May 2024 Developer Diary

[Raphael van Lierop]

1 hour ago, Leeanda said:

I meant no disrespect in my last part in my comment..   

I can't imagine how anyone would read your comment with any sense of disrespect!!

[Leeanda]

9 minutes ago, Max21 said:

There's also the problem of lack of motivation and lack of reward for achieving a goal. For example, I climb to the top of the Timberwolf Mountain and get a lot of useful items as a reward. It's a difficult location. I went the hard way and got the reward. But for example in the Blackrock location I can go to the very end of the location, fight with wolves, get caught in a blizzard, eat a lot of food and at the end I will find nothing. And next time I won't go there. Difficult locations should reward the player for the difficulty.

You may not agree with my opinion. About motivation and items in the game. But I made such conclusions based on communication with my subscribers during live broadcasts and based on surveys in which 2000 - 3000 people participated.

What one person sees as hard isn't the same as others may see it..  it's all down to individual play style .

That's why this is such a great game..the choices are vast and cater to so many..

[Leeanda]

4 minutes ago, Raphael van Lierop said:

I can't imagine how anyone would read your comment with any sense of disrespect!!

Good to know...

My sense of paranoia goes with my inability to put thought on paper sometimes... 😁

[Raphael van Lierop]

40 minutes ago, Max21 said:

There are many things or mechanics in the game that few people take advantage of not because they are bad. They don't use some things because they are (not properly designed) or don't work properly. Like the Rock Cache. It takes 50 stones to create it. Some players want a storage box, but collecting 50 stones is too hard. So they give up on this mechanic. Or for example a flashlight. It weighs more than 1 kg. It only works during aurora. A lot of people don't use it because it's too much weight in their backpack. Or they don't travel in the northern lights. There's a lot of stuff like that. Moose-Hide Cloak. Spray paint. Ballistic Vest, Ski Boots, etc. 

Again, the items are used by a small number of players because of the misconfigured functionality.

 

Woah, easy there. Not properly designed? Don't work properly? Sorry, but I disagree with that characterization.

Don't want to collect 50 "free" rocks to make a Cairn/Cache? No problem, don't do it. It's not hard to find 50 rocks and the gameplay benefit to building the cairn/cache is significant for some players (not all).

The flashlight is effective at causing "aurorified" wolves to flee, which is a pretty powerful tool. There are some gameplay mechanics and content that only work during the aurora, and so the flashlight become useful as a tool for exploring during those times. It also lets you spare other consumable light sources.

I'm not sure how you can claim the items are used by a "small number of players". I think it's totally fine to talk about whether you think something is useful or not, but you can't possibly know what other players do or how they play. This is an argument people use to try to lend more weight to their opinion.

Your relatively small sample of subscribers, in the grand scheme, is 0.0003% of our players. It's not a statistically relevant sample. We all interpret the feedback from our local community as the truth for the whole, but it's just not the case. 

[Leeanda]

1 minute ago, Max21 said:

I don't draw conclusions based on my opinion alone. I wrote in the post above.

I know,I did note that..😊.  But 2000+ opinions out of how many players ...isn't really saying that there's an issue with the game itself but that some think there's room for improvement ...

[Max21]

8 minutes ago, Raphael van Lierop said:

Woah, easy there. Not properly designed? Don't work properly? Sorry, but I disagree with that characterization.

Don't want to collect 50 "free" rocks to make a Cairn/Cache? No problem, don't do it. It's not hard to find 50 rocks and the gameplay benefit to building the cairn/cache is significant for some players (not all).

The flashlight is effective at causing "aurorified" wolves to flee, which is a pretty powerful tool. There are some gameplay mechanics and content that only work during the aurora, and so the flashlight become useful as a tool for exploring during those times. It also lets you spare other consumable light sources.

I'm not sure how you can claim the items are used by a "small number of players". I think it's totally fine to talk about whether you think something is useful or not, but you can't possibly know what other players do or how they play. This is an argument people use to try to lend more weight to their opinion.

Your relatively small sample of subscribers, in the grand scheme, is 0.0003% of our players. It's not a statistically relevant sample. We all interpret the feedback from our local community as the truth for the whole, but it's just not the case. 

You can say that everything works perfectly. But if you created a poll "Top 5 things you don't use in the game" and posted it on your social network page. You would see those items on the list. 

Try making a poll like this and collecting feedback. Not on the game forum. But on a page in a social network. For example, on the official page of The Long Dark in X. 

I have a 0.0003% statistic and draw conclusions based on it. You don't have the stats of 99% of the players. Why do you conclude that everything is working perfectly?

Edited June 20 by Max21

[Raphael van Lierop]

1 minute ago, Max21 said:

You can say that everything works perfectly. But if you created a poll "Top 5 things you don't use in the game" and posted it on your social network page. You would see those items on the list. 

Try making a poll like this and collecting feedback. Not on the game forum. But on a page in a social network. For example, on the official page of The Long Dark in X. 

