Community Manager/PR/Any kind of news

Shibdib

So I took a slight break from the game and was surprised when I came back to a game with almost no dev driven community interaction.

I remember a highly active official PR guy both on the forums/blog/slack which in return lead to more active player driven interaction. Multiple updates every week on game development and big events going on around the community.

What happened? We don't have blog posts or forum announcements anymore, we don't have a community guy in slack spearheading new player support, there's 0 advertising to bring in new players, etc etc..

As a returning player this looks bad and screams of decreased dev support/interest. As a new player coming in I can't imagine it would look much better. Whether that is true or not (I don't believe it's true as I don't see any other IP's in development that would lead to this and I can't imagine they made enough to cash out) the perception is starting to turn into screeps being an abandoned game outside of keeping the servers running.

keenathar

I'm relatively new to this game (started somewhere in the first half of January). I can fully confirm:

As a new player coming in I can't imagine it would look much better.

I enjoy the game - it's very unique and I love the real programming - but it seems like there's little happening. I've seen a few discussions between "officials" (quotes because I'm uncertain) and the community, but most were about server status and a potential move to Discord. Only Power Creeps and (in the context of Discord) Arena Mode were directly related to the game.

I don't think I'll keep subscribing for CPU if it'll stay as quiet.

Shibdib

Also I know @artch is still active. But besides him the team (especially the community manager/pr) is nonexistent and it's making it hard to justify putting money into this. He can keep adding new features but without someone doing advertising and community interaction he will be coding for a game full of zombie code.

artch

I'm sorry that you have feelings that the game is abandoned, but it's definitely not the case. I suggest checking these recent forum topics to get an overview of new upcoming features:

Note that all the development above is community driven. We discuss new features a lot on forum, and invite everyone to contribute and earn in-game rewards.

I also recommend to follow our Twitter and #announcements channel in Slack, it is where all hot news are being published.

As for Community Managers (that is, @dissi-mark and @o4kapuk), please keep in mind they are volunteers. We are a small team, and can't afford having a dedicated PR specialist, but we believe it is a great product and great community that makes Screeps a great game rather than great PR.

dissi-mark

The game is actually very actively developed as @artch pointed out with the links. There are new features in the pipeline which will probably be posted on the forums pretty soon.

The CM's are very active on slack. You can always ping us when you have questions or just want to chat with us. (just @dissi me there and I'll read it quite quickly). Please note that we are volunteers with fulltime jobs as well, which might explain where your feeling is coming from.

GimmeCookies

@artch said in Community Manager/PR/Any kind of news:

As for Community Managers (that is, @dissi-mark and @o4kapuk), please keep in mind they are volunteers. We are a small team, and can't afford having a dedicated PR specialist, but we believe it is a great product and great community that makes Screeps a great game rather than great PR.

Those 2 are pretty active. But for new players it is not really clear they are the CM's.

artch

They have DEV TEAM badge on forum, isn't it clear enough?

GimmeCookies

@artch said in Community Manager/PR/Any kind of news:

They have DEV TEAM badge on forum, isn't it clear enough?

Quoted from the OP...: "we don't have a community guy in slack spearheading new player support"

Shibdib

@gimmecookies said in Community Manager/PR/Any kind of news:

@artch said in Community Manager/PR/Any kind of news:

They have DEV TEAM badge on forum, isn't it clear enough?

Quoted from the OP...: "we don't have a community guy in slack spearheading new player support"

Slack, blog posts (monthly recaps were big as they showed that the game world isn't stagnant, or even a happy new year here's a yearly timeline etc...) are the 2 big things that we used to see a lot of but now we don't.

The forums are one of the better setup from a design perspective I've seen in awhile but slack (unless we switch to discord) is hands down the primary player to player and player to dev communication platform for this game (and the official dev team interaction there is not what it used to be). Which fits the trend a lot of games have gone, forums are arguably a dead way of doing things with chat programs and more user driven mediums being the future.

It's awesome that @artch is active on the forums but that shouldn't be your responsibility. You have community managers who yes are volunteers, but that also means they did volunteer and have an obligation to do the job. And perhaps that job outline needs to be better defined to more than just being forum mods.

