewhat understand why, the amount of complaining on the forum can give the iimpression we only come here to whinge.  

 

The thing is sometimes very good ideas and suggestions are voiced on the forum sadly they tend to be ignored. Still to WGs credit they do a pretty good job of answering our questions.

[Wizard27_1979]

1 hour ago, Thracen said:

However as a tool to communicate with their community, does wargaming actually use it? 

Did you ever hit this button and check the latest staff-postings on right hand side?
 

 

1 hour ago, Thracen said:

With wargaming announcing the restriction of information to super testers and community contributors (who also seem to be ignored?) I get the impression they are limiting feedback to be only "spreadsheet" based.

Please explain which information is "restricted" to SuperTesters (like me) - I'm curious, really. 



 

[Bortasqu]

What communication...?

[Andrewbassg]

4 hours ago, Thracen said:

Honestly I quite like the forum. There are good people on here, and when I'm stuck with something that can actually be fixed I often get good advice. 

 

However as a tool to communicate with their community, does wargaming actually use it? 

 

Nope. It s just an obligation for them. I mean the existence of the forum.  Communication, what's that ? Ah the "we tell you what's gonna be and you have suck it up"?

Btw. from now on, every single game I play. I will start with F....WeeGee!  Let's see what that will do to their "karma points".

[Thracen]

2 hours ago, Wizard27_1979 said:

Did you ever hit this button and check the latest staff-postings on right hand side?
 

 

Please explain which information is "restricted" to SuperTesters (like me) - I'm curious, really. 



 

Your right, the information did not include changes to super testers, just the closing off of information to the community at large. As for communication, I had to scroll back to the middle of last month in my clans discord to find this since I don't use facebook.

 

As for the other comments on this topic, I appreciate all your thoughts. The optimism I had about the interaction possible with the game on this forum has been successfully stamped out. Thanks for taking the time, it means I'll do a better job of using mine in the future :). 

 

o7

 

[CptMinia]

Hello,

          Not sure what you mean, WarGaming still announce any news regarding the game on the forums as well as other platforms and WoWS Staff also spend some of their time contributing to threads and answering questions and queries. The forum is still widely used so I fail how this relates to the forum not being used. You can also now join the official WoWS discord where you can talk in debate in a live chat with other WoWS players across all regions and all news and updates are also automatically posted in this discord in the appropriate channels, if anything this allows you to have a closer relationship to WG and the WoWS community as it is a live text and voice platform.

 

As for WG not listening to feedback, they do. The problem WG is trying to correct with this new data is innacurate or misleading information being released regarding new content which is a work in progress. This means anything regarding the new content can still be changed, this can include major changes which could completely change the way a new ship or content behaves/players/interacts/feels etc. This is a problem that has been around for some time, for example the Graf Zeppelin debacle that occured. This NDA should prevent these sorts of problems in the future but it also means that CCs will only be able to review and feature new content once it is close to the release version. As I said, this will prevent confusion and also allow more accurate reporting regarding new content. At no point does this NDA mean that WG will reduce or not listen to the amount of feedback they receive. They do listen and sometimes even act but they can't make changes when there is not the appropriate volume of reliable information to backup any changes. This includes both ST, CC, volunteer feedback and developer, community feedback as well as what statistics say about how new content has peformed. To make any appropriate changes there must be a correlation between all these sources.

 

Kind regards,

                       Minia

[Yosha_AtaIante]

For many on this forum "communication" means listening and following demands. 

Thats why they don't recognise all the actual communication going on. 

[Andrewbassg]

52 minutes ago, Yoshanai said:

For many on this forum "communication" means listening and following demands. 

Thats why they don't recognise all the actual communication going on. 

People are people. They are varied in their (real or perceived) opinions, needs  etc. Plus add to that a significant amount of ignorance. BUT there is a NOT small difference between using that as an excuse, or.... as filtering mechanism. Wg consistently and conveniently choose to do the former, no matter what. And you know that very well.

     The "let's just not make waves" attitude is  WAAY too familiar to me, as its results. I mean just look at the US right now.

 

And, no there is no such thing as "communication".Communication presumes the presence of a from of dialog. For that a crucial condition is needed and it is called LISTENING. Which is completely nonexistent on WG's part.

[Wizard27_1979]

5 hours ago, Thracen said:

As for communication, I had to scroll back to the middle of last month in my clans discord to find this since I don't use facebook.

