There's old-style and new-style PR. Old-style is the kind well-trained managers are comfortable with. All announcements are made by PR officials and are carefully screened to put the company in the best light. Nothing is announced until it is certain, lest it result in accusations of downgrades or vaporware. You can understand that managers who are beholden to investor-elected directors take to this strategy as a means of what can gently be called arse-covering. This is not, and cannot be, the new style. New-style PR declares, following The Cluetrain Manifesto{/i] that markets are conversations, and the purpose of PR is to engage the opinion leaders whether they be journalists or outspoken forum members or whoever. You cannot ignore this, because the Internet will subvert you if you do. You must engage the opinions of those who have opinions (at least those who are worth engaging, those who make demands the company cannot fulfill are merely excluding themselves from the conversation). CDPR is only now learning how to do this. Be patient and encouraging to those who are learning.
In regard to your tech thread, there's no doubt in my mind the unfortunate changes to the engine mid-development prevented them from carrying that out. It kind of sounds like they were in emergency mode, so sharing code details might not have been that flattering. I strongly feel that mid-TW3 development changed everything for the company. I also feel TW3 saved it. They needed the success of that game.
They changed their communication methods after/during downgrade drama, its obvious. They are not promising anything right now because they dont want another backlash. Look how they changed communication for Cyberpunk 2077 they will talk about this game probably 6-8 months before release not like Witcher 3 (2 years) . Part of what made this community great was waiting for new trailers / gameplay, "coming soon" from marcin, community chat when we watched trailers etc and after that talking about stuff and giving feedback, for example Novigrad size in 2013. Hearts of Stone release date is october and we still know/saw nothing which confirms what i wrote above.
The other was made at somewhat greater length by Kinley. You cannot have a conversation that consists of accusations, demands, and shouts of "mai waifu". That's not public relations nor anything that responsible executives should be forced to endure. That's why we have moderators, and moderators have the power to say enough is enough.
Honestly, I don't blame them. Even if that was their mistake not to act before the fandom and cancer plague spread.
I would rather be a beggar or corpse handler, than moderator right now (or after the release). I mean, I would be obliged to read the fandom threads and act if necessary *shiver*. I feel for you BLUs.
All in all, last weeks really dimmed my interest in the game.
I was planning 3rd playthrough when Redkit comes out, but we know how it ends - won't comment on it.
Forum has gone all mad, literally BSN or worse in some places.
I am more excited about Mad Max game now, than for W3 expansions honestly - especially after that thing with additional romance dialogues with quality of a tumblr fanfic.
:eredinfacepalm:
Fucking hell.
I'm honestly tearing up reading this. You have no idea how bad I want this back.
Could be. If the engine changes were so radical and expected on the constant basis, they could also worry that any given answer could become invalid soon after. But it still doesn't explain why they didn't address it post release when engine must have been stabilized already.
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I hope they are learning indeed, and I think community can give them the benefit of a doubt and assume poor communication is not caused by intent to ignore, but simply by lack of experience. Everybody would welcome some improvement in this regard.
That's exactly what we were discussing. Triss topic in the Polish forum has 36 pages, here it's a few hundreds pages. And guess which one REDs replied to?
Like @Kinley said in his post, sadly, the community is changing (for the worse) and so CDPR's communication with said community would have to change, even if it was mainly their fault recently in making it so in the first place imo.
If this is the way they are going to handle things from now on, then it is better just to leave this forum alltogether, I joined this forum two years ago because I saw a community that was passionate about a game coming out and I saw the developer of the game sharing their excitement and passion of their product back to their fanbase, that beautiful continuous back and forth relationship is what made this forum great, even with all the backlashes and the toxic discussions we had regarding the demos and the downgrade Witcher 3 got, I do not want that to go away, even if it is sadly inevitable in the long term.
Even though I didn't want to, recently In a weak moment i tweeted some reds and got a (1) reaction within hours, before that it took weeks before even someone reacted to my thread.
I always thought this forum is the connection between us the fans and them the developers, but it looks like this connection became just an one way street nowadays without knowing, whether whatever you write will even reach them, even less if they even care anymore.
In the past 2 years I just trusted them to do so, but since this year, I am not so sure anymore.
You know, money makes the rules...if the game sells like hot cake, they can't really have done much wrong.
I always thought this forum is the connection between us the fans and them the developers, but it looks like this connection became just an one way street nowadays without knowing, whether whatever you write will even reach them, even less if they even care anymore.
In the past 2 years I just trusted them to do so, but since this year, I am not so sure anymore.
You know, money makes the rules...if the game sells like hot cake, they can't really have done much wrong.
There was no active feedback from CDPR. That part needs to be stressed. They never did this. The people who are new here think they used to 'communicate'. No, they didn't. They were a nobody indie dev from Poland. They've never talked to the community that much. My main gripe is their actions as a developer now, not their communication.
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Yeah, that was one of the first things I learned here, but I always had the impression that they listened to us, but something changed in the last couple of months.
My main gripe is still with the actions of the so-called community. Whenever CDPR brought out a preview, there were accusations that the game had been downgraded, and too many members who wanted nothing more than to shout down every effort CDPR made to explain the state of the game. The explanations of why CDPR made the game from a single build were turned against them by members who had nothing better to do than carp, and dismissed as false charges of trying to maintain "console parity" and "crippling" the game for PC. Members who participated in that flame festival should be ashamed of themselves, and the rest of us should see that that manner of thoughtless attack has led to the reluctance to share information that is seen today.
"Nor cast your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you in pieces."
"Nor cast your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you in pieces."
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Let's be honest here, your experience in this industry has colored your defense of CDPR. I admire you as an individual to no end, i really do, but defending CDPR the way you do seems biased to me. Why is CDPR still showing the old build of their game on their main page acceptable? That isn't the game you're buying. It simply does not exist. Why are they content to now ignore certain claims they made previously? There's no excuse for saying you'll do something and then not doing it.
Also, I never saw CDPR trying to explain "downgrade" here on the forum publicly. Did they ever do it? To dismiss something, there should be what to dismiss. From that Eurogamer interview it was clear they didn't even think that it was important to communicate, so they didn't.
But its not old build. screens just looks better because they are downsampled from 4k. Compare these photos to debut trailer and vgx trailer they are looking completely different. Character models, lighting, shaders etc everything is more or less comporable with the game i got. Screens are much more sharp of course.
I'm not using Twitter, but even if I did, that would look more like a private communication channel. It seems developers feel uncomfortable to have public conversations on their own forum. That's very unfortunate.
The point is...when you don't give an explanation, a satisfying one, things get worse. Just because the costumer, the old fan, feels betrayed and abandoned.
You could be right saying that us overreacted with that, but there wasn't any attempt to explain the situation from CDPR. Actually, the same contrary. When they say something like that issue doesn't exist, even if you see it with your own eyes...how you feel about. Cheated. Simply cheated.
That was the communication problem, and things just escalated very quickly. But, with that lack of info, couldn't be otherwise.