Emissary wrote: Sat Aug 27, 2022 6:39 pm
So what do you see as the main reason the site can not get any more help than it does?
Lack of time by Max, Gamesbond and co to actually process / train / weed through the people who actually want to help. It's not fair to put all of the blame on Max or Gamesbond given that Max has had horrible personal stuff he's been going through, and Gamesbond is literally getting settled into a new home, but it still pains me to see those two's absence result in lack of qualified help.
If I was the RoR administrative team, I would certainly just open source the game's code and all the tools needed to help, aside from confidential parts such as anti-cheat and potential art team work, so that there exists public resources for people to actually contribute that don't make the 'help' feel like they're having to go through some shady avenues to contribute.
Secondarily, if I was the administrative team, I would be less resistant to people agreeing to complete work on behalf of the team. If an opinion on change is massively popular, there should be no sole figure on the RoR team that shoots it down single-handedly. Ideas should be allowed to fail on their own merit. The will of an entire community should not be subject to one or two people's opinions that are in positions of power before they are attempted to be trialed. GamesBond's focus groups were supposed to allow for this, but I feel like that, still, is an exclusionary club and the problem changes from one or two people to 10 to 40, and major issues like NerfedButtons' removal or a year of focus on a game mode with no one playing it (Ranked) as opposed to a focus on bugfixing, polish, FTUX, and completion of base Warhammer Online content such as Lost Vale and TOVL are still left unaddressed and the playerbase feels like they are swept under the rug with no say.
I guarantee that this community has or had qualified people that would be willing to contribute if it were made easier and have an actual process for doing so.
Side note because it's been needing addressed and I had no way of publicly stating it as I left all 89 discords I was in to save my sanity from idiocy and people having ease of access to me during the day:
I've had some folks approach me in private messages about 'making my own RoR' recently and I don't think that's fair to RoR / Warhammer's community nor the appropriate way of approaching this issue. I think the issue should be solvable by the community at large, and people are currently voting with their time by playing other games as the population declines.
I'm thankful that GamesBond is listening and organizing those focus groups, but I worry about the speed and accuracy of those groups' implementation without the proper support of a team of developers capable of implementing those suggestions. There are no public facing tests of upcoming content, there are also no public facing roadmaps of what to expect. It's hard to get excited for new content or changes when you know there's a 50/50 chance of the team in question working against your own interest and you have no say or objection to the upcoming content in question. That imo is all the worst parts of corporate AAA games with none of the monetization rationale.