Asking for some open communication from the devs



  • Hey devs I just wanted to reach out and ask for some open communication and signs of life. With the exception of the tweet about the perimeter expanding it has been a month of radio silence. I appreciate that you guys are probably incredibly busy with the conversion to pixijs and the implementation of power creeps, but I believe the lack of communication is hurting the screeps community. For example there hasn't been a monthly review released for March and we are half way through April. I understand if there isn't enough time or manpower to do the monthly review, but if that is the case I think it would go a long way to just let us know.

    In the past Artem has been the main bridge between the community and the devs, but as far as I can tell no one in the community has heard from him in over a month. Is he still with the team?

    Power Creeps are a highly anticipated feature release that in theory is arriving shortly (and they may very well be on track to be released on time), but no one in the community seems to know anything about their progress. The design docs were released and it was asked that we discuss them and there has been a lot of discussion had, but it has been a long time since anyone from the dev team has been a part of those discussions. Does that mean the discussions are over? Have you guys taken any of the suggestions that were discussed?

    I realize you guys are probably busy but a little bit of communication would go a long way.



  • Good evening Rajecz,

    I'd like to chime in as well and say that active open communication with the community is definitely critical. Especially considering the nature of this game and how community bound it is.

    If preparing the monthly reviews has been difficult, I think they could/should open up for submissions and allow the community to put them together. Depending on the time available, I think they can push a lot of this responsibility to the community itself.

    On that note, Artem is still around, no need to worry there. I saw him pop his head in a few times in the past 2 weeks, so should be fine.

    Regards,
    Atavus


  • Culture

    Agreed 100%. There are forum threads that should have gotten responses and where just ignored and I had a helpdesk ticket that went a month without a response (by the time I did get a response it was too late to do anything about it).

    This is on top of the pile of pull requests that have been made and are just sitting there not being commented on or pulled. This is actively discouraging other people from contributing to the game, which is a huge problem, and these pull requests would really improve the game.

    This seems like a huge difference from what we've seen just a year ago, where the game devs (Artem specifically) would respond to forum discussions pretty regularly and we got regular communication. 


  • YP

    This unannounced radio silence is really a bit distressing. The actively communicating devs have been one of the key strengths of this game and losing that would absolutely be a setback.



  • and again: no answer. My trust has almost disappeared and I'm very disappointed. No matter how busy they are. This is definitely not worth a subscription 😞


  • Dev Team

    I'm sorry for giving an impression of absence in community. There were a number of organizational factors and personal circumstances. But there are good news - we're going to relaunch this forum on a new engine (keeping old data of course) and hire a community manager in the next few days. Follow the news, we'll explain it in a blog post soon.