Man forums here took a massive hit. Its a ghost town in here. 
7 posts down last reply is 4 days ago.
11 posts down last reply is 17 days ago.
Steam reviews are getting a bit better at least but its mostly still doom and gloom.
D4 expansion comes soon.
Any good news on the LE front?
Forums always die out in the off-season. They pick up a bit again when we start getting the hype week, they go full swing in the first few weeks, then they start falling off again.
A long time between seasons just makes it more evident, but having less interaction in the off-season is a normal thing.
Yeah, but even then… it’s very silent compared to other products of the genre.
Not good… though in the case of LE it’s because they enforce usage of Reddit and Discord over the Forum as well, so that plays into it. Makes it seem like the game isn’t really alive and thriving though, and perception is important.
EHG needs to finally put some measures in to ensure that they don’t get an actual ghost-town of a Forum… because when it begins to happen when releases come as well then it’ll be too late.
Yeah, at this point they might as well make the forum read-only & post the patch notes, announcements, etc to the website (or reddit). I’m not sure they’ve used the forum much since 0.9/1.0.
Or simply post these announcements directly on the website and get rid of the forums’ entire infrastructure. As much as I prefer forums over reddit and especially Discord, I don’t see them ever being more active in the forums again. It became pretty pointless with the split up community and attention (reddit, Discord and forums) which is understandable - with these limited resources you can only do so much - but is a shame. I have the feeling that the forums only exist so that people don’t get angry when the supporter badges can’t be presented any more.
If it were up to me, I would get rid of Discord. But it seems to be the devs’ favourite.
Edit: I must have misread your comment because what I suggested is what you suggested as well. Oh well. 
Yeah, but then you get rid of all the historic useful info, comments, etc.
Yup.
The Void will always be here. Orobyss beckons!
I don’t know if this will make anyone feel better (or worse, sorry!) AND I’m sure many of you already know this but developers are much more likely to get new sales by having dev conversations in places where ‘not currently a customer’ people traffic.
Sure, but they also need to keep the ones that are “currently a customer”. And not communicating with them (especially when you’re communicating with others) will alienate plenty of people and cause them to instead become “no longer a customer”.
I not advocating, excusing or suggesting… anything. I literally have zero dog in this hunt anymore. I understand why they sold. Experience tells me this will end poorly, but I absolutely suck at guessing the future. Zero expectations, zero hope. Today I did a drive-by of a game I used to care about and saw this thread.
Posting on external sites is just a common pattern across all developers which ‘management’ never seems to have an issue with, and I think the main driver is sales. And a common complaint for players that invest themselves in a particular game and participate in the forums ("for the love of god, why don’t you post that here).
There’s 2 parts of doing business:
Acquiring new customers.
Keeping existing customers.
A happy existing customer is stability and worth a lot more then new ones which are not ‘established’ yet. Hence the amount of effort invested to keep customers is supposed to be higher.
EHG doesn’t do that well simply. They need to though.
We need to take it into perspective though.
Posting outside of your own space is done eagerly… but they usually either link to outside articles inside their own site… or towards their own site from outside when posted there.
The interconnection is important, providing freely accessible information for everyone at roughly the same level and time investment is a mandatory aspect about communication with customers.
That’s why it’s not a issue… you can post wherever as long as people can access it and get the link to the access.
EHG is actually one of the very few companies which don’t have their shit even remotely together in this area… most others actually do a better job there, and quite a few to a stellar job even comparatively.
Terraria, Factorio, Dwarf Fortress, Icarus, Barotrauma, Caves of Qud… many different studios or individual devs… and they all do better communication-wise compared to EHG by miles. And they don’t individually talk to customers a lot… but people don’t feel like they ‘miss out on information’ with all of them because they do a good job in providing a quantity and quality of it which keeps nigh everyone interested in the product engaged.
And that’s something to be achieved for EHG, they’re at AAA communication quality by now… non-existent basically and absolutely atrocious. Just without the backing power AAA conglomerates have from their massive advertisement campaigns.
I know where you’re coming from & it’s nice theory/armchair economics but reality doesn’t work like that for some sizeable & mature parts of the economy. Perhaps you could tell the various CEOs/etc that they’re doing it wrong. For example, banking (mortgages, savings, credit cards, introductory rates for new customers only! 
), telecoms (ISP, landlines & mobile, in the UK it’s usually 1/2 price/double data for 6 months of an 18-24 month contract), insurance (again, often 1/2 price premiums for X months), subscriptions both physical & digital (gyms, Netflix, other SaaS), other utilities (again, introductory rates for your gas/electric for X months, but curiously not water), FMCG kinda does but everyone can buy the product at the lower price so that’s a bit different,
Indeed, my beloved & never wrong government is being not at all bureaucratic about it.
So, no, not really. At least, not as a general rule. Customer inertia is a thing & those customers that you’ve attracted with your sweet introductory offers often stick around to be fucked over pay more once they leave the contract term.
Banking and telekoms are essentials nowadays, you cannot avoid em and they’re nigh universally assholes without law stopping them.
Insurances in many countries do give incentive for long-term customers by the way. In my country you get packet bonuses, bonuses for staying with the company and not another one, insurance reduction for being a long-term customer and so on.
Gyms the same, streaming services are currently demolishing themselves as piracy is coming back majorly because they’re too idiotic to realize why Netflix became so extremely successful at first… which was convenience. Having to search through 5 services and pay for each to watch the things you enjoy is not convenience… so now it’s free again.
Utilities are once again the same issues as banking/telekom… essentials… and where people cannot avoid stuff they tend to get ripped off unless extensive competition exists or the government actively enforces proper customer service to happen.
Now my question:
Is gaming essential?
