Increasing Forum Participation/Vitality

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What changes in the forums do you believe would increase participation?


  • Total voters
    87
I think that the forums are fine as they are.

Posting volume on these forums looks like every other game forum that I either participate in or occasionally check out. When something new happens, lots of people have lots to say about it, especially if its bad. When the game is in periods of steady state, a few people continue to post regularly, a lot more of us drop by once every few days to check things out, and most people go on to other things until there's something new worth talking about.

This seems like reasonable behavior to me.
 
I tend to shy away from forums now. They were bad even when I frequented them more years ago, but the level of entitled toxicity has either grown or I have just finally found myself unable to politely deal with it.

I used to have issues with some games I have played. *DAOC, KotOR, LotR Online, etc.) and I would post up suggestions and concerns and likely sometimes strayed into less then polite territory but it seems presently, too many go incredibly negative and toxic because they wanted something else, and they refuse that anyone can possibly disagree or like it as it is etc.

I'm just over it. Its not a forums problem, its a people problem.
 
Coming from the point of view as a CP77 player, I think I can at least provide some insight from this playerbase. I myself got quite invested, not only in CP, but also in the CDPR forums in the months around the initial launch, and then also during the followup period of bug fixing etc.

However, I have significantly dropped my activity on the fora simply because the apparent productivity from devs has equally dropped. Or let me rephrase, the interaction between devs and players has dropped significantly. Between launch and the larger 1.3/1.31 patches, there has been little to no communication between the devs and the community, so what's the point as a player to raise our voices in a forum, if we never feel heard anyways.

I for one have gone into a state of waiting, waiting for things to finally improve to a point where I find it worthy to invest myself into CDPR again. If CDPR can't even provide proper roadmaps except saying "we are working on undisclosed things", then I won't have the incentive to invest myself as a community member. Simple as that. As a member of the community, I don't feel respected by CDPR, as there is minimal transparency from their side, despite them saying that transparency and honesty is what they aim to improve.

I bet I am not the only one feeling left on the side of the road by CDPR, while just hoping that they'll eventually come back to pick us up.
 
Certain things run in cultural levels and cultural shift can be dated back to late '60s. Ironically it was a work of fiction Neuromancer, that set me on path to learn about things. Something I really recommend for everyone is "The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations" by Christopher Lasch. Reading that made me realize that American context doesn't matter, like in Neuromancer, certain things were happening in Europe too. Students note: Reading the book also gives crash course on Freud. It's also very relevant to CP 2077 if thinking about possibilities leading to how society ended up to be like it is in game.

What I was really saying is that while there's no fighting certain things and what I didn't say, why would that be a job for entertainment industry to begin with(?). Is that isolating the chaos enables opportunity for creating something new, but the whole process won't start unless there is incentive, goal worth to make that happen. Platform really doesn't matter, though some are better at some things. User can send link to even single post from here to social media feed on Twitter or something by using post number, reply doesn't work though but then conversation could be embedded. Practically nobody does that because that doesn't align with goals forum users has.

Another thing that could benefit users and CDPR would be perhaps exploring meaning of sub-context in CP 2077. Hollywood used to get this wrong, they had certain premise for a show and they adjusted things according to feedback but productions ended up being rating failures and canceled because they didn't realize that there were large amount of silent watchers who were following because of sub-context. But, it's not that nothing hinders people writing about that here even right now. Can't force people to do anything.
 
I can only speak for myself, but here we go. My biggest reason for not posting at the moment is lack of time and having other interests elsewhere.

First time I ended up here when I had problems with Hearths of Stone expansion, if I'm not mistaken. I asked for help, and while waiting for an answer and randomly browsing other topics in the meanwhile, I found these forums really nice and chill place. So I started to hang out more and comment on other topics too. At some point I pretty much lived here :D Back then everyone was playing the game and having lot of questions and topics to discuss. Now, several years later, pretty much everything has been said I guess. Life moved on, relationships changed, work changed, hobbies changed, new games happened...

I still love this place and come back time to time to check what people are talking about. Specificly when something new comes out. But at the moment there just isn't that much for me to talk about. I'm not that much into Gwent that I would go there, and even if I enjoyed Cyberpunk a lot, I don't find that topic interesting enough to start creating topics or taking part to those conversations. My heart belongs to wizards and dragons, not cyberpunk. I just can't help it :shrug:

But yeh, I'm still here on the background, hybernating. Waiting for something dear to me to come out. Then I will definitely spend more time in here again =)
 
The most obvious thing that would bring people back, and have them contribute in a positive way (not that pointing out problems is negative), would simply be to fix the game properly - then they can talk about playing the game rather than all the bugs/glitches etc they have with it.
 
