Larian's obsession with telemetry suggests to me that those pressures have won out in their internal corporate culture, and they resort to anonymous data gathering as the primary/solitary source of 'feedback' they actually consider, but the early access model requires at least a veneer of accepting feedback because part of what you're selling is player involvement in the development process (whether you officially admit it or not). Protip, Larian: telemetry alone is not feedback - collecting all the stats in the game tells you almost nothing useful if the game those stats were collected from is incomplete. Collecting stats from your existing incomplete product is, however, an extremely effective way to create the delusion that simply regurgitating statistically meaningless stats from a deeply unfinished project counts as 'listening to players', and anyone who verbally disagrees with your decisions is 'just a troll' or 'doesn't understand the game'.
Well, I am very much looking forward to that community update they promised, which is supposed to go more in depth about exactly this. I'd very much like to know more details so will withhold judgment. However, we can't just dismiss telemetry and data out of hand - as someone else on the forums also recently pointed out, it is largely the same crowd of people who come to the forums every day to participate in discussions. The opinions of the most active/vocal forum members may not represent the opinions of the rest of the thousands of players of this game who might never come to the forums to make a comment... they play the game, enjoy it, and that's it. And I am glad they do have telemetry and data feeding back to them from the game as we all play it, as this is pretty amazing technology really. The main thing that I'd like to know is how do they interpret that data. And that's why I'm looking forward to the update... soon(TM). sigh.
I think the "how" was what Ink was pointing at.
We already discussed this but in an interview Swen said that "you cant sell bless" to players. I'm close to sure that their telemetry will show that many players just don't use bless, or faery fire to give another exemple. Is that because those spells aren't interresting at all ? is that because the game makes them uninterresting ? Is that because players don"t know what those spells can be usefull for ? That's questions telemetry cannot give any answer.
I think these data can be very valuable especially when they explained a few monhes ago that they use them to understand if the hidden area are not "too hidden". Or to see if players are playing the story as intended, if there are issues and so on... But a lot of these data could mean very different things to different people when you're talking about the mechanics and that's really dangerous according to me.
The game's balance (difficulty, mechanics,...) is a real problem in the game and looking at "where players dies more often" won't help to understand that. To understand that you have to play the game a lot, really learn how it works and probably play the game in a solo playthrough. I'm not sure anything else than player's feedback can be valuable in that case.
But yea, let's wait to read them "soon" to have more details
Originally Posted by Alexandrite
Originally Posted by The Composer
Yes please! Am I right to assume that's a fair example of how people would generally want more of from Larian? I mean, the type of responses. I'm not asking you specifically, Bobla, I already assume that's the case. But I'd love to get a verification from others, just so I can build a case and point to it for reference.
Yes, please - if you're able to whisper in Larian's ears at all, please please relay to them how deafening their silence is to their devoted player base.
Just some kind of contact - a tease here, a tweet there, a "we're working on something really cool, stay tuned" - and then a follow up with something, anything at all. It has been almost 3 weeks since they last promised a community update (last hotfix according to SteamDB was 19 days ago, so coming up to 3 weeks) and no community update has materialised as yet. If they've had another flood, or programming bugs that are difficult to squash, or they've run into any kind of difficulty, we'd still love to know what is happening. I'm sure anyone who's ever touched a computer knows how difficult programming bugs can be, so they would find more sympathy here than derision. If COVID has impacted on their plans or delayed things, again we'd understand, there's still a global pandemic going on - or perhaps, we'd love to hear about how they are overcoming those challenges.
I understand they may have NDAs that they cannot break or reveal details until Big Patch Reveal time comes, but no one here is asking for details or spoilers - just some contact, any at all.
