You say you’re not earning enough money, hence the Krafton acquisition, but you just casually delay yet another season?
We do not believe any woes can be addressed with a single patch. With Season 3 it was made quite clear by the community that major updates need to have a certain amount of content, and that is more important than the timeline. So we are taking the time we need to hit that content bar, rather than trying to meet a deadline competing with other larger and more experienced teams, and putting out another season that falls short of player expectations.
We believe the timeline we have established is the best route to deliver the best content to our community to both work towards re-earning our community’s trust, and build upon our community.
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Fair and understandable.
Does that mean you’re finally getting a form of ‘fixed timeframe’ which we can trust on you to take from Cycle to Cycle? A rough estimation of the timeframe to have reliability is very important after all and was completely missing until now.
Will it stay at 6+ months hence for the ‘foreseeable future’ or is that ‘*subject to change’?
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Because we’re also looking towards Last Epoch: Orobyss (our expansion), unfortunately I can’t say we have a locked down timeframe. We have a better idea of the content goals we need to hit, and our plans are going to be based around that,. Locking down a regular cadence is something at the top of our list of priorities to get nailed down - it just may take a bit of time.
We agree that “regularity” is extremely important to the community, and want to try to get answers to that. With Season 3 we tested, and heard that hitting a specific short timeframe is not the answer: it needs to be a combination of timeframe and content. We’ll continue to work on improving and building upon our systems, which improve our development speed and pipeline, and with that hope to continue cutting down season lengths to what the community wants, while also keeping the content expected by the community in an update.
(Even typing this, I recognize how PR this sounds, haha, but I swear it’s the truth and was written just based on on-hand knowledge of internal conversations =p)
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One of the biggest ways to do this is to actually communicate with the community. EHG is so scarce on the Forum that other players frequently post from what you have put on other sites so that those of us that rely on the Forum can get the info.
Is this going to be addressed also or are we going to continue to have to rely on other sites or other players? This is an honest question, not just a sarcastic poke.
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This is something we, as a community team specifically, want to improve upon. We’ve recently managed to increase our community team (for years it was literally just me, haha), and so we’ve started being able to step up our interactions to try to meet our increasing community size.
Personally: on the forums, there’s a lot of “natural” conversations which are fantastic to simply monitor for feedback. It often feels like if we interject by stating our own current opinions, it would halt that conversation, and lose us that feedback. We’re definitely getting better at looking for opportunities to respond and interact, I can’t guarantee we can always respond when we get directly called for a response, but we’re absolutely improving on that and want to be seen more.
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Hi there,
I don’t think Travoas meant for EHG staff members to reply to people like you are doing just now, but more so news posts are put on the forums first and foremost.
A few days ago there was a post on discord stating “We’ve heard you and you can expect a new roadmap in the coming days.” Or words to that effect.
I only know about that post because another player posted a link to the Discord post and I saw it by chance.
I think what I and many other players would prefer is if posts like the one I just mentioned were always posted in the news section of the forum, and then you can link to the forum when posting discord and other social media.
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For Last Epoch wide comments like “a post is coming in a couple of days!” these have felt out of place for the forums. Forums are a living entity - they don’t exist in a moment like social media/Discord do. History is not history with forums, threads exist ‘forever’. So while it may make sense in the moment, having that thread after the fact feels misleading if someone doesn’t pick up that it’s an old announcement.
Because of this, we try to to keep things to the forums that make specific sense to have a longer life of conversation, or are particularly critical such as service outages. This is certainly feedback we’re hearing, and something we take into consideration on “where” we chose to post things. We currently feel that the forums are not an appropriate place for short-life announcements,. That role is much better fulfilled by other platforms, which are not typically seen as exclusive (users on forums don’t often feel like they can’t monitor discord news).
They aren’t. The same as teasers, general answers to questions… basically all communication.
The issue is:
They’re supposed to be ‘forever’.
Don’t insult your customers. If someone doesn’t have the mental capacity to realize a 2 year old post might be outdated by now then you cannot ‘save them from themselves’.
It’s solely frustrating and hard to acquire information unless you use several program which are not under the control of your company.
Neither Twitter, Discord, Reddit or anything else is not your company space. They are tools to expand the reach, not to diversify information.
It’s a bad habit of companies to do that, always has been.
