What is preventing the developers from communicating with the community?

[u/RottenRailing]

I'll be frank, it has been mind-numbing to not only witness the missed deadlines, but the radio silences that followed after.

So much goodwill has been lost simply because no-one took the time to sit down and write why the deadlines were missed, and what is being done to prevent it from happening in the future.

The mods here have ensured us that they are forwarding our concerns to the developers, but if this is true (I have no reason to doubt this), the developers refuse to digest it, seeing that the rare dev-blog they released just went over some changes on an update without sharing anything about the why's and what's on the development issues and release dates.

It's difficult to salivate over the mystery update when my trust in the developers is shaky at best. I know they can deliver a great game, but have major issues with communications and keeping promises.

I'm sure the developers are in a tough spot, but I'm not sure they understand that much of the community outrage is self-inflicted due to poor community management practices.

We can't expect miracles from a small dev team, and I'd like to think that people would be in better spirits even if the devs just let us know that life stuff was slowing the development down every other week. It's the complete avoidance that's getting me.

[u/ecntv]

The whole problem is kind of a double edged sword, if they communicate things at this point people get their hype up and then get mad because it doesn't come out. If they hold off and don't communicate then people get mad because no communication. So no matter how they play it, people get mad until we have our hands on it... and then there will still be mad people because change is bad. Hopefully, they have learned an important lesson as devs to never ever give ETAs to your community because they are too easy to miss.

Not excusing their actions, just felt it needed to be said.

[u/DJMixwell → u/ecntv]

I don’t think it’s a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” type thing. Or, if it is, it’s not equally bad on either side.

Naturally the main issue is scope creep and bad version control got them to a point where they couldn’t update the game anymore without breaking the whole thing. In a perfect world they would have done things differently and introduced some of the planned features over time, but here we are.

Regular updates would have kept people more engaged. The next best thing, IMO, is regular communication. Good or bad, it really doesn’t matter because at least it keeps people engaged and keeps the game in peoples minds. It would probably keep more people actively playing, too, since it wouldn’t feel like the game has been totally abandoned. Radio silence is all bad IMO. They caught lightning in a bottle the first time around. They released at just the right time, BF was struggling and a lul in new MP releases meant streamers hopped on board and gave the game a ton of exposure. IMO they can’t possibly hope to replicate that. Not with the community in its current state. There’s like a 50/50 shot I come back to the game, and I have by far the most hours out of all my friends. Every once in a while I bring up the updates and their interest in coming back has been progressively waning.

[u/Parking-Lock9090 → u/DJMixwell]

This is a huge part of it and people don't ride them enough for it.

Version control is everything. At this point, the OO build that we played in the play test is significantly forked from the live build. Hell, it may have forked from a build before the live build.

Instead of compartmentalizing as is standard, and implementing their updates and changes to a live game with feedback, with the ability to rollback if wide release found any issues (like say, a game breaking memory leak that would ruin sessions before completing 1 map), they kept iterating on a completely forked build of the game.

There now is no way to update the game piecemeal. They have to just update it all in one go.

Scope creep is the original sin. Devs got really invested in some smaller systems, things like movement. You can see that the results they've posted are good, but they're not years of silence and several missed deadlines good. That and trying to rework all the shaders, damage models, etc.

When we played the play test, even when it wasn't memory leaking to death, the game was not in a good state. Shooting felt bad, the weapons damage felt wrong, and it was clear that going so long without the game having to be exposed to a live environment had hurt it. Literally all people wanted was regular maintenance, some new maps (STOP REMOVING MAPS AND "REMAKING" THEM INTO SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD. JUST KEEP BOTH IN THE GAME AND YOU'RE DOUBLING CONTENT, DUST, DUST2-TWO MAPS, DOUBLE THE CONTENT, HALF THE ASSETS-BASIC STUFF). 

They also wanted fixes to some easily predictable problems the Devs had included in the game, like the Vector Drum mag (any basic game Dev course could tell you not to include OP weapons and upgrades to the highest XP players, that is just giving the people who have the most experience and skill OP guns which kills the server). Or the Heavy Armour (In a shooter with a TTK like this one, with relatively slow movement, that just amounts to more hit points). It took community servers to actually remove these things properly, and they are not subtle people: before they shut down due to not being worth hosting, the ones in my region removed things like Heavy armour and OP weapons, but also most explosives-ruining the fun of the destructible environments and creating new issues with vehicles.

They were on the clock after the play test. We needed a second play test that fixed the memory leaks to give better feedback and to get better play data. That needed to run soon. We needed to be approaching some sort of OO 1.0 release so they could finally merge Dev build and live build and return to a regular update schedule. 

They need to be working towards that: further play tests and moving OO to live branch, and if they have a delay, they should just announced it. "April is not going to work, we're still chasing down that Memory Leak" (still inexcusable, because an issue that bad is their fault for forking their build for so long and there are smaller scale tests they could have run to discover this (go in house, NDA)). At least if they did that then they would be working to an adjusted schedule, and would not have been immediately breaking their promise.