It seems to me as you don't know about this section of forums:  https://forum.worldofwarships.eu/forum/754-development-blog/

That's where they give all information about Test-Ships, Development, Changes etc. 

[Excavatus]

9 hours ago, Thracen said:

I get the impression they are limiting feedback to be only "spreadsheet" based.

Because spreadsheet does not have feelings, personal gain, high or low skill, preferences.. 

every feedback from anyone, includes personal bias one way or the other. 

But the spreadsheet is like an AI who does not care about anything but balance.. 

 

is it successful? thats a whole different debate :) 

But personally, I don't think they are ignoring players feedback, but they take pure numbers for the basis of balancing.. 

[thisismalacoda]

Agree. I think they communicate really well, but too much stuff is earlier or easier to find on reddit than here.

[Afghanicus]

3 hours ago, Excavatus said:

But personally, I don't think they are ignoring players feedback, but they take pure numbers for the basis of balancing.. 

Why are they constantly asking for feedback then? Just to mock the player-base while focusing on pure numbers which do NOT reflect the real state of the game?

 

Silly example: If you have more potatoes in CVs than good players, the numbers will tell you that CVs should be buffed. The result will be that the potatoes will still potato, maybe a tiny bit less but it wouldn't change much for them. On the other hand, the good players would use that buff nicely end would make them even better in their CVs (avoiding using the 'OP' word even though it would fit right in).

 

It's like that with everything. You can't just focus on the numbers. We're human players, not bots. Seems that's something WG is forgetting.

[quickr]

6 minutes ago, Palubarac said:

We're human players, not bots

Playing WoWS I would say it's other way around

[Shaka_D]

13 hours ago, ColonelPete said:

They use it all the time.

This only a part of their posts of today:

 

True if you're simply looking to tick a box that relates to oneway information feeds,  they don't really fully engage with the forum community do they?

[Dampfboot]

WG doesn't listen to customer feedback. They have holy spreadsheets instead.

 

Check on the Puerto Rico (aka PR disaster) and you know how highly WG values customer feedback.

[NobleRipper]

I can only offer my own observations, and I've only been around since December last year, but for what it's worth:

 

It seems as though certain things in the game are changed in line with some of the opinions presented here. We've had a lot to say on the forums (to put it mildly) about how the recent events have been run, particularly about the use of RNG, and it seems that each new event has done away with certain unpopular features and tried something else. However, it's also the case that certain features which were liked and accepted have also been removed or re-jigged into things perceived as less consumer/player-friendly. Also, it's entirely impossible to tell how much of this was due to feedback on the forum, which leads me to another point.

 

The transparency of communication on these forums is sorely lacking. A prime example is the post by @Excavatus above (and apologies, this would be getting into that debate he mentioned) regarding WG's prioritising of the spreadsheet over player experience. All else being equal, it's true that raw numbers will give more (let's call it) accurate feedback than people; however, quite frankly the numbers are only as good as the people collecting and interpreting them. What if the spreadsheet is collecting irrelevant information? What if the people reporting on the spreadsheet are picking and choosing numbers to fit their own agendas? Statistics as a field is historically rather notorious for its misuse. I should be clear that I'm not accusing WG of deliberately doing anything like that, but my point is that we are given essentially no information about the spreadsheet, what it contains and how it's used (in the past I've been told by @MrConway that he didn't have access to the actual figures that were in discussion at the time, despite making assertions based on them), so we're unable to make any kind of judgement for ourselves.

 

The creation of new threads for each news item and feedback threads for numerous different aspects currently under discussion is a very nice and conscientious inclusion, and helps ensure that there is a place to discuss pretty much anything that comes up. However, I personally find a lot of the news items to appear very similar to one another, sometimes almost entirely interchangeable, and so given that a thread is created for each and every single one, it can sometimes be quite confusing as to where to post about a given topic. And to go back to my point about transparency above, we don't really receive any feedback on the forum here about whether or not the opinions we share in those threads have any real effect. Sometimes it feels like those threads only go up as a token obligation toward the playerbase.

 

Overall, I have to say that I'm much more glad to have these forums than not: aside from anything else it's a good way to find out the opinions of other players and pick up on information that you might have missed elsewhere. That said, I very much get the impression that this place is more for players to air their opinions than for WG to do any significant level of data gathering.

