Larian Studios Forums General Chat It's a-me: Lenny - Senior Community Manager

Hi Nicou,

I have a couple of remarks and questions.


Communication around "how Larian process & parse feedback, etc".



What I would be interested to hear about.

I'm overall fine with mrfuji3's answer.

But my answer would have been "well, everything was initially planned for this communication".


Context.

I realise that you (Nicou) were not yet at Larian when this announcement about a future communication was made. Which explains your somewhat-surrealist and certainly-surprising question.

So here's the context.

• From the start of Early Access, Larian's communication has been nearly non-existent. Players have kept asking for more and better communication.
• Then, in the Hotfix Notes of 12th May 2021, Larian announced they would (finally!) communicate with us, in their next Community Update, and about how they handle feedback.
  You can look up the original post to see that players were pretty excited about this.
  Alternatively you can recall the reactions when you gave some semblance of information about the implementations of Reactions.
• This announcement was followed by ... nothing. The much anticipated communication did not happen.
• Players sometimes enquired about the status of this communication. To which Larian, faithful to what had been their behaviour since the start of Early Access, replied with a resounding silence.
• And since the time you asked mrfuji3 what they would like to hear in that communication about how Larian handles feedback, still nothing has happened.

I hope that Larian's communication experts (... or a few of them, at the very least) do not believe that this sort of communication helps maintaining a healthy relationship with those who take the time to provide feedback. An objective which, on BG3's Steam page, Larian claims to have.


Additional question : what's the backstory behind this ?

It's a bit "meta", but should Larian ever get round to delivering this announced communication about how they handle feedback, I would be quite curious to know how things ended up going that much wrong with this specific part of their Early Access communication.

I can envision several hypothesis.

• Hypothesis 1 : sabotage. Someone wanted to piss their colleagues at Larian (or perhaps make Larian's reputation for communication sink deeper) and inserted some wild claim in the Community Update that Larian had no plan to honour.
• Hypothesis 2 : it was honest mistake by a low-ranking PR person who is not in charge of crafting the communication policy. This communication was never meant to happen. When management caught wind of this, they called it off immediately.
• Hypothesis 3 : Larian truly intended to talk to us about feedback. Sadly, the only person at Larian capable of handling that left the company. Larian was inconsolable and, in their upset, completely forgot about this. Or perhaps Larian believed that no one else on Earth would ever be able to pull it off.
• Hypothesis 4 : it was actually green-lighted by the powers that green-light communications. But then something made Larian change their mind about it. So the plan was cancelled. Larian figured there was no need to inform players. Nothing fosters a healthy relationship like standing your players up, and then proceeding to ghost them.

These are just a few ideas, I'm sure one could come up with more possible explanations. I have no idea which one is more likely.


Side note : why telling people how feedback is handled would be a good thing.

Unless it is more appropriate to say "would have been a good thing" ? Anyway ...


Firstly, and for what it's worth, there is demand. I have seen a fair number of posts of people asking how to best submit feedback, how to make bug reports useful, where to submit feedback, etc.


Secondly, telling players how feedback is handled would probably be beneficial for everyone.

If Larian were to communicate clearly about how they handle (process, but mostly collect) feedback, that would allow players to learn what sort of posts are useless, or of low value.

A possible example are the brainstorming posts ("my new idea for Reactions, what do you think ?"), or more generally all player-to-player discussions posts. I don't know how much superficially or thoroughly the feedback collectors read those posts. I suspect that they quickly classify those posts as not immediately collectable/processable, and so not very useful, and they promptly move on to reading the next post.

For the players who are primarily interested in giving feedback (more than in discussing with the community), knowing which forms of posting are less useful means less time wasted.

For the moderators, less players replying to each other mechanically means less players arguing with each other, and eventually less moderation work to do. Also, better atmosphere on the forums.

For the feedback collectors, less low-value posts to read, even just superficially, means more efficient work.