Also quick note:

I thoroughly enjoy this game, my break was not at all because I thought the game was bad or anything. This is just something that came up in slack with a few of us who were around when the community was a bit more active (steam release) and notice that it is much more dead nowadays than it used to be. Obviously lots of factors there but community interaction is definitely one of them.

artch

@shibdib Could you please elaborate what do you expect of CMs regarding Slack that is missing currently? They are constantly online (considering Europe timezone), making announcements, answering questions, and relaying them to developers back and forth, so I can't seem to understand what specific problems concern you here. If you don't see enough activity, could it be simply a different timezone then?

Comparing overall community activity to the Steam launch period is not very just though, it has been an obvious short-term spike following by a decrease which is absolutely normal.

SemperRabbit

I know that I developed a WelcomeBot in the slack that should have messaged everyone new with all of this information... it lists all 5 slack moderators, including the 2 community managers. It should also have included the 3rd party page and lots of other good stuff. I'll post the DM it should have sent you, but I'm still hosting it on my laptop, so it may have missed you. Anyways, you can DM it anything and get the link again.

That being said, I do miss the monthly and then quarterly world reviews. I know that dev/community postings have waxed and waned in the 2 years I've been here.

https://imgur.com/a/CegOs WelcomeBot DM

artch

I suggest checking ScreepsWorld.com web site if you'd like to have Screeps-related reading. Interesting materials from there are announced in Slack and Twitter quite often.

Shibdib

It doesn't help that slack has no way of highlighting certain members and the whole history issue of messages disappearing. Right now the announcements channel has the twitter post from a couple days ago and nothing else. (Score 2 for discord)

Are both the CM's EU based? Perhaps finding a US based one would be a good start. If making them paid employees isn't an option than some type/increasing compensation would attract more volunteers.

As for advertising an affiliate/referral program would go a long way (sub tokens?).

Shibdib

Good example of a lack of interaction being the 11s tick times shard1 has been experiencing for a few hours right now. A simple "We're aware of the issue and we're working to fix it" goes a long way.

Shibdib

@artch said in Community Manager/PR/Any kind of news:

I suggest checking ScreepsWorld.com web site if you'd like to have Screeps-related reading. Interesting materials from there are announced in Slack and Twitter quite often.

Screepworld hasn't had an article in 2 months. And relying on a third party to discuss your game is perhaps not the best strategy.

W4rl0ck

@shibdib like "We're having some issues on the servers. Our technical staff is already notified." ? ... look at status.screeps.com

Shibdib

@w4rl0ck said in Community Manager/PR/Any kind of news:

@shibdib like "We're having some issues on the servers. Our technical staff is already notified." ? ... look at status.screeps.com

You mean the warning that has been there for weeks?

artch

@shibdib Do you really want us to spam to all media every time an issue occurs? This is why status pages exist. Yes, this message is often displayed constantly, since there is an ongoing status of something minor, but it means what it says - that we are notified on every status change and will work on it asap. It's not just a dummy message, sometimes I get calls from the notification system in the middle of night.

Davaned

As part of the community that has seen ideas contributed, I do think the devs actively engage on the forums. They are definitely more closely intertwined with the community than previously. Their slack presence is pretty much zero besides dissi and 04k occasionally.

However I have still been disappointed with the pace of gameplay, the tick lengths made me cancel my sub.

artch

@davaned said in Community Manager/PR/Any kind of news:

Their slack presence is pretty much zero besides dissi and 04k occasionally.

Dissi and o4kapuk are the community managers though (i.e. dev team representatives). So it can't be zero, right? Do you have any matters/questions/issues that have been left unanswered/unmanaged in Slack?

However I have still been disappointed with the pace of gameplay, the tick lengths made me cancel my sub.

If 3s tick rate on shard2 is not suitable for you, then I'm afraid the public server is not for you, since we don't have plans to make it faster than 2.5-3s, people need time to debug in real-time. I believe your only options here are to either play on any community server or wait for Screeps Arena.