Its unsurprising that the list of improvements to your game is light on examples.
You’re two nerds who haven’t ever delivered a product working from home, not Activision Blizzard or EA.
“Am I out of touch? No, its the community that’s wrong!”
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Multiplayer games are very hard to make successful.
Even harder if you ignore some of the golden rules.
You think you can’t afford someone who understands the principles of marketing and community management. The truth is you can’t afford not to have someone on your team with these skills.
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It’s good that this is being worked on, because I think we all agree improvement is necessary to make the game friendlier to new players. This is tangential to the point the letter raises though.
I don’t see why that shouldn’t still be the case for the “unsexy” work too. The people that have spent many hours playing this game probably have a good idea about how the interface and the game generally could be made more accessible. In fact, I’m incredibly confident, based on the years and years of threads based solely on UI
I’m not sure I can agree with this. I understand that some of this was down to lawyers being involved, but we struggled to get any information about why INS parted way with two of its developers shortly after the KS campaign ended. Those developers were also ejected from the community Discord without warning, which given the community Discord was actually run by the community at the time, was rather upsetting.
Ok, but as part of the discussion we had as a moderation team, we strongly suggested that at the very minimum, we should integrate a moderation bot to make our jobs easier, given we are purely volunteers, and make sure that we can remain accountable to the community. Sure, all of these bots take maybe an hour or a couple hours to configure properly, but even this hasn’t been done.
I also still believe that if you’re intending on making a multiplayer game, community management is one of your most important functions. If you don’t have players, your game can be pretty as hell, but no-one will play it. The game itself has very little incentive for people to come back to it at the moment (there’s another thread about that though), so the absolutely second best way to counter that is to have an active and healthy community that use the game to play together. Happy community members also offer free advertising through word-of-mouth, which can get you more bodies in game and more sales, both of which you desperately need.
Even single-player games benefit from good community management, and I believe we’ve given No More Robots as an example of how a dedicated community management team can help an indie publisher overperform. But even here, INS has an advantage that NMR doesn’t have. You have well over a decade of community engagement and creativity to tap into, a lot of it provided by those that have signed this letter.
The other problem is that it really doesn’t matter how much money you throw at your game if it isn’t going to convince people to buy the game and keep it. A dead game with a dead community won’t sell your game and will likely lead to more refunds than fully converted purchases.
Ok, let’s just quickly talk about that, because SteamDB esitmates between 0 and 20,000 players, but it also says there are 13,905 followers which either suggests the actual number is less, or these are the people that are interested but failed to convert. It also tells us that its recorded average total playtime is 3.3 hours, with 0 minutes in the last two weeks.
But this also tells us more. In the last ~6 months it has kept records for, your player peak has been between 200-250 players, but for some reason on October 9th last year you had over 14,000 people watching the game on Twitch, with about 50 people playing at the time.
Between these points, clearly we’re seeing some number of people buying the game (but it seems to be generous to call it tens of thousands), but the vast majority aren’t playing it. It suggests that even with a healthy number of twitch views giving visibilty to the product, there’s not enough there to convert people.
So again, we obviously understand you can’t make everyone happy. But most of the people who buy the game just aren’t playing it, and probably aren’t actively invested in its development. Whereas the people in this thread have followed this project for over a decade, and have funded and fought to get this game to exist. If you can’t make the people that already want you to succeed happy, you’re going to struggle with everyone else.
Believe it or not, we get that. But that’s why a community manager is invaluable, because they can drive community engagement whilst the development team has their nose to the grindstone. They can manage expectations, curate community suggestions for whatever comes after, and generally keep morale up and maintain order. And yes, as you pointed out earlier in the post, communicating across multiple channels is a lot of work. That’s why it’s a full time job people are paid to do, and why it’s an important role to fill especially for multiplayer projects that rely on a healthy community.
Just to wrap up, I think tone is important here. No-one here wants you to fail, if anything because people have their own money riding on it not failing now. I get criticism is difficult, but it’s worth looking into why. And I feel this letter covers why. There’s not been any sense that community engagement has improved since the Discord server was handed over, and since then there have been heavy-handed decisions made that have hurt those who were among the most active and most willing to support the team.
The two roads forward suggested in the letter are for INS to take a step back and let the community look after itself again until you’re ready to get more engaged, or INS properly invests resources into community management, so that the fanbase that’s supposed to help you sell your game feel looked after.