If information is not worthwhile to put into a announcement, FAQ, tutorial, guide or anything of the sort then it’s not information you need to provide in the first place.
Sneak-peeks are news for example. Important information which is up to date should be pinned anyway.
Plainly spoken your news section should contain at worst a post every week.
Don’t consider this.
Just provide the info here. That’s all that’s asked.
You’re complicating things which aren’t complicated. It’s easy → ‘Do our customers want to see this information likely?’. If the answer is ‘yes’ then post it. If it’s ‘no’ then it has space in neither Discord, Reddit or the Forum.
It’s simply annoying.
How many Discord servers do you guys think people use?
Personal groups of friends.
Maybe some streamers.
Then the games.
Then some other hobbies.
Not to speak of Reddit on top, Youtube, Twitch… it gets too much.
Less is more.
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Don’t insult your customers. If someone doesn’t have the mental capacity to realize a 2 year old post might be outdated by now then you cannot ‘save them from themselves’.
It is certainly not my intention to do so. Rather, this reflects experience. How often is a five year old discord conversation necro’d? How often do forum threads get necro’d? I think this demonstrates the point.
This is a complex conversation based on search engine results, and even newer: AI results. AI systems implemented often reflect information provided in forums, which may often be out of date, or simply incorrect. I also think it’s also fairly easy to miss the date of a post when you’re heavily invested in the potential contents.
I don’t see this as disrespecting our forum users, but the opposite: Understanding the results and limitations of the systems they operate within.
This isn’t to disregard any of your feedback, and doesn’t apply to much of your feedback that is being taken into consideration. It is just merely to refute that we hold any lack of respect for our forum users. If our forum users don’t feel our actions reflect that respect, we are more than happy to listen, and adapt.
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Nobody posts in your news or announcement Threads, they are not supposed to be necroable in the first place.
If they are then you did something wrong. The oldest Announcement is the last post at the bottom. The newest is the topmost.
Same with news.
Communication between customers is up to them, and even then it happens rarely by very few individuals given we got hundreds if posting people and the last time a post was necroed was… I think months ago?
Which is the fault of the tool, not of your company.
Don’t you fear that AI states the game is freshly released because it provides this information to the user?
If it does the function is useless. Which it borderline still is in many cases.
What you’re suggesting hence is to delete anything which is not absolutely up to date and hence conceiling the history of your product entirely.
That’s not realistic in any manner. And avoiding the failing of AI to instead make it your personal responsibility is a road to failure as well.
That’s more then fair, and I don’t expect you to have done it intentionally either.
Acting according to the intelligence you want your customers to present rather then dumbing it down to the lowest nominator is very important though. It’s always impossible to include every side-effect. You either have the choice of belittling the mental capacity of your customers by dumbing it down so much that everyone barely able to even start your product is included… or you don’t do that at the risk of overwhelming these individuals. And I’ll directly say: Your product demands a baseline intelligence level to even be properly used. Handle your information channels according to this intelligence level, not below.
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Hey Kain, I love this opportunity to chime on with my personal two cents here.
Because the recent “announcement” that there will be a more detailed roadmap (between the initial one that you posted on Nov 25th and the one on Dec 9th was something that flew right over my head and I catched it because somebody posted a screenshot or link on the forum from the twitter post.
You want to know the reason why I missed it? That announcement was made in the “News” Channel on the Official Discord, but got no ping attached to it.
Now you could say that I have misconfigured my discord and notification because I missed it, but if information like this is treated the same way than a “Happy Thanksgiving” Announcement, made in the same channel for a holiday that is not even celebrated in other countries/cultures.
While this “there is a more detailed roadmap coming” is not a major announcment in itself, it is curcial and very important information IMO.
There have been other cases where there was only a post on X or a reddit thread/comment was made about a certain topic.
Furthermore I disagree on the forum being different part. You just need a proper category for it.
It just feels very disconnected and weird to not get the most up to date and important (even when they are short-lived) information on the game’s own forum.
On top of that sometimes communication is scattered so much. There is one comment from Dev A on a Reddit Thread, there is another comment from Dev B on discord and then there is some Twitter/X Post.
Having all these informations bundled up somewhere would elleviate ALOT.
