Communication between the Witcher community and CDPR

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Communication between the Witcher community and CDPR

Disclaimer: this is a heated topic these days, so please stay focused.

Lately a lot of community members expressed their concerns about poor communication with CDPR. Many questions remain unanswered, controversial issues remain unexplained, and in general one gets a feeling that community managers and developers vanished into the void and all communication is represented by single directional PR-style announcements only. It even caused some long standing members here to leave. Reasons for such situation remain unexplained (by CDPR) as many other things as well.

Today I found an interesting chart which shows plans of "promotional activities" by CDPR (page 18 in the PDF):



May be it can shed some light on what's going on? The first group (fans or RPGs and fans of the Witcher) that's what most of the core community here is. As you can see, CDPR refocused most of their resources on a different group. So called "hit buyers" (I'm not sure what that means, but I suspect it's mass market consumers). And if they didn't back that with more resources, you can guess what happened. Communication with the community basically ceased.
 
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A thread for the purpose of badgering CDPR into answering your Technical Questions list is not within the purpose of the forum.

Firstly, that's an accusation which is wrong. Calling "badgering" attempts to fix the severely broken communication is not nice. Secondly, I express frustration of many community members which was practically ignored by CDPR. Please show me forum rules which forbid this. And if it's indeed forbidden, I'll leave this forum for good right away.
 
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This thread isn't about badgering CDPR or getting a response from them. My guess is that is should be a private discussion thread. So perhaps it's in the wrong forum, but it shouldn't be quashed..
Since it involves the whole community and CDPR themselves, it should be public IMHO. It would be highly ironic if thread about CDPR not being open / communicative enough will have to become private. ;D
 
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I see this thread as an excellent opportunity to discuss what the state of the community/forum is like right now, how comfortable we are with it, and what we would like CDPR to do about it. We can't make demands, we know that. But this is a community formed around CD Projekt RED and their games, namely the Witcher. If we feel dissatisfaction with the way CDPR handles their community we should be able to voice our concerns. After all we form the first group in that chart, "Fans of the Witcher", and I am sure CDPR wants to maintain a certain base of fans. The way things are moving right now, this group of fans will start decreasing as many of us feel less welcome and have fewer reasons to stick around, specially when there's poor communication (and our reason for being here is, precisely, communicating).
 
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I like the idea of this thread, but it is true, we shouldn't diverge into meaningless accusations. Question is, how we should proceed to fill this thread. On possiblilty would be to select different PR statements and quote them and state, why we feel they are problematic or at least symptomatic. Then we could collect other events. We should probably also find positive examples. In general we should paint a picture, of what we think is going wrong and how it could be better to make constructive suggestions. Or what do you think?

I think most of us are not interested and accusations or being angry at people but rather reforging the connection especially between the veterans and the company.
 
This could be a potentially valuable discussion, both for the Community and CD Projekt -- if they read it, that is. [MENTION]Mataresa[/MENTION] has a good suggested approach for beginning it. If we analyse what information has been published, which issues haven't been addressed satisfactorily, and what points of CD Projekt's communications we like, dislike, or would prefer to be handled differently, we could arrive at a better understanding of the perceived problem. This could also be the place to consider the question of public relations, and promotional strategies in general, and how the various policies affect the industry. It could be an interesting learning experience, if we pursue it calmly, intelligently, and diligently.
 
Some of CDPR reply to a PM of mine about the slowly dead of the community. He was surprise, nd tell he will report my POV to the manager Staff. It seems they are most distanced from the reality that they thought... And, the forum is dying too, the freedom from yesterday has gone too. Now this is not the forum where people from other censored forums come to express themselves. We have lost something special like forum community. No more trust, no more confidence, no more CDPR's offical Forum with its respected users by the medias... Just another forum in the net.

Just why to fight to be alive yet?
 
Hmm, I can add here only my own personal observation of this forum over the last two months, but for what I have seen so far is following:

* The community in itself is very active here, especially the fan blocks about the lore and books and family/romance stuff and fan fiction/art things, as like also the fans of gwent and in general everyone, me including , the people which are highly creative and full of ideas, on where the game could get improved somehow and people who try to find all kinds of bugs, glitches ect. pp to list stuff up, what CDPR could do all with patches to fix the game and make it in the end better

* On the other hand...the Dev Staff.. or someone called "Community Manager" haven't I seen here posting until today for a single time in any of the threads I've seen or participated in so far..
I see here only posting the occasional Mods, with the most frequent answers coming from Dragonbird in my opinion as most active Mod...

