View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0008016 | Valley 1 | Note To Test | May 22, 2012 10:37 am | May 22, 2012 2:37 pm | |
| Reporter | Robby | Assigned To | Chris_McElligottPark | ||
| Severity | major | ||||
| Status | closed | Resolution | won't fix | ||
| Summary | 0008016: Arcen Games Phone Numbers | ||||
| Description | Does Arcen games have any contact numbers I can reach them? I'd like to discuss feature suggestions in detail. That way we could have a clearer understanding of eachother. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
| Internal Weight | New | ||||
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"I require the phone number of x4000. I want to talk to you about many things regarding your game. If you do not submit to this, then I will find you and ask you myself. It might take me a couple of weeks, but I'm sure I will manage. It's very important that I speak to you." ---- First of all, we don't make our phone numbers public. Secondly, if you find my number and call me I will consider it harassment. We have many venues for you to talk with us (the forums and mantis, mainly), and we cannot respond to remotely every thing that gets sent to us. Players outnumber us thousands to one. Somebody on staff reads all of the suggestions that get made; if we don't act on it immediately, then either: 1) We simply don't have time at the moment, and/or there are more pressing things at the moment. 2) We don't agree, and generally close the issue. 3) It's marked as considering or assigned or somesuch, and we get to it in our normal queue of work. Trying to circumvent our normal systems of feedback is not going to make us listen to you any more than we already to. We respond to reasoned arguments, not volume. And truth be told, I'm not inclined to spend all day debating anyone about this or that design merit. It's profitless, for players and for us. You guys want us to be doing actual development, not just debating players about potential changes all the time. This is why we take the time to read comments, but not to debate every last point. I am not hiding from you, but you have not said anything yet that I have found worth delaying development to discuss with you. Hence I forwarded your PMs to Josh, and he responded because he and I are on the same page of what the design goals are. I am available on mantis and on the forums for discussion, but I will be the sole judge of what discussions I choose to partake in. |
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I see, so you'd call the cops on me if I found your number and called you. And you speak of that you need profit. Tell me, would make Aqua Suit and Flippers suggestion be unprofitable? People love content with function, I'm not sure why it wouldn't be considered. Fine, I will not call you. I'm just feeling a bit on edge because all my suggestion get shot down these days, and there seem to be a select few of people who get their suggestions considered. |
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"I see, so you'd call the cops on me if I found your number and called you." If you go to great lengths to dig up information and then call me agaisnt my wishes, I will hang up. If you persist, I will escalate as needed. There are boundaries that have to be set -- my private life and my public life are two separate matters, and I very much do not appreciate someone threatening to invade my private life with matters of features for a game. We do not have office space or maintain company phones, so the only number you could possibly dig up would be my personal home number, which I would indeed find to be harassing. If I were to find your address and start calling you, I think you'd feel the same. "And you speak of that you need profit. Tell me, would make Aqua Suit and Flippers suggestion be unprofitable? People love content with function, I'm not sure why it wouldn't be considered." If you will note, the first feature you suggested _already exists in the game_. It's called the Fast Swimmer enchant. And also, regarding the flippers enchant I have written at length in multiple other places about why that sort of thing isn't what I want to do. Rather than doing any looking into past discussions, you are wasting my time making me repeat myself. If you read the past discussions and have something new to add, I will read your comments; but that's been pretty well-trodden ground. If everyone thinks that they can PM me or call me and talk for hours, I would never get anything else done. It takes us 5+ manhours a day just to read and categorize all the suggestions that get made. If we also are expected to debate every player about every feature that we don't agree with (not to mention debating every feature multiple times over every time someone new comes into the game), we'd never get anything else done. This is profitless for _you_ and the playerbase. "People love content with function, I'm not sure why it wouldn't be considered." In terms of that more general query, there are easily 10x more features that get suggested than we will ever be able to implement. And that number only grows with time, it doesn't shrink. Therefore we try to pick the ones that we think will best suit the game, and give enjoyment to the most players. If you feel that we have overlooked a feature that is important, then your recourse is not to yell at us or try to get us to debate -- it's to convince other players of the merits of your argument, and get them to upvote your suggestion so that it shows up higher on the Vote Tallies. Thus far you've gone outside all of our normal channels for suggestions, which were set up precisely so that things could operate smoothly, and you've been vaguely threatening in your wording throughout. If I come to your work and make vaguely threatening comments to you, how would that make you feel? Do you think you would be more or less receptive to hearing what I have to say? If I insist that you stop doing your normal work and instead talk to me for hours, do you think that you'd want to do that? Or maybe you were figuring that I'd just work overtime and see my family less so that we could chat about the deficiencies you see me as having? I'm more than happy to take your feedback through the normal channels, and goodness knows I don't mind criticism, but most of what you have said is not as original as you might think. If you look at the forum history and so forth, literally every point you raised was discussed somewhere else at some point. But rather than joining those discussions, you wanted a one-on-one with me, which is something that I simply don't do -- that leads to repetition. Anything that someone has to say to me about the game can and should be said in public, and I'll either respond publicly or other players/staff will. I hope that clears things up to some extent. |
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"I'm just feeling a bit on edge because all my suggestion get shot down these days, and there seem to be a select few of people who get their suggestions considered." We consider suggestions purely on their merit, not based on who made them. Many of the "select few" people that you notice that are getting a lot of suggestions implemented have been aware of Arcen for less than a month. They are simply more in tune with where I want the game to go, and thus their suggestions are more likely to get implemented. Suggestions that enrich what I'm trying to do with the design get implemented; those that try to steer the design somewhere else get shot down. That's not to say that the latter suggestions were inherently lower-quality or that the person was stupider or anything of that nature. The _only_ thing it says is that the person is less in tune with where we intend to take the game. But that doesn't mean that all of their suggestions are going to get shot down either, so certainly feel free to make more -- even suggestions that we don't agree with, we are grateful to have. |
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Also, I'd like to point out that as the guy who reads through (nearly) all of the suggestions, most of the time, I don't even pay attention to who it's coming from. If it's getting implemented, obviously I and Chris look at it so that we know who to thank. But, if you were to look at my notes from the discussions Chris and I have about suggestions coming from the community, you would not see a single player's handle mentioned on any of them. |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| May 22, 2012 10:37 am | Robby | New Issue | |
| May 22, 2012 10:37 am | Robby | Description Updated | |
| May 22, 2012 10:46 am | Robby | Description Updated | |
| May 22, 2012 10:47 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Internal Weight | => New |
| May 22, 2012 10:47 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0024571 | |
| May 22, 2012 10:47 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | new => closed |
| May 22, 2012 10:47 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Assigned To | => Chris_McElligottPark |
| May 22, 2012 10:47 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Resolution | open => won't fix |
| May 22, 2012 10:48 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Edited: 0024571 | |
| May 22, 2012 10:48 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Edited: 0024571 | |
| May 22, 2012 10:52 am | Robby | Note Added: 0024573 | |
| May 22, 2012 10:52 am | Robby | Note Edited: 0024573 | |
| May 22, 2012 11:07 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0024575 | |
| May 22, 2012 11:11 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0024576 | |
| May 22, 2012 2:31 pm | tigersfan | Note Added: 0024605 |