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They are so out of touch with the reality of 0 customers using their product right now, don’t waste your time on corporate speak. They think because they made it “big” on steam and would rather roll around in early access dough by trapping ppl into a dead game based on “corporate speak” they can just step on the little guy, what goes around comes around.
INS has 1.5 customers a month lmao.
THIS ^ I also hacked in a cloud layer on the screenshots haha I did more planet updates than the devs lol.
It’s nice to see the head honcho actually admit the planet tech is lacking. That’s the key to retention and actually getting closer to the 17,000 player retention of nms and away from the 0 player retention they have now on dead planet’s and moons. That is why NMS and SC invested in the planet tech first before all this other nonsense " gameplay" like a hud and lasers, newtonian tweaks auto aim ect and all the other crap.
ROFL your passion is"inflamed".
Your customer base and community issues a letter of grievances to you.
What is your response:
- A) Acknowledge the problems and provide detailed explanations, promise improvements and ask for patience and more support
- B) Say everything is going fine, and that you are doing your best, and call them disingenuous
CEO: B.
I expected a non-response, given the more recent track record and lack of resources, which is one reason why I didn’t sign the petition. A clear aknowledgement of the grievances brought forth would have been nice though. The “disingenuous” remark is just another validation that better community management is needed 
. But I think the core issue is the lack of fun the game is providing in its current state, which is why so many people are upset. I think nobody would care about community management If the gameplay worked right now.
Given that nothing can be done about that at the moment (according the Keith, If I understood him correctly), its better just to accept it, step back and wait for the games hopefully glorious 1.0.0 release. 
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For those of you who weren’t around in Discord earlier today I wanted to give a quick update. We’ll be hosting a town hall sometime soon, the date/time will probably be announced tomorrow, and if anyone has any recommendations on the medium to use we’re open to suggestions. We’ll also be adding a bot to the Discord channel sometime this weekend.
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Another update, a bot has been added to our Discord.
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Edit: keith has clarified this here: We are removing all community moderators from our Discord
Further update, it looks like @INovaeKeith has demodded the founder of the community discord TopperFalkon, in likely retaliation for his previous post in this thread, though Keith has declined to clarify the specifics.
This after previously refusing to address community outcry regarding a different moderator abusing multiple other community members. A simple post trying to help the project is apparently far more significant to Keith than direct abuse of other members.
Just highlighting that it should be obvious that we’re trying to help the community survive here, and there is a warranted issue of nobody being able to trust the actions of I-Novae. This action is directly going to make this issue worse, again, and there is obviously no transparency in this decision.
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Demodding Topperfalkon seems like a spiteful action, he didn’t even sign the open letter.
Dwarden is on the Discord server now offering some good advice. Please listen to him and learn everything you can from his extensive experience of community management.
If possible, and if he has time, approach him directly for advice, please.
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And they always will be.
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The town hall will be held at 12pm EST on Sunday, May 10th (roughly a week from today). @Lomsor has agreed to be the town hall moderator and will collect questions from all community member participants. The town hall will be held in the townhall voice channel on our Discord and speech will be disabled for everyone except members of the I-Novae dev team. We are currently looking into the possibility of temporarily enabling voice for each person asking a question so that they can ask their own question.
The agenda will be set by those asking questions, however we will not be answering any questions regarding the banning of @cybercritic. We’ve already repeatedly explained why we banned him and have nothing more to say on the issue.
@cybercritic as for your participation in the town hall we are willing to temporarily un-ban you for the duration. If at any point we deem your behavior unacceptable we will re-ban you no questions asked. After the conclusion of the town hall you will be re-banned.
This is a big experiment for us and if it goes well we’ll look into doing these town halls semi-regularly.
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What did I do to you @inovaekeith I don’t recall insulting your mother or anything like that, something would require a permaban without any warning. @INovaeHutchings never warned me in DMs, you never spoke to me in DMs, @inovaeflavien never warned me in DMs. I don’t recall doing anything wrong, but moaning?
I’m not a rabid dog.
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While the issues extend far further than critic, this is definitely one of the issues people will want to discuss. It has been acknowledged by inovae staff that the handling surrounding how he was banned was not perfect:
- You acknowledged in the discord earlier that the reason that the ban being “permanent” was down to just lacking the tools for temporary discord bans.