I see here basically no communication at all from the Developers with us...theres nothing they ask us, what we think as community on which things they should focus for now the most for Patches, there is no participation from them in suggestion threads to show us, that they are even interested in the things that come from their community, and if it is just a simple line about showing appreciation, if they like some ideas or would like to see maybe some more details about certain ideas to see from their community to be discussed that could help them to make some decisions for the games future, be it for patches, or be it for the upcoming expansions ect.

So practically I can absolutely understand that perceived impression from the OP, that the forums looks currently, like a meaninless forum of many on the internet, like a forum, that seems to slowly die out, because we seem to receive from the developer staff absolutely no feedback.
All we saw the last months is just making more or less good announcements about when one of the 16 free DLCs appears to be downloadable or when one of the last 3 patches would come (1.05, 1.07, and 1.08 within the last 2 months - 3 patches, within 2 months is also a sign, about how broken alot of the game was on release and there was practically a 4th one for PC,, but thats an other topic now..)


For the near future I'd love to see more interaction from the Devs here in the forum with us, that we get feedback, that we can see that they recognize it when a large part of the community has somewhere issues with the game, be it bugs and glitches of the game, or when the community is talking about something in an large extent, like a made suggestion, that found many likings to see their feedback on that then also.
I haven't seen in the last months since my registration day a single Dev post somewhere in the forums here, but maybe I always looked into the wrong threads..who knows...
But for me this shows simply, that I share the observation from the OP and I'm also pretty sure, alot of people left the forum, because of this lack of feedback, especially in regard of bugs ,glitches and the like and negative effects that came with each following patch, what is the reason why people lose their trust and confidence in CDPR, when problems seem to get ignored over longer time without feedback or a signal towards the community, that these issues are being recognized at least.
 
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Some of CDPR reply to a PM of mine about the slowly dead of the community. He was surprise, nd tell he will report my POV to the manager Staff. It seems they are most distanced from the reality that they thought... And, the forum is dying too, the freedom from yesterday has gone too. Now this is not the forum where people from other censored forums come to express themselves. We have lost something special like forum community. No more trust, no more confidence, no more CDPR's offical Forum with its respected users by the medias... Just another forum in the net.

Pretty much nails the current state of the forum :( can t say where this ll go...
But with the recent statements ...specially regarding the promised RED Kit
upset people ... which is in FACT, wrong communication with the community

Unfortunatly i don t share the opinion on the purporse of this thread.... it seems
the "old" forum community is slowly dying... and i guess we will not get it back.
or ... lets say not back in the form we remember it... this is just impossible.

This has several reasons, first: ... dmg is done by the mislead communication...
second: ... core members left ... i assume many even without bothering to say
they leave... third: ... the audience is another one than ... lets say 2013

So we might get some of the "old behavior" back ... but it will not be the same
anymore.
 
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First I want to say that communication between CDPR and the fans has always been sparse. I've been here a long time and the fact is they don't talk to fans much, nor is that obligatory. What they've been stellar at is actually reading fan feedback and implementing it into their games. There's no denying that. And since we've been so spoiled I do think some fan demands go a bit too far. I'm guilty of this myself. What worries me though is the increasing use of pat PR slogans and a distancing from PC. There was a ton of this in the lead up to TW3, and it still seems to be their MO. For me the tipping point came when they released the modkit and curtly said this is all we're getting, then alongside that they continue to state they want to 'treat all platforms the same'. It's pretty clear what this means for PC users, and is a 180 from what they said while developing TW1 and TW2. We also know they're in talks to release mods on console, which in theory shouldn't affect what they offer on PC, but now I'm concerned what it might mean. Ultimately, going multiplatform is good for the company but I feel it's been behind a number of changes at CDPR that haven't been so great. I hope they don't feel the need to respond to this thread in particular, as we're discussing stuff only the lead members in the company can speak to. Not one of the devs or Marcin Momot. Thanks to mods for keeping this open.
 
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First I want to say that communication between CDPR and the fans has always been sparse. I've been here a long time and the fact is they don't talk to fans much.

Communication in the past was patchy, but it wasn't practically totally non existent. Plus in the past community was smaller, and with the bigger size communication issues only escalated without resources needed to maintain even the previous level.

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Question is, how we should proceed to fill this thread. On possiblilty would be to select different PR statements and quote them and state, why we feel they are problematic or at least symptomatic. Then we could collect other events. We should probably also find positive examples. In general we should paint a picture, of what we think is going wrong and how it could be better to make constructive suggestions.

