Participation - What to Expect

Cluck

Cluck

Moderator
Like quite a few of the members already signed up, I've been through "player participation" in both WMD1 and WMD2, for pCARS1 and 2 respectively and there are some valuable lessons learned from that time that I thought might be an idea to share with everyone.

First and foremost, you will get out of your participation what you put in. Do nothing, you'll get nothing.

Criticism is certainly going to be welcome. There is no point simply nodding your head and saying "this is great" to everything, nothing will progress unless it is honed to perfection. But criticism isn't an excuse for rudeness. Before writing your criticism of a feature, or handling quirk, ask yourself "how will this be received?". Be constructive, be polite, be amazed at how much more responsive the devs will be in return.

Be realistic about what your participation will achieve. Ian and the team will have a goal, it is THEIR job to realise that goal and it is OUR job to help them. Many great ideas will be put forward, many strange ideas too, but you must learn to accept that "just because an idea is great, doesn't mean it will be implemented". See John Hargreaves' point about some of his ideas, from way back in pCARS1's development, that are only now starting to see fruition in AMS2. If you feel your idea is being ignored, or sidelined, don't be disheartened but don't be 'that guy' and badger the devs about it constantly. Raise your idea again at timely intervals, if you wish, but remember, it is their game, not ours.

Be polite to everybody. We all want the same thing here, a great game that sells well to give lots of players to race with and against. But just because we all want a great game doesn't mean we all want the SAME great game. Respect the ideas and wishes of others, even if you have no desire to see them in your ideal vision of the game. Sim racing is, like many genres, incredibly tribal at times but let's keep that off here. We all have our favourite sims, our favourite "bad apples", our own ideas of what 'feels' good but starting fights is going to get us nowhere. And remember, nobody's opinion of what feels good for them is wrong.

Keep it light, keep it civil and relax, because at the end of the day it's just a game :)

For those of you that have also been through game development participation, feel free to share your thoughts on what to expect here too.
 
Are you seriously asking people to think before posting anything? Be constructive? Polite? And civil? Come on. Where's this fantasy land you're talking about? 😛










... Totally agree with everything you said.
 
For me at least, getting away from toxic positivity is a huge priority. Giving devs a false sense of security about their game can sink a team, and it's something they won't even realize until it's too late - if ever.

Some of the stuff on the horizon is directly designed to address that.
 
Austin said:
For me at least, getting away from toxic positivity is a huge priority. Giving devs a false sense of security about their game can sink a team, and it's something they won't even realize until it's too late - if ever.

Some of the stuff on the horizon is directly designed to address that.
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The good old "constructive criticism" point comes to mind.
As long as everyone remembers that the devs are humans like everyone else, with families to look after, and therefore should be treated and respected like we would ourselves liked to be , than all should go smoothly.
 
I'm making the assumption that there's going to be some form of beta program and that we will have access to builds along the way.

In addition the the DBAC narrative, what would the dev team like from us?

Do you think it would be possible to introduce some form of structured testing and feedback process?

Could a trello board (or similar) issue tracker be exposed?

Back in the old fourm, It was sometimes really difficult to read through repetitive free form feedback covering a wide range of things.
 
The way Reiza chose with their backer programme giving access to the beta, paddock club where people give feedback in different threads, and all future DLC for x amount of money is perfect. That‘s probably what WMD was like, without DLC.

I agree, constructive criticism is crucial, you need to be able to address issues to get the best possible product.

It’s going to be the same here as everywhere, there will be haters and rude people, people who like the word ‚arcade‘, sim racing elitists, friendly people, newbies to sim racing and veterans, racing drivers and people who have never driven a car.

I honestly can’t wait to see what Ian‘s vision for this new title is.
 
Konan said:
The good old "constructive criticism" point comes to mind.
As long as everyone remembers that the devs are humans like everyone else, with families to look after, and therefore should be treated and respected like we would ourselves liked to be , than all should go smoothly.
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The inverse is also true; some of the onus is on us to not take things so personally, and know when to take a breather. If every time Tom Delonge wrote a bad song and the fans crapped on him, he went on Tiktok and made a video ranting about how he's a real person and just trying to feed his family, people would think he's... more nuts than he already is.

I've found in years past that some devs intentionally tone police or skew the definition of "constructive criticism" to such a degree, that in the end criticism effectively isn't allowed regardless. Re-typing a forum post five times to ensure nothing upsets the devs, shouldn't turn into its' own meta-game. It creates a really weird environment.

This mentality can extend to goofier things like dismissing content creators with valid points as "clickbait", or outright refusing to read some of the bigger sim forums because "everyone on there is toxic." Definitely don't want that happening this time around.
 
The main thing of course is to try and get the negative points across but without being blatantly obnoxious and rude about it. It's quite easy to express disatisaction with handling, audio etc without hyperbole and rudeness.

It's a 2-way street though. You know what really helps us players? Information. If something is technically feasible but unrealistic, say so and explain why. We should be adult enough to accept why something can't be done provided it's explained clearly. This was another thing I learned from the DLC testing for pCARS1 - once it was explained to me why some things weren't going to get fixed, I just got on with reporting them and leaving it at that.

And that brings me to an additional point to make regarding realstic expectations from us players, especially when it comes to bugs. A wise member of SMS explained to me, after what seemed like an obvious bug had slipped through our DLC testing :-

"There are a dozen of us testing this stuff. There's a couple of million players out there right now. Who do you think is going to find a bug first?"

In short, as frustrating as it is that bugs slip through, you cannot hope to compete with the playing power of tens/hundreds of thousands of players vs a few hundred testers.
 
Cluck said:
It's a 2-way street though. You know what really helps us players? Information. If something is technically feasible but unrealistic, say so and explain why. We should be
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Absolutely agree here.

It upsets me when other devs get short with players and say things like "you don't understand game development", then don't bother explaining to them the logistics behind a scenario.
 
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