Content is the obvious one. Once/if there's expansion content or information to discuss then my vitality will increase. If it's content that deals with the endings my vitality will remain much higher for a longer period as i would be doing so regularly whilst also playing the game rather than poking my head in to see if there's anything of interest.
 
You know what would have people pouring in here every day. I can tell you because for a over a decade it was working like gangbusters over at the official Oblivion and Fallout forums.

Some of you may have guessed already what I am going to say.

M o d s !

Even had a not so insignificant membership in the forums of people that did not use mods but loved to see them on YouTube and talk about them in the forums.

Mod often would inspire talk about the lore even with non-moders because some mod was examining and expanding or using canon story elements or mythos.

And Mod makers would contribute often even to the non mod forum sections as they saw a lot of behind the scenes data and could speculate on things like lore and stories and characters in the game.

Having the Mod makers in the non-modding sections of the forums was a little like having the DEV active in the forums.



edit: I remember once I was working on a mod that required research of some obscure Oblivion lore. This inspired many people (even some that did not mod) to contribute to the string to help out. One very clever player that had not played Oblivion in a while booted up the game again to go to his in game library in Oblivion to read thru some of the MANY books he had collected in game and found one of the answers we were seeking in the in game book. I guess these days you could find the info easy on the internet proper, but back then there was very little of that detail on the net.
 
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You know what would have people pouring in here every day. I can tell you because for a over a decade it was working like gangbusters over at the official Oblivion and Fallout forums.

Some of you may have guessed already what I am going to say.

M o d s !

Even had a not so insignificant membership in the forums of people that did not use mods but loved to see them on YouTube and talk about them in the forums.

Mod often would inspire talk about the lore even with non-moders because some mod was examining and expanding or using canon story elements or mythos.

And Mod makers would contribute often even to the non mod forum sections as they saw a lot of behind the scenes data and could speculate on things like lore and stories and characters in the game.

Having the Mod makers in the non-modding sections of the forums was a little like having the DEV active in the forums.



edit: I remember once I was working on a mod that required research of some obscure Oblivion lore. This inspired many people (even some that did not mod) to contribute to the string to help out. One very clever player that had not played Oblivion in a while booted up the game again to go to his in game library in Oblivion to read thru some of the MANY books he had collected in game and found one of the answers we were seeking in the in game book. I guess these days you could find the info easy on the internet proper, but back then there was very little of that detail on the net.

Agreed! It would help revive this forum tremendously but that would require a set of tools that's on par with Bethesda's. Which, in all honesty, I highly doubt is what we'll get.

The simply truth is that it isn't exactly fair to expect the same level of support regardless of how much we want it. Bethesda has been supporting mods and constantly, yet slowly and carefully, improving it's games and tools modding capabilities. I doubt CP2077 was developed with intense modding in mind even if it does handle what little mods we have very well already.

Anyhow, it's very obvious this section of the forum is... well, I wouldn't say dead but it says a lot that a single post in a thread that had been dead since January is enough to bring said thread back to the hot topics page where it'll remain for a while.
 
There's not a lot to talk about. All aspects of the game have been analyzed ad nauseum and the lack of communication from CDPR only results in thread critizing the lack of communication. There simply isn't anything new to talk about. Pity, I quite like it here, but there's not a lot to say at the moment.
 
The devs do not understand this forum could be an extremely valuable crowdsourcing resource.

Personally I think devs should come on the forums 3-4 times a year, talk balance with pro-ranked players and discuss how to make useless cards useful. I think most players would want to see more deck diversity and devs aren't going to see a lot of information about cards just from looking at statistics (which cards get played the most, which ones have highest winrates). This game could be a lot more fun if devs setup periods to take pro-player feedback on various mechanisms to not only improve the game and balance out weaker or useless cards, but also open up discussions on some of the metagame itself and why some cards are so much stronger than others.

Overall though, I am happy with Gwent, but Gwent could be an S-tier card game (instead of A tier) if devs put some love into the community. But this must be something the devs want to do, they actually need to feel passion for making Gwent into a masterpiece, otherwise it won't work.

Community managers would also have more of a role if something like 3-4 big events happen per year, and could structure threads to help summarize discussions between the playerbase and devs.