For me as a long time follower and supporter it feels very bad that I am sometimes not on top of the most recent relevant information, just because I missed some discord message or reddit thread.
I think there are a few ways to go about this:
A. If you do announcements, small or big do them on all platforms equally, with the appropiate category/channel/tag.
B. Do a Dev Tracker somewhere, prefferably here on the forum and link to that in discord, reddit etc. Look at how other dev have done it and this works wonders.
C. Make some more specific discord roles that people can subscribe/unsubscribe to for misc., minor, and major news. Mabye differentiate between game news and EHG news or whatever.
I know Option A and B might make people from your team scared to post stuff or talk something "from their own personal perspective and less “as a dev”, because it might become something bigger than they intended.
This whole inconsitent and scattered communication is probably my number one pet peeve with EHG since years. And you know I love you guys, I still do. I want all the best for the future of your team and the game. But especially in these troubling and rocky times better communication will be half of what is needed already.
Cheers from Germany (where we don’t celebrate Thanks Giving)
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To respond as a normal community member for a moment (excuse the direct responses, haha):
The problem isn’t the conversation actually being necro’d, but rather that individuals can view it as an active/relevant conversation to begin with. being able to actually necro it or not doesn’t change that.
God, I wish. We actually do more moderation than people think, ha =p
Who’s fault it is doesn’t matter. it doesn’t change the result, and we don’t have the power to change the tool.
Our intention is that for forums are for ongoing, complex, or in-depth conversations, and other platforms are for “in the moment” things. Though I’m not sure sure what you mean by “dumbing down” - we’ve never posted a more summarized version of something to the forums than other locations - in fact, forums typically have the longest and most detailed post. Other platforms are really bad at this and where Forums shine. This is why we don’t post things like patch notes to other platforms. Those discord/social media users need to come to our forums when the content doesn’t match their platform in the same way.
This is in relevance to the entire paragraph, just to cut down on quote space. I don’t disagree with you, and it’s a result of receiving a lot of flak from too many pings. We’re looking at improving discord onboarding, which would likely include more roles for news pings to avoid this.
This is very much a growing pain that we recognize. One of our amazing community members, Andrew Tilley, once put together a “leaks” thread, and this has been a big inspiration to us to be better at tracking how, when, and where information is released with less “designers doing their own thing having their own conversations.”, and seeing that information shared.
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But how would one then think ‘it’s new and relevant’ if you cannot necro it? It’s clearly stated with the timestamp and positioned below the new ones.
Good job there definitely! Yeah, managing a Forum is a massive amount of work.
Ah, sorry, that’s my bad there, I’m always skipping a few steps, abstract thinking is a bane for me sadly.
It was about users not picking up that a threat is a old one. Which is common sense to see though.
That’s where the ‘insulting the mental capacity of customers’ came from.
Which brought up the topic of necro’ing which is the only reliable method to internally showcase a old post like a new one.
Which is not possible and hence not applicable after all.
And yes… tools existing which don’t work right is a ‘pain in the ass’ to say it directly. The thing which you guys do as a action related to that though is to ‘do it wrong’ so the tool cannot cause issues.
My argument is simply to ‘do it right’ nonetheless. You either get problems from the AI side… or you get problems from the communication side.
AI advances rapidly and is changed in how it acts faster then anyone can reasonable react to. But core communication? That stays, that’s valued.
I would definitely love to see that realized.
The one thing I - speaking solely as the simplistic customer mindset here - want is to click on one button and have all the information presented to me right away, with a choice of what exactly I wanna see.
The moment I need to put effort into it? It becomes tedious. One product but several places to check up on? Not fun.
It’s the same as to why people keep all games on Steam and hate other launchers… it’s tedious. And it caused for example the movie and series streaming sector to loose billions, because customers like convenience.
Provide convenience and you get rewarded basically.
Great things to hear. Better, more customizable discord roles for each member would be great.
I understand that you might got feedback the other way around in the past where there were to many pings.
But I think the judgment of which posts deserve a ping and which don’t is just off. With better discord roles this would somewhat get elliviated, but just to name a few examples that are off IMO.
The Ninety-Nine little bugs on the wall post had no ping as well. Granted I am a primary forum consumer I sasw that post anyway, but I know many people are not on the forum.
