A question for the Hinterland developers.


EternityTide

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After perusing the pre-alpha archive, I noticed that the developer interactions with the testers was far larger than the interactions with the open alpha players. This isn't a complaint, I'm just curious.

Is it harder for you to relate to the new alpha testers, or is it that they are so many it's difficult to respond to them all now the forums have expanded in size and fanbase? Or is it because you had more of a peerage with the pre alpha testers than with the open alpha players? Again, I must stress that I'm not trying to be confrontational or create an awkward situation, I'm simply curious about how the social interactions between the Developers, the Pre Alpha testers and the open public players

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It's mainly due to the quantity of responses that would be needed...

With initial pre-alpha testers [before the alpha backers opened] there were just a few testers while the foundation was being made.

Backers sections were added next so there were a couple of hundred people playing/testing [a lot don't bother posting], so it was still manageable. They were mainly focussing on building a stable enough version for initial Early Access release.

Now with tens of thousands of players, it's a case of time management. They're locked down in full programming and updates. They read the forums regularly, and participate when they can - but with the growing player pool they are also now heavily focussed on tweaking and expanding the game for everyone, so they don't have as much time to respond to every post - plus a number of the topics are repeats of other suggestions are duplicates so it's time consuming to respond every time. They're also looking at what suggestions and requests are workable for adding to the game -- it must serve the planned storyline gameplay, and as well not use up too much of the main allocated programming time for building the main game.

One reason there's still a little more interaction with the devs and very early pre-alpha testers is because we're also very familiar with the directions and time management limitations. We try to leave the long lists of requests for the devs to go through and decide what can/can't be added, but have followed early on enough to understand how/why they focus on a balance between realism vs gameplay, and also that they need to be limited in simply adding cool fluff content since that can take away from the time needed for completing the full story mode games and maps.

(sorry for the long answer, but hopefully that explains - they don't mean to seem selective or less interactive, they're just relying on the long term people to field some responses so they can concentrate full out on the game building as much as possible now)

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