Open letter to FoldIt research team - Communication between team and players

Started by Nina

axcho Lv 1

Interesting article. :p

I'd be curious to hear some examples of games with good communication between developers and players. It always helps to have a good role model to aspire to. If you could link to some game forums you think are particularly well-managed I'd appreciate it.


admin Staff Lv 1

I think the term Community Copout isn't applicable to us, as we didn't create any of the vehicles of interaction so that we wouldn't have to interact with the players. However, low resources meant we got to many issues late or never, which combined with the lack of any sort of tracking for posted issues made people think we weren't listening. The feedback tracker has gotten rid of an awful lot of community problems that stemmed directly from our forum software – it didn't give us more resources, yet it improved the players' role in making the game.

We continue to use the feedback tracker to interact with players about the game's progress, the forums for more general discussion, and we continue to improve the feedback tracker (as when we added voting features). Our blog and developer chats are pretty low-key, but that won't improve much until our resources improve.

There is still a lack of information on many fronts, although the situation is slowly being improved.

orngjce223 Lv 1

I don't know what was intended by that, but I perceive the post (by admin) to have a defensive note. I was commenting that the article seemed to describe what many players thought was the problem with the game, and with the team: a lack of communication, and the creation of more and more vehicles to complain by (though not necessarily be heard through). (I attempted to make a neutral observation, and made a non-neutral one, so evidently I stepped on someone's toes. I apologize if this was perceived, on the dev team's end, to be an attack, as it was not meant that way.)

In any case, though, I wonder if a specified requirement for player interaction (say, five hours a week on-game, in-chat) would solve things? or would it aggravate them, by gaming the system by leaving chat in the background and never responding to it? See, the only way out is accountability. A feedback-tracker is a substantial step forward, if certainly not perfect.

axcho Lv 1

Thanks for the PM, orngjce223, I'll check them out in more detail later.

I'm often in the chat while I'm coding, though lately I've been too busy. I find that being in chat can greatly decrease my productivity. :p

However, as far as I know I'm the only developer who regularly goes in chat (other than admin) or for that matter, on the forums, so I agree that there could be a lot of improvement if more developers were encouraged to participate. I guess it is a tradeoff between community involvement and speed of feature implementation.

Deleted user

It appears to apply here as well as just about every BOINC project, and the BOINC development group at UCB as well.

admin Staff Lv 1

I'm sorry. I thought you were expressing your opinion about the state of affairs now – not an unreasonable assumption, I hope. Since I don't think we are a community copout, I naturally enough posted my reasons. Please feel free to express your opinions, fully, without concern for stepping on any toes – we can't have real debate if we are too cautious! For my part, no offence taken, and I hope I did not give any.

LennStar Lv 1

Perhaps you should not look at games, more on Mods to commercial games. On the other hand, thats more an in-group communication (but I can assure you, if that fails, the Mod is dead).

One problem:
I do many thinks for an OS-game called X-Force. Bughunting, testing, making a gameset. The team there is very small - only 2 programmers (and a hand full of "gamesetters"). All testing except thats done right at the programming is done in a more or less open alpha/beta. And with the above mentioned mantis bugtracker and fast reaction it works very well.
But that also means, who really cares for the game is right at the spot. There are awful long and complicated feature discussions, including ideas from people with no knowledge of programming. And more than one is "not implemented for a very long time because we don't have the man-power". But the end is: If something is build, its (hopefully) in the best way it can be.
Here on foldit, we don't see or hear much on what is planned. It is a huge difference of course, the games are quite different and the goal also. But maybe we can have more discussions like axcho had started here e.g. for "the fun in foldit". Or "what you want in cookbook" - before it is released.

Also included in the X-Force game is a script language. And there is a big problem. There are people willing to use it, but 1. its not easy and 2. its not really documented. Not what a beginner would call so. But the 2 programmers don't want to use days to write more than they have. They want the time to program the game (and they do it in their freetime together with all the other things!). Its not easy.
What I mean with that: You have a lot of tools and now the cookbook. How much words have you typed to explain it?
The "community", means the players, can do it. Right. Some would do it. But there need to be at least a few Players who know what to write at the start. Maybe they just explain it in chat and another one writes it. But there is no authoritative version. Players have to find out by themselves and then they think "maybe its not right or not good enough, I better write nothing".
And right at the first day there was the cry for a handbook to the cookbook ;)
But who should it write? Does anyone from the players now know what "iteration" (the only thing to wiggle) really means? I asked it my "my thougts on cookbook" tracker ticket.
I also did make a suggestion of a drag&drop feature, that got immediate thumps up in the chat.
On both I got no reaction.
This are things that can only be answered by the team.
(And btw: In the next ticket zoran mentioned LUA and gave a link. If this is all what we get after it is implemented, it is indeed a Community Copout and excactly the problem I mentioned with the X-Force script anguage where we needed to give the programmers a virtual beating to get at least a tutorial on the basics.)

In summary: There are things that can only be done by the team, and even now that doesn't work that well. But this is crucial for a fast understanding and using of features. If players need to guess and find out on their own, that slows down everything immense and is a motivation desaster.
It's like torrent seeding. You need at least one person who has all of the data to start it. Three more and it takes only a week to be fairly common. ;)

So, now I have given you more than an hour today in forum and issue tracker, don't waste that time :D

orngjce223 Lv 1

@LennStar: Whoa.

(Tldr summary: We don't want to end up like XForce's scripting language, undocumented because the programmers haven't thought to document it.)

@ADMIN: Just because you don't think you are providing any community-copout, doesn't mean you aren't. Be careful about saying you aren't something; people are remarkably good at ignoring their flaws, whether individual or team-based.

The point is, not all of us have the temerity (for the kids in the audience, by the way, "temerity" means "courage") to provide documentation, and those of us experienced enough with the tools to provide documentation would rather be playing.