But this thread was one of the best things you did in the past (if you deliver on the promise of fixing many, if not all of these reported issues). This is exactly the type of thing that needs to REACH everybody. Long lasting bugs that are repeatedly reported and not fixed is one of the most common complaints across the community.
And Outage news post got no pign as well. Isn’t that important as well?`
But your future MTX suggestion thread did get a ping.
I do love to hear that you recongize it. But what still bugs me about it is, that this is something that I noticed and complained about for years already. So its not just recent.
Also I don’t think some deep and detailed designer discussions on reddit or discord are what needs to be more publicaly visible.
I am complaining mostly on relevent information about coming updates/patches.
Just a few examples:
Mike mentioning skill X or unique Y getting a buff in the next patch
Trasochi mentioning skill Z gets a rebalance/overhaul in the next patch
Kain mentioning the next update will contain some changes for game system X
If this type of thing is mentioned somewhere, that needs to be tracked.
If a dev writes a 400 word essay on why bug X is so hard to fix and its not as easy as it looks, that is fine if it gets lost.
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Exactly.
Good summary there.
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I personally, completely appreciate this. I know this isn’t a new thing, and the fact is, it simply wasn’t something I could handle on my own. With an expanded community team, I have high hopes for the future. The amount of progress we have made for PLEX (read: ‘community’) in the last several months - for our input on getting bugs fixed, for getting ideas through (and… secretly/not so secretly for planning events 
- give us your ideas for events and reward you want!) has been huge.
I cant promise that the results will be felt immediately. All I can say is that internally I personally feel much better on delivering on community wants that aren’t design related in the future. I believe we have always done well on responding to design feedback, that has been our focus, Though please feel free to provide feedback if you don’t feel this is the case.
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Just finished the reads after my post and between @Kulze and @Heavy they covered my concerns which I apparently didn’t make clear enough.
Thank you for the responses on this subject. We need any and all news about LE to be made here on the LE Forum so we aren’t missing it or being forced to go to other sites to find it.
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Unfortunately this won’t work, it is fine for basic tabs. Though for example a currency tab or map tab. Once you have one most people don’t need more. So again comes to I wouldnt have bought this and it is usless.
That being said it would be nice for GGG to add 1 a free premium tab and now a mechant tab. Over all we used to sell items from the forums. Times have changed and I’ve always said add tabs and make new players more able to accsess.
This also comes with another downside of bots, also multiboxing for extra tabs and stuff. Though mostly bots is the problem.
Still, I agree they should have something for newer players. Even a tiny version of the important tabs like currency and maps with like 1/8 the size. Yes it small but able to upgrade. Then still the problem of upgrade cost, though if that remains the current price of the tabs I do not see too many issues.
You will always have someone cry about something though. Im definitely for finding a way to make newnplayer experience better and 4 stash tabs is not even close to enough.
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That’s completely wrong from my point of view. It’s human nature to talk about “unlaid eggs”. If you gave a fraction of insight people would shift toward, what they like and dislike about it and what could be better.
The problem is you get a ton of feedback on concepts that are most likely rather final and nothing can be done about it. So people discuss in circles anyway. So if there is some content for the future you want input for you just need to drop some hints or show up in conversations and you get more feddback then you want.
For example go and ask for old league mechanics people thought are fun and you get a lot of feedback. If you ask if people have ideas for league mechanics they want to see you’ll get even more.
Your community, from a devs point of view, is multitool you can use if you engage with it. Communitys are invested and if you don’t mess up they stand behind you heck they even work for you and feel good about it becaue they helped. So if you don’t sit on your hands in the future and interact you’ll reap benefits from and the community will feel good about it.
That’s not asking for much I think.
Yes this happens a lot but that is why there are community mangers. You see stuff like this and point at the date. As far as I’m concerned that’s your job.
Here wo go again didn’t take long. As I say for years now: Just add a dev tracker if for whatever reason you don’t want to inform about everything at you “home base”.
Wow? What did you take and can I have some too 
? Necroing threads is a thing as old as forums. That’s not an insult but regulary happening 
. Then again as I said… It’s their Job to manage a community if they are community managers or to moderate things if they are moderators. So nothing to excuse there.
Oh BTW Kain guess we still had a conversation going on here and the topic is still approached from different angles… just sayin 
.
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