[Afghanicus]

7 hours ago, NobleSauvage said:

It seems as though certain things in the game are changed in line with some of the opinions presented here. We've had a lot to say on the forums (to put it mildly) about how the recent events have been run, particularly about the use of RNG, and it seems that each new event has done away with certain unpopular features and tried something else. However, it's also the case that certain features which were liked and accepted have also been removed or re-jigged into things perceived as less consumer/player-friendly. Also, it's entirely impossible to tell how much of this was due to feedback on the forum, which leads me to another point.

Are you saying that WG listened to the player-base and there is less RNG involved recently?

 

Are you serious? Are we playing the same game?

 

Because I can see the exact opposite. RNG being pushed everywhere, all the time. Look at the current event (no need to go further back even though it's the same BS). You don't get early access ships by completing certain missions. You get some boxes instead which hold some BS tokens. The amount you obtain is dictated by the RNG and RNG only. And for the first time ever, even if you buy a premium bundle/box/whatever for REAL MONEY (doubloons), you still don't get a specific amount of tokens. You're still at the mercy of the terrible RNG that WG pushes so hard.

 

So tell me... how are we getting less RNG than before because one of us must be delusional at best.

 

I see RNG when I enter the battle and it's up to MM if there will be a ROFLSTOMP or not. RNG can spawn me isolated, away from the rest of the team. RNG can detonate you in a blink of an eye. If I shoot someone with AP straight in the citadel, RNG can still decide that no citadel hits happen. If I shoot HE, RNG will decide if there will be fire or not. etc. etc. Once I finish the battle and get to the daily container, RNG decides what I will get in the container. Then you have each and every event being RNG-based.

 

Even the current "rent a ship" feature does NOT let you choose the ship you want to try for 24 hours or the captain you want to keep. It's still RNG-based.

 

While I know that RNG must be present in some aspects of the game... RNG doesn't have to be everywhere, all the time.

[NobleRipper]

21 minutes ago, Palubarac said:

Are you saying that WG listened to the player-base and there is less RNG involved recently?

 

Are you serious? Are we playing the same game?

 

Because I can see the exact opposite. RNG being pushed everywhere, all the time. Look at the current event (no need to go further back even though it's the same BS). You don't get early access ships by completing certain missions. You can some boxes instead which hold some BS tokens. The amount you obtain is dictated by the RNG and RNG only. And for the first time ever, even if you buy a premium bundle/box/whatever for REAL MONEY (doubloons), you still don't get a specific amount of tokens. You're still at the mercy of the terrible RNG that WG pushes so hard.

 

So tell me... how are we getting less RNG than before because one of us must be delusional at best.

 

I see RNG when I enter the battle and it's up to MM if there will be a ROFLSTOMP or not. RNG can spawn me isolated, away from the rest of the team. RNG can detonate you in a blink of an eye. If I shoot someone with AP straight in the citadel, RNG can still decide that no citadel hits happen. If I shoot HE, RNG will decide if there will be fire or not. etc. etc. Once I finish the battle and get to the daily container, RNG decides what I will get in the container. Then you have each and every event being RNG-based.

 

Even the current "rent a ship" feature does NOT let you choose the ship you want to try for 24 hours or the captain you want to keep. It's still RNG-based.

 

While I know that RNG must be present in some aspects of the game... RNG doesn't have to be everywhere, all the time.

No, that's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying we had a lot to say about event features/RNG on this forum; also that things have been changed between events recently (these are not related points); and also that these changes included the removal of things that people did like; but the key point (which is there in the part of my post that you quoted) is that we have no way of knowing if WG did listen to the playerbase or if there were other factors involved. And I didn't say anything at all about anything in the game outside of events, certainly not as pertaining to the RNG therein.

 

The current event (and the ones that came recently before it) is a prime example of what I'm talking about: British Cruisers 1 left the receipt of the actual ships (the main prize/attraction of the event) in the hands of RNG, although the tokens were obtained at a known rate. The BC2 event had a guaranteed prize and the tokens were gained at a known rate, but it was down to luck from the previous event as to whether players had the ship that allowed them to shorten the grind or not. Now in European Destroyers, we have a known progression for the ships and no reliance on previous events, but the tokens themselves are overwhelmingly influenced by RNG. Do you see how certain things that were complained about for each event have been changed or removed in time for the next one? Again though, my point was that we don't have any way of knowing if that was down to forum feedback or not.