Post by Rasputin on Sept 26, 2019 2:45:59 GMT -8
Albert Wei's letter gets mentioned quite a bit over on the official forums. Newer players, or those who didn't venture much further than the game itself, might not know what this was so...
Albert's Letter
Albert's Letter
I'll reproduce the text of it here - in case the blog vanishes.
This was written back in July 2017. I'll leave it to you to decide how much they raised their game after acknowledging all of this.
To our Walking Dead: Road to Survival Players,
As leaders on the development of Road to Survival (RTS) who have been with the game since the launch two years ago we want to address our players about their feedback on our recent Cross Region War (CRW), and the general RTS experience.
We have been reading the RTS forums and your posts on our Facebook page and other channels. Many of you have been playingRTS for a year or more, and you’ve put in a lot of time and passion into the game, your team, and your faction. You’ve told us that we are not consistently delivering on the kind of game you deserve, and that we not communicating as well as we should about the game, the updates, and the player experience. Your concerns are real. We’ve missed the mark and we need to own it.
As game makers we cannot be successful without being passionate about gaming; both as players as well as a creators. As individuals we’ve put literally thousands of hours into concepting, creating and running Road to Survival, and it’s a real hit to the gut to realize that we’re not living up to the bar we set for ourselves. We’ve spent the past days discussing the player feedback with the team, and hammering out the concrete steps we need to take to address these issues, not just today, but consistently as the game evolves.
As developers, we are excited to launch new features like Cross Region Wars, which was designed to give our players and factions new players to compete with and bigger rewards to fight for, something that we know our players want. The initial feedback from players on the announcement of CRW was shared excitement and appeal across factions -- so it’s that much more disappointing that we delivered an inconsistent experience for our most dedicated players. If this was a one time issue, it probably would not have created much concern, but we recognize that we have under-delivered on a recent series of Wars and events in a way that does not live up to the kind of experiences Scopely should be delivering to our players. So we want to address concrete steps for what we’re going to do moving forward.
First, We need to provide a commitment to consistent quality -- we will be doing a full review of our testing processes, and ensuring that we are putting the overall player experience first in everything we do. Aside from the improvements we will make internally, we will also engage the player community earlier and longer in our testing processes, in order to uncover issues earlier and allowing us the opportunity to respond to problems before they impact the wider community. It’s worth noting that we have no illusions of infallibility. Creating and launching new features and experiences; and simultaneously being “consistent” are often at odds with each other, and there will inevitably be times when we try out new styles of events or roll out a feature that even with testing and feedback will not perform as well as desired or expected at global scale. What we must do regardless is work to reduce the frequency of these issues, and be more forthcoming when they occur.
Additionally, we need to demonstrate a player-first attitude -- which needs to be seen in the design of our events, rewards, and features. With millions of players, there is no one “right” answer for everyone, but as players you need to see that the daily game experience is designed to make the game more enjoyable for the community of our active players and factions.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly for a game with such a passionate and active fan base, is a commitment to regular and consistent community updates and engagement. We are letting you down here, and moving forward the leadership of the game team will actively communicate with you about the state of the game and what we are prioritizing to improve it. We want to provide some explicit next steps here since in some ways we cannot satisfy the first two commitments if we’re not being accessible and transparent with our players.
Some of the actions we are putting in place here are:
A single blog post is not going to solve, or even satisfy, your concerns. We want to be clear this is the catalyst for a new process with our team that starts here but only succeeds with actions and follow through. No doubt you may have a healthy level of skepticism and plan to hold us accountable to our stated goals. We wouldn’t expect otherwise, and welcome the opportunity to get you re-energized with the changes you’ll see.
Lastly, while we announced a gift to the entire community for the recent problems with the CRW, we do want to recognize our active faction players who were ready to join in during the event; so, for every faction player who logged on to Road to Survival anytime during the event we are announcing an additional gift of 3 Ultra Rare/Elite Rare Gear Bags. That does not solve any of the issues you’ve raised, or change the need to follow through on all of the commitments we’ve made, but we believe it will be a real benefit to your gameplay at any level of the game.
Thank you again for the dedication, passion, and persistence in seeking a better and more enjoyable game for the entire player community. We look forward to immediately following up with our first developer FAQ this week on Cross Region War, as well as a upcoming developer update on a new feature going into beta testing in the near future.
Albert Wei, General Manager of The Walking Dead, Road to Survival
Jori Pearsall, SVP of Product
As leaders on the development of Road to Survival (RTS) who have been with the game since the launch two years ago we want to address our players about their feedback on our recent Cross Region War (CRW), and the general RTS experience.
