Personally I’m a bit baffled by the “lack of communication” argument. I guess it’s all a matter of perception, but we’ve made an update on the 10th of January and another one yesterday. That’s only 3 weeks apart. In addition we’ve mentionned our status on Twitter and those forums a couple times during this past week. It’s not like we haven’t said anything since the end of the Kickstarter you know ? 
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Yeah but as you can see it’s not enough… to uderstand me, I think that 99% of the games I follow (including AAA) have he same problem : it is ok when you only have good news… when yiu have a problem it’s not imo
This is why I preconize a permanent exchange like if the community was part of the team, even with the obvious loss of dev time inducted
With all due respect, I am baffled why you wouldn’t put said (Twitter and those forums) information here on your website. After all, not everyone supports Twitter but they are supporting you here on I-Novae/Battlescape forums. As for update, I believe there was no decision regarding the delay of the release, at least not here, so people are probably somewhat miffed that we were left in the dark to the very last second. And I hate to break the news to you but 2 updates provided and 2 ‘mentions’ you offered isn’t a whole lot, especially for a company that promotes DEV access.
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A weekly debrief could be enough I think, even for a little paragraph… the point is the transparency
Maybe somthibg more pro than a little paragraph but it is just about the frequency not the “how”
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Woo first post!
I think that the kickstarter update would be improved if you included this. A delay is very understandable if your building the network base for the game and you want to make it work well, not just work right now.
For some advice, maybe consider copying this post and putting it on the kickstarter? I think people would be very impressed if they saw what you are working on.
Especially as Star Citizen still has 30GB patch updates, even after 4 years and a 100million.
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It’s not so much the frequency of communication that’s irritating as much as the information given in the updates. I’m pretty sure up until Sunday most people didn’t know Kimmo had left, and if you’d known this and made it known in the Jan 10 update it might have altered expectations. But because we didn’t know, we kinda expected January was still the target.
I also think the post you gave up above about what was actually needed before the release would have been a helpful thing to share in the Jan 10 update, because it again would have allowed people to set better expectations if they had an understanding of what exactly was holding up the release. It also means you can better explain these situations in follow-up updates, and also shows that you respect the audience’s intelligence by giving more technical updates of what’s going on.
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I would say it IS a matter of perception, Flavien. From the perspective of you folks working on this game I’m sure time flies by with all of the work to be done. From our side time crawls with regard to this project because all we see are single updates several weeks apart. I’ve seen updates handled badly, and I’ve seen them handled well. Something I believe I have gleaned from following a company that does it well, is that not every update has to give people a complete picture of the project at that stage–just throw out something that you’re working on. This same company (Trek Industries) seems to enjoy throwing things out on social media that are more social/personal, and don’t even relate directly to the game. The lesson, IMO, is that social media is just that–social, and we’re interested in the people as well as the products Facebook is a great medium for this, and it’s how I like to keep tabs on the projects I’m following, even though I don’t use FB as its intended to be used (you want my dossier you’re going to have to do the work yourself :P).
Fight the good fight, guys. All the best.
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We understand your frustration everybody and we’re sorry. You’re absolutely correct that time flies for us and crawls for you and we recognize that your angst primarily comes from a place of love - your desire to play our game. Kimmo’s departure wasn’t announced in the first update because it was completely unexpected and we didn’t want our first update to start on a negative note. Secondly we honestly thought we could get it all done by the end of January.
As @INovaeFlavien mentioned what we’re working on currently is critical infrastructure. While it isn’t particularly sexy everything that comes next is dependent on account management, authorization, deployment, and patching. None of this code existed outside of our website prior to this month. On top of that since this code is critical it has to be done right. If we screw something up here we’re going to be getting bogged down by support requests due to issues with payments and being able to play the game someone just purchased. Even worse we could have a security breach that leaks user information or allows their account to be compromised. The amount of testing involved in making sure this code is solid is significant.
Moving forward we will work on improving our transparency and of course we’re diligently focused on getting you guys the prototype as soon as possible.
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I think the amount of transparency that people truly want (not just say that they want) is minimal. Right now, we get posts every couple of weeks that are 3 or 4 paragraphs long, explaining what you’re doing (plus all of the microblogging and stuff you guys are doing) which, really, is appreciated.
But it doesn’t give a sense of progress.
It’s the old file system action percent bar thing. It doesn’t matter so much which files are being moved, or even necessarily how quickly that bar is filling up, so long as the bar is progressively filling. Hopefully the Quick Progress Reports will better fill this role.
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I agree. There isn’t a great deal or even a moderate amount of information; it’s almost as if it’s an inconvenience. And that is not to say the DEVs are not working their butts off because we know they are. Perhaps they are so laser focused on the game and building the foundation that they would rather spend their time on more immediate things that have a direct bearing on development. I understand this but I think developing a sense of community can also benefit Battlescape both financially and in the broader context of PR. Besides, we are not only here to support the game, we are also here - and I think this is something that is often overlooked - to experience the community developing it. Of course there are those who simply want to give money and be done with it and that is understandable given everyone’s busy schedules. But there are those of us who are passionate about the development of this incredible Engine created by some incredibly talented guys. And lets not forget, this Engine is truly groundbreaking and leaves all other Engines behind. This is something to be proud of and perhaps the DEVs need to step back and realize that the present lack of interest has more to do with a lack of communication/PR than anything. Personally I think the DEVs should be crowing from the rooftops with this Engine and letting us get energized over being a part of its development. But this can’t be down with a few tweets and updates on the website. This has to be done proactively based on real appreciation and confidence with what they have to offer. And they have a lot to offer!!!
Sorry for the wall of text - what were we talking about? 
Anyway, as Keith has already explained, they are in transition and things are pretty frenetic at the moment setting up all the protocols and such; but it sounds to me that they understand the situation and our concerns. I’m pretty sure once the Engine is out and we are posting videos more will be forthcoming - well 70% sure anyway.
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It sounds pretty practical
The one i want you guys to take your time is security, accounts and authentication. Dealing with hackers (both preventing and fighting them) is probably very annoying. One thing i really want to see is the ability for me (as a player) in the client to live-report a hacker and for a dev/cm member to go there in realtime and see if it is indeed hacking and instantly ban it. Also “gold spammers” are annoying, players who get hacked and their account is turned into an in-game ad spammer.
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thousands of players (backers). only like 6 team right now. And that number pretty much scales down in terms of staff usually. Bit unrealistic but a nice thought.
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Well, here’s a good chance to hire me as a community manager down the line 
I would love to be involved, who knows maybe i’ll join the dev team in time.
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Yeah, they could probably get some people to volunteer to be server moderators at least, or something like that.
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I’d imagine there’d be plenty of old-timers happy to do some server moderation
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Mod abuse! Mod abuse everywhere!
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Lol. Lots of games end up having moderators who are more interested in exercising authority over others than allowing true public input. From what I am seeing here on I-Novae, Flavien and Keith take criticism constructively. I tip my cyber hat to them.
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They have, in general, always done this in addition to the community. It’s why I found myself drawn to the community because it was an inviting place to chat and debate and criticize construcrively.
I think it’s important for all of us, including the community, to be open to criticism as we see more and more new faces as development goes on. You never know what you’ll learn!
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