I promise you, unless something weird happens, this will be the last “modern internet sucks” post for a bit. I can’t promise a while, but I can promise at least a week and a half. I’ve started to play Battle Bit Remastered lately. It is an insanely fun game, and has sold really well. Today there were over 40k people playing. I bring this up because the way the devs communicate to their audience is fucking retarded. They seem to post their roadmaps and every bit of dev diary-like info in Discord. Discord fucking sucks and if you post it there then it is locked off from the internet, unless people join your server. This makes it impossible for someone to simply Google this bit of information.
“But it’s just 3 people making it!” This is what you always hear whenever you bring up any criticism towards the game. That’s fine to excuse some issues, but not all. What they’ve put out is very impressive, don’t get me wrong, but it feels like they’re making everything harder for themselves then it needs to be. Especially when it comes to community responses. The devs will respond to Reddit posts on Discord, Discord posts on Steam, and Steam posts on Reddit. It’s a fucking confusing mess that makes it impossible to track as a player, unless you decide to investigate this shit.
Do you want to know what would make community shit easier for a small team? A dev diary/blog on their own website. The game’s website is currently pointless. Even the news bit on the website links to Steam’s updates for the game. However, with the latest patch they released the patch notes on Discord first and then waited a full two days before posting it to Steam. There were 2 days where unless you were on the Discord server you had no idea what nerfs happened in the update. You wouldn’t need to update multiple services if you just had a dev diary. You could post roadmaps, patch notes, and more there while directly linking to them from Reddit, Discord, and Steam.
This is something modern devs need to learn. Keeping information locked to multiple different social media accounts does nothing but confuse the fan base and makes it a job to track down the information. Back 4 Blood ran into this issue where they’d release info on Instagram and then you’d need to go to Facebook for the rest of the info, or sometimes Twitter. Then they’d post information on Reddit and require you to go to Discord to get the rest of the information.
Whenever patches would come out for Back 4 Blood I would always have disputes with my brother because he’d insist certain things changed when they hadn’t been touched. It’s not his fault for not knowing this. I would spend a solid 2-3 days collecting every bit of info for the game, because even their own dev diary didn’t have all the info. Sometimes you had to go to Reddit and Discord to dig up shit the devs didn’t list. Honestly? I’m sick and tired of having to do this.
If you don’t want misinformation spread, or players to get constantly upset at you seemingly ignoring their requests, create a spot where all of the information will be posted. Host your own forums. Host your own dev blog, and keep the information accurate. Do something to make it easier for players to go to one spot to get all of the information instead of digging through the hell scape that is social media. Also, Battlebit Remastered has sold so many copies it was one of the top selling games on Steam, in terms of revenue earned. They can afford to hire a community manager to run a blog/forums/socials.. They can go from a 3 man team to a 4 man team, with the 4th being in charge of the community. Something they desperately need since it won’t be long until players end up leaving over dissatisfaction with the devs. You can see Back 4 Blood and Evolved as prime examples of that, by the time they fixed stuff the community had left because they felt burned and ignored.