- A miscommunication about critic being properly warned in private has come to light. Considering the ban was “voted on” before you all even had all the right information…
- The context of the ban was someone telling critic to “get fucked” and then asking hutchings to ban him… this is a weird situation to ban someone, why not just ban critic when he actually does something worth banning him for.
Being so committed to keeping a single person banned forever seems oddly specific especially when most community members do not agree that he was disruptive enough to warrant said perma. It’s like being committed to a course because it’s the course we are committed to. If i felt as strongly as you all seem to about critic, at this point i would still just make some kind of compromise like a conversion to a temporary ban, especially now that you have the tools for it, just because such a large portion of the veteren community is in agreement. Many seem to think he shouldnt have been banned at all, but you don’t need to just do exactly what everyone wants, nobody is expecting that. Comprimising is a consideration of the special context and circumstances.
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The CEO has a personal grudge against critic, there is no way they will unban him.
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Thanks Keith and Team for the willingness to talk directly to the community. As I mentioned yesterday in voice chat, it seems that communication works much better trough voice then the forms we have been accustomed too.
I will do my best to prepare and moderate the town hall meeting. If anyone has anything they think should be on the agenda (beside what has been brought up in the letter), please write it here or PM me on the forum or discord.
Even though I would also like the issue of the ban to be resolved, I don’t see that it is possible at this point.
Both sides are locked in currently.
I strongly disagree though that the only solution is to try to uphold the current situation. It is ok though to postpone resolution to a later date. Preferably some tangible one.
As it stands I think a one sided solution won’t work without some casualties. I hope we can find a compromise at a later date.
If not, these casualties should at least be recognised.
As such I would ask everyone who is rallied up about the issue to try to focus on building up a basis on which all issues can be communicated, both ways.
This is a chance we all should recognise, al be it while upholding the purpose for all of this, creating a good environment where a multiplayer community can thrive.
On the other hand I can really understand that people, especially critic, are extremely offended by the whole ordeal. Trough now countless chats I was able to understand the reasons of such and still can’t anticipate what is next to come or if some approach is really the way to go.
I just try my best to get the most out of this guys. I am sorry.
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For reference critic, since you weren’t in the discord when we pressed for an answer (though a lot of other critics were…), Keith did finally give us an ‘official’ reason:
critic repeatedly instigated fights and talked negatively about the game, frequently misrepresenting the truth, to new players
I didn’t see at the time how rules were broken here though.
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Am I correct that this will be on 10/05 at 18:00 CET?
I’m always confused by AM-PM switch, you have 11AM -> 12PM -> 1PM, and then 11PM -> 12AM -> 1AM
There are game related discord servers where you are banned for doing that once… No fights, trolling, negativity and racism are like general rules…
p.s. as a thought: expressing your criticism as opinion is one thing, talking negativity to other members is another.
Thinking about all of this it seems like a huge loss of trust has happened at some point and/or (probably and) over time. Everyone has reacted differently to this.
Some have left, others have changed approach, some are starting to exploit weaknesses shown.
What I see is a very strong urge in everyone for answers, a truth, that can be trusted again or for some trusted for the first time ever. I feel it myself, very strongly, it just manifests a bit differently.
The aggressive accusations and exploitation of weaknesses (Like accusations of personal interests and controversial nominations) are one form of that, I think. Trying to dare the negative image that has formed or was there all along to stop hiding and manifesting itself and as such, finally reveal an answer that can be trusted as it would be far less ambiguous then conclusions based on derived information.
The urge is so large that it pushes people to do these things.
I don’t think its meant to harm. Not yet at least or at least not from everyone.
It would once the battle to rebuild trust is completely lost and the image of the antagonist is seen as much more likely to be the truth that can be trusted rather then what previously has been believed or endured as a status quo.
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“Instigating fights” seems like a rule violation (If thats indeed what happened and If that was intended by Critic).
Bad mouthing the game can also be seen as a violation of the “Be kind”-Rule. I personally would not have banned Critic for it though, even if it happened repeatedly (I don’t know if thats what happenend). I would not ban anyone for “bad mouthing” the game…
Banning “negative” voices is always a slippery slope, but I can understand it on a personal level. To me this just highlights the need for a community manager again because to maintain a healthy community you need someone who has no reason to feel personally offended by just or unjust criticism.
@cybercritic Did you do the things you are accused of (in your view)? And if you did: Have you considered apologizing, so we can have you back?
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