So for example, Dev opens a thread on say, Nilfgaard, and asks for pro player feedback (anyone who has had a pro ranked NG deck for 2 seasons or more is eligible to post) in under 100 words, pro players respond on cards they like/dislike, which ones are bad or strong, etc, and then a community manager reads all the replies and summarizes it in a post in the same thread after a few days. The dev returns to read the summary, which, since players have also read, the players could also have objected to the community manager's summary if needed to edit the summary, and then the dev responds to the summary with his thoughts. This process repeats 2x a week for two business weeks (weekends are off!), and the end result would be a exquisitely crafted game with tons of interesting cards.

Furthermore, if players would expect that the devs will come in 3-4 times a year for a balance/design discussion of some kind, then this would encourage the normal forum users to engage one another so that when a dev shows up, the forum will have reached some sort of consensus on what to present to the dev. This consensus will be more true for pro-players with lots of playtime, because the meta of Gwent isn't up for too much debate, but no matter if a consensus is reached or not, forum activity will greatly increase.

So obviously, I voted for more dev involvement, and I hope a dev reads this post and sees there is a low-effort way for them to both improve their game and utilize the existing forum. A smaller forum like this will always be better for brainstorming and discussion due to the lower noise levels than a shitstorm like reddit or twitter.
 
At this point I seen it as a nothing to lose situation to talk a bit about the intentions (and I mean INTENTIOS, not "WHAT WE'RE GOING TO DO") with a portion of the fanbase, who have a little bit of touch with - for example - charactersystems.

Some lighthearted - though occasionally perhaps not, but that's the name of the game - discussion on gameplay aspects, perhaps some narrative design. "We thought X worked well in our internal testing... Oh, why don't you think it didn't?", "What do you mean the interactivity wasn't quite up there...?", "We thought the character systems served the purpose and paid off if the player was focused on combat in that are... Ok, that's interesting, would't you think gameplay would suffer because of that?... Ah, I see."

Is that really impossible to arrange? Plenty of moderators around to help shift through/delete the wishlists and other irrelevancies.

Ask your marketing... scratch that, don't ask them... but it would help with company image to be more open. Anyone who says no, is lying.
 
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Yes, so shocking it squeezes the gut and and pushes stuff out at extraordinary pressure.

Come now, Sard, you recognize a figure of speech.
It's best not use figures of speech like that. Not everyone gets them, or has english as their first language.
 
Since I joined the forums in May, 2020, it seems to me that participation levels have significantly dropped.

I'm there since 2014 or so.
There were always a bunch of dead times, but between the fact that the game's launch was pretty bad and that they'll delay DLC and all for another year...

So yeah, that forum is pretty much dead to me, let's wait for the next Cyberpunk game (if there is any).

I mean, I'd love to talk for hours about Cyberpunk 2077 the game, but we all played the same game I think.
Not that it's bad, but we already went full circle...
 
Last comment on this forum by a Red on a subject other than Gwent was over two months ago. I think that's really sad.

I'm a frequent lurker here and I'd love some engagement. Which platforms do the "Community managers" actually engage on? The closest thing seems to be Pawel Sasko's twitch stream, and he's clearly not allowed to discuss anything concrete.

I'm interested in what's in the pipeline and what the ambitions are for CP2077, please CDPR loosen some of the NDA handcuffs and let a couple of devs out to talk about what they're working on.

I actually logged on today to see what people had to say about the game awards nominations, but they haven't even bothered to post about that!
 
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Developer involvement.
I think this is probably the thing that would be most impactful, and they used to post somewhat more back in the Witcher 2 days, but as things got more popular, they tended to have issues anytime they posted here (which seems crazy now seeing how TW3 is largely viewed positively in retrospect). As one developer put it:

Maybe I can share my view as a developer working at CD Projekt on this whole issue. I, as a developer, am not in fact paid to read and write on these forums, but to write and implement quests. We developers do it because we love our job and The Witcher, because we value the feedback of the community and because we like to interact with the fans. We do this in our free time, when we are not working on creating the game.
People making accusations, writing PMs about other people and wildly interpreting the simplest of statements are what make me personally not write that much on the forums any more, because I am simply very cautios about what I write and where I write it, since of course this is usually seen as the opinion of the whole company, even if this is not the case.

Every now and then they post, but it's definitely infrequent now days, whether for the reasons stated above or any other.

Also, the forums are MUCH less busy when it's not release window (or as I call them, THE DARK TIMES).
 
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