Then you better follow proper customs in terms of customer handling, because that’s hasn’t ever changed in any era since the invention of commerce.
I agree with the theory. Seems obvious, honestly, that in an entertainment industry with a lot of choices that there would be some academic thought put into customer engagement and retention. For the gaming industry, and especially in the live-service space, where customer communication seems required, having a strategy that accounts for (waves) ‘all the above’ would be in the companies best interest.
But from a sample size of one, it feels like the rare exception, not the rule (this is me saying it could be just perception bias).
Yes, they’re the exception, absolutely!
As much as any successful business is the exception. In my country for example 80% of companies fail in the first 2 years… means they didn’t follow the rules of success, and being willing to sacrifice what is mandatory to have said success (whatever the shape of that is, that can vary heavily). You’re already the exception if you solely pass that timeframe, and beyond ‘dimpling along’ it gets ever more exceptional.
But we actually know a vast majority of things which are needed for success… and they’re a lot, in a lot of different fields, and you need to follow them all as every exception will make it harder for the luck-factor (which is solely information beyond your knowledge, the smaller you make that the more guarantee, but you can never remove it entirely, just keep it substantially smaller) and hence for you to provide a top-end product/service.
Some of that knowledge we can get easier.
Some is nigh unobtainable.
And in this case we got game-design aspects which are widespread.
We got communication protocols and styles which are well received.
Those are actually the ‘easy’ things while stuff like ‘knowing the target audience and their needs’ are the ‘hard’ ones.
And the issue is… the ‘easy’ ones are the ones which aren’t handled well.
In our case stuff like ‘Don’t tell your customer bad news without resolving it swiftly’ as the whole fiasco since we heard of the company being sold has been.
The communication and action there is easy to see and easy to even do… unless you mess up by being blindsided (or incompetent in that aspect, which is worse for the ones doing the marketing). The right decision was always to have the negative information happening but immediately releasing easy to do quick updates after to showcase action. ‘Since we were taken over our work now shows results’.
No overhyping (like is repeatedly done sadly) but simple ‘silent action’. Providing details over details without having to be asked. Dropping steady - and visible - fixes despite more work for the new Cycle. Releasing color-variants of the existing decorative items as that’s extremely swiftly done but provides a visible result.
A myriad of available options are there to do to show ‘now we take action’.
No Man’s Sky wasn’t ‘saved’ in a year, to get to a position where people couldn’t say ‘it underdelivered’ it took them nearly 5 years to do… but the people which left… steadily came back. More… and more… and more.
Why?
Because they showed results. They didn’t talk at the beginning and just acted. Couldn’t provide results in a day? In a week it was there suddenly, as asked! A short while later… more, nothing mentioned yet. And the results came in ever swifter and swifter, ever more and more because of it. They learned, and people forgave and nowadays even praise them as they’re overdelivering by now.
As especially for communication it’s very obvious to what people want and love! The internet is litered with the success stories of customer communication and they all share the exact same thing:
You communicate exactly as much as you can provide to the customers, in clear words.
Hence you don’t ever oversell or ‘hype up’. The community does that, no words like ‘be excited about!..’ and the likes, that’s ridiculously bad marketing. The customer decides what their feelings are… not the company. Comes always over as ‘you gotta feel like this or you’re not fitting in’. Not good communication simply and sets you up for failure. Because if it doesn’t align with the specific feeling you’re ‘supposed to feel’ then it’s already disappointing… even when the alternative feeling is still a positive one, it suddenly becomes comparatively a negative one.
Have a single core communication channel and everything goes through that primarily. The blog of Factorio is a prime example for that. They link to it… but the information is there, all in one place. All chronoligically sorted… and discussion is not bumping shit which shouldn’t even be able to be bumped.
Neither does teasing and hyping up a roadmap and then having the customers 8 weeks for that be acceptable. Not to speak of it being empty and basically stating ‘Yeah, we still work on this product, cool, right?’.
Nor is it throwing around relevant information which should be inside patch-notes, official bug-lists, a knowledge compendium, a troubleshooting FAQ or whatever else type outside of the official communication channel and not acting until it gets so bad people flak you solely for writing anything outside of your official channel if it’s not there already. because you missed ever putting the ones formerly inside for years on end.
I mean… it’s fairly obvious. Clearly not for the people doing the decisions at the specific moment. But guess what? That’s literally part of their job. You hafta do it if you want or not… and you gotta be at least decent with it. Which EHG wasn’t, and hence why we’re landed here by now.
If you do badly you don’t have to get to ‘normal’ after… you gotta get to ‘overperforming’ to even out the balance.
Reddit seems to be way more active even now.
The forum may not be very popular, but the developers listen to the players. Unlike “AAA” studios.
I think its cos most of the chatting happens in discord - general, class specific and always busy as heck in the ask developer channel. Most people get the answers they need, links to builds and help in there so I guess there’s not much need to post on here if you get live feedback.
New season in late March.
Until then, juts updates from dev what’s to come . I think there is new info today.
They could do like small event and give out free mtx once I a while to give the game some exposure, and people to return
I. Fact there should do this for season start, some freebies.
I do not see much people not a hardcore LE fan returning for next season without some carrot on a stick.
A lot of people here do not like blizzard ( evil big Corp !) but they are very good in keep the hype and exposure of their active games every 2 weeks there is some new info about wow, about diablo, they invite influencers to these office , they have public / private testings, in turn the influencers help maintain keep the ganes trending.
So people who used to play these games or new players eventually get the recommendation from YouTube or socials and attach new and returning players…
Also d4 regular give discounts and these things help…
LE basically keep alive barely from Actoarpg . One of the few influencer that update LE info.