We have been reading the RTS forums and your posts on our Facebook page and other channels. Many of you have been playingRTS for a year or more, and you’ve put in a lot of time and passion into the game, your team, and your faction. You’ve told us that we are not consistently delivering on the kind of game you deserve, and that we not communicating as well as we should about the game, the updates, and the player experience. Your concerns are real. We’ve missed the mark and we need to own it.
As game makers we cannot be successful without being passionate about gaming; both as players as well as a creators. As individuals we’ve put literally thousands of hours into concepting, creating and running Road to Survival, and it’s a real hit to the gut to realize that we’re not living up to the bar we set for ourselves. We’ve spent the past days discussing the player feedback with the team, and hammering out the concrete steps we need to take to address these issues, not just today, but consistently as the game evolves.
As developers, we are excited to launch new features like Cross Region Wars, which was designed to give our players and factions new players to compete with and bigger rewards to fight for, something that we know our players want. The initial feedback from players on the announcement of CRW was shared excitement and appeal across factions -- so it’s that much more disappointing that we delivered an inconsistent experience for our most dedicated players. If this was a one time issue, it probably would not have created much concern, but we recognize that we have under-delivered on a recent series of Wars and events in a way that does not live up to the kind of experiences Scopely should be delivering to our players. So we want to address concrete steps for what we’re going to do moving forward.
First, We need to provide a commitment to consistent quality -- we will be doing a full review of our testing processes, and ensuring that we are putting the overall player experience first in everything we do. Aside from the improvements we will make internally, we will also engage the player community earlier and longer in our testing processes, in order to uncover issues earlier and allowing us the opportunity to respond to problems before they impact the wider community. It’s worth noting that we have no illusions of infallibility. Creating and launching new features and experiences; and simultaneously being “consistent” are often at odds with each other, and there will inevitably be times when we try out new styles of events or roll out a feature that even with testing and feedback will not perform as well as desired or expected at global scale. What we must do regardless is work to reduce the frequency of these issues, and be more forthcoming when they occur.
Additionally, we need to demonstrate a player-first attitude -- which needs to be seen in the design of our events, rewards, and features. With millions of players, there is no one “right” answer for everyone, but as players you need to see that the daily game experience is designed to make the game more enjoyable for the community of our active players and factions.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly for a game with such a passionate and active fan base, is a commitment to regular and consistent community updates and engagement. We are letting you down here, and moving forward the leadership of the game team will actively communicate with you about the state of the game and what we are prioritizing to improve it. We want to provide some explicit next steps here since in some ways we cannot satisfy the first two commitments if we’re not being accessible and transparent with our players.
Some of the actions we are putting in place here are:
- A monthly update from the RTS General Manager - spelling out what we’re working on, feedback we’re hearing from the community, and answering open questions from the community channels.
- Community updates by the development team with every major new game feature/event. This will include discussing upcoming new features that are going into beta test so we can educate the players about what to expect, what we are learning in the test realms (good and bad), and how we’re addressing any open issues from the beta if it moves forward to global launch.
- Developer FAQs in the forums that specifically address recurring or topical issues with the players by a team member who can best address it.
- A dedicated Community Lead for RTS. This will provide you more immediate and continuous access to a trusted source who can both speak on your behalf to the development team, and also answer questions and provide insight directly to players on the game. We are actively recruiting for a dedicated Community Lead and want to have that person in place as soon as possible.
- Additionally, we want to develop new ways to facilitate more interactive discussions between ourselves and our players. The goal is to better engage a cross-section of players with more interactive discussions on topics such as new feature design, improving Wars, and faction tools/communication. We will be working over the next weeks to find the right way to accomplish that.
A single blog post is not going to solve, or even satisfy, your concerns. We want to be clear this is the catalyst for a new process with our team that starts here but only succeeds with actions and follow through. No doubt you may have a healthy level of skepticism and plan to hold us accountable to our stated goals. We wouldn’t expect otherwise, and welcome the opportunity to get you re-energized with the changes you’ll see.
Lastly, while we announced a gift to the entire community for the recent problems with the CRW, we do want to recognize our active faction players who were ready to join in during the event; so, for every faction player who logged on to Road to Survival anytime during the event we are announcing an additional gift of 3 Ultra Rare/Elite Rare Gear Bags. That does not solve any of the issues you’ve raised, or change the need to follow through on all of the commitments we’ve made, but we believe it will be a real benefit to your gameplay at any level of the game.
Thank you again for the dedication, passion, and persistence in seeking a better and more enjoyable game for the entire player community. We look forward to immediately following up with our first developer FAQ this week on Cross Region War, as well as a upcoming developer update on a new feature going into beta testing in the near future.
Albert Wei, General Manager of The Walking Dead, Road to Survival
Jori Pearsall, SVP of Product
This was written back in July 2017. I'll leave it to you to decide how much they raised their game after acknowledging all of this.