It sounds like a win for everyone.


Thirdly, it would make Larian seem like they're actually interested in the players' (textual) feedback.

After all, if Larian really wanted to hear the players' feedback, and they wanted to make the collection easier for their feedback scoopers, and they wanted to be somewhat organised/efficient/committed about it, they would give the players some pointers and information about how they handle feedback. They did not do that. So

• they're not that keen in hearing feedback (beyond perhaps some very broad strokes), or
• they don't care to make the job easy for their employees, or
• they're not particularly organised/efficient/committed.

Personally, I don't doubt that Larian wants to collect feedback from the players, and I would rate the third possibility (poor organisation) as more likely than the second.

But it is easy to see how a fair number of players will think Larian just isn't really interested in feedback.



How Larian's communication has changed since two new Community Managers started.

Very little has changed in Larian's communication since the new Community Managers arrived, 3 months ago.

• Salo made essentially one intervention to make feedback collection visible.
  
  One the hand, it's good. Previously, one could have been forgiven for thinking that the person in charge of collecting feedback for Larian, from the official forums, was The Composer.
  
  On the other hand, it feels as if the intervention was made mostly to tick a box. As if "Make feedback collection visible" was on the list of things Larian wanted the new CMs do to.
  
  We got a couple of "thank the player for their feedback" post (this is meant to show the existence of some Larian employee collecting feedback), and a pair of "ask the player a question about what they meant" post (this is meant to show that Larian cares about the feedback). Done. Box ticked. Next task.
  
  And as this was essentially an isolated event, it does not feel as if things have changed (regarding feedback collection).
  
  
• You intervened in a discussion about Reactions, one of the most recurrent topics of feedback, and you gave some update about the status of this feature.
  
  As you could see from the players' reactions after your post, this sort of communication was very welcome.
  
  Your update was a fully non-committal statement that did not contain too much information. But at least it existed.
  
  Since then, there has (sadly) not been any other such comment and update on the feedback. So, again, it does not feel as if things have changed (regarding acknowledging the main feedback topics and sharing updates about the status of the related features).

Beyond those two notable and much-welcome communications, there was ... nothing. Well, nearly nothing.

There were a couple of posts that don't really count.

• Advertisement for "job vacancies" for the PAX West Convention.
• Update about the game's supported platforms, with Stadia going down.
• Advertisement of the Brazilian-Portugese language for DOS2, if that's even worth listing in discussing Larian's communication about Baldur's Gate 3.
• Advertisement of the release of Hotfix#29.

None of the above sounds like Community Management, nor like communications that would not have happened in the era before the arrival of two new CM.

Then there were couple of posts that honestly felt like putting out fires, when players complained too much that Larian was still as silent as before. These were followed by a small spike of activity : a couple of "thank you" posts here and there, and posting in the very safe "Who are you ?" thread. Those posts read as being integral part of the damage control intervention (i.e. putting a couple of forums post out there to remind people that, indeed, there are two CM on the forums now).


In summary, not much has changed in Larian's communication policy since they hired two Community Managers.

Which leads me to two remarks.

1) This lack of change reinforces the idea that Larian's low-communication policy is by design, and not by default.

I don't know the reasons that led Larian to choose to not engage with its players, but they must be very solid. So good that neither the requests for more communication, nor the complaints about the disappointing communication, nor the bad reputation that Larian has been earning on the communication front, have changed Larian's mind.

One could have believed that Larian finally hiring Community Managers (not one, but two !) was a sign that the communication philosophy would change. Clearly, it wasn't.

2) I also think that the label of Community Manager for the new PR folks is a source of confusion and wrong expectations. Larian should probably have give these positions another title.

SerraSerra's Image Macro in this post is pretty on point.

I don't know what is the exact set of tasks that Larian is assigning to you and Salo. For now, I have seen some promotion/marketing, product information, and feedback collection. But I haven't seen much in terms of actual engagement with the community.