That's a good point. So let's recollect some past issues:

1. The "downgrade" issue. Initially CDPR demoed TW3 (on E3) using their WIP variant of the engine. Later demos showed a noticeable difference. Community was concerned that the game was "downgraded" because of consoles. CDPR practically didn't respond to these concerns, until the issue blew up. Later CDPR gave an interview to Eurogamer trying to explain what caused the change, and saying they didn't explain anything to the community "frankly speaking because we didn't see it as a problem". But it obviously was a problem of communication. Note that CDPR were discussing it with the media, but again not with the community.

2. RedKit 2 release issue. Many people were waiting for the promised RedKit 2, and when CDPR instead released ModKit, community was again concerned that it twas trimmed because of consoles? And what did CDPR say to the community? That nothing else is planned.

3. The issue with community Q&A. Community was promised that it will happen closer to the release of TW3. It was pushed off a few times, and then it was pushed off completely without even a comment. It's a communication failure as well.

From the document linked in the first post you can see that CDPR in general increased marketing budget a lot. Quite a lot. You could assume that marketing should include communication with the community. But from the same chart you can see that most of it is going into "hit buyers". What I think CDPR fail to realize, that both "hit buyers" and "avid gamers" (whoever they are) can end up being in the first group because they liked the game. And it's not enough to market the game with single directional PR. Community should be addressed as well.

Understandably marketing can be tricky. For instance, with the downgrade debacle if they wouldn't have published any info on E3, there wouldn't have been any debacle to begin with. I.e. their internal changes to the engine would have stayed internal. But they thought that E3 demo is good marketing and publicity, and later they stepped into not addressing the change publicly as well. So I'm afraid what they learned from it is not to communicate things more openly, but the opposite - not to communicate anything at all. While it can prevent cases like "downgrade" concerns, it won't solve this disconnect that community feels lately.

So to get back to your point. The purpose of this thread is not to just collect examples of such issues, but to propose some solutions. What could CDPR do better? I think firstly, as many others already expressed - talk to us. I'm not sure what exactly it involves for CDPR. Hiring more people, or changing internal attitude, but in the past there were a few active community managers here on the forum, but they either have left or stopped participating. And CDPR can do better, as you said we should mention positive examples too. For instance it's good to remember several great community interviews with level designers which @Kinley conducted around the release time. They were answers to community questions and it was great.

Secondly, I think CDPR shouldn't assume that no one cares or "it's not a problem" (like that Eurogamer interview says). People do care, and lack of communication is a problem. And being straight with the community will only gain you more good will.
 
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For instance it's good to remember several great community interviews with level designers which @Kinley conducted around the release time. They were answers to community questions and it was great.

Actually I wanted to do more of these, but the interest just wasn't there, so they got cancelled. I think it's a combination of most of the "old guard" leaving and the interests of the community as a whole changing due to the interests of its new members being different.
 
Actually I wanted to do more of these, but the interest just wasn't there, so they got cancelled. I think it's a combination of most of the "old guard" leaving and the interests of the community as a whole changing due to the interests of its new members being different.

In other cases they didn't answer anything at all while there was enough interest. So I'm not sure really how they decide when to answer and when not to. It seems to be an arbitrary thing (at least from community perspective, I don't see any logic), and I guess community can lose interest in spending time and effort on this, if it can easily end up ignored and not answered.
 
Aaaaah, I don't like that image. It make me feels like just an impersonal source of money.

Well, it's addressed to the shareholders, so they need to show their plans for profits. It's understandable that as a company they need to balance their business with other aspects. But it would be unfortunate if that would come at the cost of community being ignored or viewed as just a profit source.

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Actually I wanted to do more of these, but the interest just wasn't there, so they got cancelled.
If you have any practical proposals how to fix this and restore communication with CDPR - feel free to comment.
 
I'm actually pretty interested in how CDPR defines "managing the community". What's the daily job of the community manager? How is he supposed to interact with the community? How deeply is he involved in the decision making process? How much freedom does he have? What other channels of community integretion exist?

I mean, what's their strategy for the community? I don't see ANY tbh. This forum her for example just exists but rarely does ever anybody interact with the community, not even Marcin. Sometimes I get the feeling that they talk more in the Polish forum but that's imo a shame since the Witcher is an international brand for a long time now and the community should interact in English imo so that everybody can participate.

Any response of the REDs would be appreciated.
 
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