People are playing Good Robot WHICH YOU CAN BUY NOW ON STEAM BECAUSE I’M SURE YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THIS LINK TEN TIMES THIS WEEK ALREADY and for the most part people seem to be enjoying it. We’re getting lots of feedback, which is also good. However, the feedback is complete chaos.
I’m getting feedback and bug reports via email. And on Twitter. And on the announcement post. And in the hangout post. And on the bounty post. And on the Steam forums for the game. And then some people are contacting Arvind. It’s chaos.
This is our fault. We never gave people a fixed point of contact, so people are just defaulting to whatever is the most convenient at the moment. In our defense, Arvind has never released a game attached to a blog / personality like this one, and I’ve never released any game ever.
So for the sake of my sanity, we need to funnel all the feedback into one place. And that place is the Steam forums. That way people with similar issues can share information. That will give us a single place to go when trying to figure out which issues are the most common or pressing. Also, the Steam forums are much better for discussions that might run for weeks of back-and-forth, trial-and-error troubleshooting, since there’s no way for you to know I’ve replied to you in an old comment here on the blog.
Of course, you’re still welcome to criticize and complain here on the blog. Armchair game design is kind of what we do around here, and if I can spend the better part of a year painstakingly dumping on every facet of Mass Effect, then it would be crazy to declare my own game off-limits. If something bugs you or you just want to say how you would have done something differently, then by all means: Have at you.
But if you aren’t just making conversation and you actually want your feedback to influence the upcoming patches, then please post your feedback to the Good Robot discussion on Steam. I’m sorry if that’s not super-convenient. I’m sure many of you have never even bothered with the Steam forums. Frankly, I don’t like it over there. The spelling is bad, the grammar is worse, the color scheme is dark, and nobody ever answers my questions anyway. But it really is best way for us to respond in a coherent manner.
We have meetings twice a week, and now that the game is out a big part of that meeting is going to be going over the list of complaints, crashes, concerns, grievances, vendettas, and angry rants about how the sawblade gun is totally bullshit and why is that even in the game are you kidding me. While I read every comment on the site, the other members of the team do not.
Also – and I realize you know this already because you’re smart and articulate, but I’m saying so anyway as a formality – please make your topic titles as descriptive as possible. “Crash” is bad. “Crash when changing levels” is much more useful. “Strange bug” is bad. “Can’t fire secondary weapons on Tuesday” is better. “Game is unbalanced” is (probably) bad, while “Weapon prices are unbalanced” is much better. Be specific. Look for similar posts before posting, because one long thread where ten people report X is far more likely to catch our attention than ten single-post topics that all seem to be sort of X-ish.
Our plan is to fix the worst bugs right away. I don’t have a timetable for a patch yet. We have ten or so fixes done already, but we need to work out where we want to draw the line between “stuff that needs to be in the first patch” and “stuff that can wait”.
Thanks for your patience. The sawblade is bullshit.
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
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