Why would I do that? Our TLD account on twitter has 27k followers. Again, this is a statistically small sample. Most people who play the game will never show up in any forum, never post on social, you would never know they even exist. 

This is the danger with game communities and listening too much to the vocal minority. I'm not making a game for 25-30k people. I'm making a game for 10-million+ people. Every single one is equal. 

And I by no means think everything works perfectly. I don't think I said that. No game is ever perfect. This one never will be despite my working on it for over 10 years.I do know that for every person who dislikes a feature there is at least one other player who likes it. Which opinion should I listen to?

[ManicManiac]

@Max21
This feels like it's getting rather disrespectful now... 
Working properly is very much in the purview of the people who make the game.  If things work the way Hinterland intends... then it's working properly.

For the rest of us it's just subjective option.

It feels more than a bit out of line for folks to be trying to dictate to Hinterland about "proper" game design.  Also... I doubt very much that you personally know what all the rest of us who play this game feel about all the various mechanics and their implementations.

It seems to me to be rather bad form for you try and speak on behalf of others and to be assuming that your "opinions" are objective reality.

At this point, I feel as though you are just trying to be rather needlessly antagonistic.
Let's let this alone now.

 

Edited June 20 by ManicManiac

[Max21]

3 minutes ago, ManicManiac said:

@Max21
This feels like it's getting rather disrespectful now... 
Working properly is very much in the purview of the people who make the game.  If things work the way Hinterland intends... then it's working properly.

For the rest of us it's just subjective option.

It feels more than a bit out of line for folks to be trying to dictate to Hinterland about "proper" game design.  Also... I doubt very much that you personally know what all the rest of us who play this game feel about all the various mechanics and their implementations.

It seems to me to be rather bad form for you try and speak on behalf of others and to be assuming that your "opinions" are objective reality.

At this point, I feel as though you are just trying to be rather needlessly antagonistic.
Let's let this alone now.

 

I was just expressing an opinion. I use a translator. What seems disrespectful to you is just normal communication here.


This topic is closed.

[Raphael van Lierop]

Quote

But perhaps you should pay attention to the opinion of players who keep a constant online in Steam (this is approximately 3000-4000 people). 

What makes you think I don't pay attention to our players' opinions? All I said was that YOUR specific subscribers are just a subset of a larger set of players, and so their opinions must be assessed accordingly. You have an impression based on what you see and who you interact with (your community), and we have the same on a larger scale.

Re: constant users on Steam -- don't mistake what CCUs mean. CCU = concurrent users. For us these tend to go from 1500-5000 depending on what time of year, update releases, etc. etc. This translates to between 15-30k active Steam players per day, and about the same across all our other platforms, so let's say 50-60k daily around an update. Obviously the monthly number is much higher than that (about 750k monthly across all platforms, spiking up to 1M+ during big updates). 

It would be a mistake to read too much into the opinions of such a small sample of the overall players. The same would be true for the Baldur's Gate team at Larian.

I understand that you don't like my response, but I think you should try to see the bigger picture here and realize that by nature of even being in these forums, you are already a super minority of our player base. Doesn't mean you or the 2000 subscribers aren't important. But I can't think of you as "more important" just because you are here. I have to think about everyone who bought the game and plays it.

[I_eat_only_wolf_meat]

1 hour ago, Max21 said:

Meaning a large number of players make the choice not to use a lot of things in the game. What's the point of adding things that most players won't use?

I think these things add interesting play options that are useful, but are by no means "optimal"  There's a role for things that aren't optimal that might come up in extreme survival instances. or special circumstances.

For example, acorn pancakes are more trouble and work than they're worth, generally speaking.  They require cooking oil, maple syrup, water, and the acorn grounds themselves which are a chore to produce.  For all that you get less calories than a piece of wolf meat.  On the other hand, if you're dying of starvation they're a great option.   It's harder to see where something like the ballistic vest would be useful, but I'm sure it has its niche some place.  Most things in the game are like that.

[Leeanda]

4 minutes ago, I_eat_only_wolf_meat said:

I think these things add interesting play options that are useful, but are by no means "optimal"  There's a role for things that aren't optimal that might come up in extreme survival instances. or special circumstances.

For example, acorn pancakes are more trouble and work than they're worth, generally speaking.  They require cooking oil, maple syrup, water, and the acorn grounds themselves which are a chore to produce.  For all that you get less calories than a piece of wolf meat.  On the other hand, if you're dying of starvation they're a great option.   It's harder to see where something like the ballistic vest would be useful, but I'm sure it has its niche some place.  Most things in the game are like that.

Ballistic vest =cougar 

[I_eat_only_wolf_meat]

1 minute ago, Leeanda said:

Ballistic vest =cougar

Oh, yep, you may turn out to be absolutely right about that.  If he doesn't just bite our necks and kill us, that is.

[Leeanda]

1 minute ago, I_eat_only_wolf_meat said:

Oh, yep, you may turn out to be absolutely right about that.  If he doesn't just bite our necks and kill us, that is.

Fair point... But it might take it longer to chew.. giving us a fighting chance...for a few seconds anyway.

[UpUpAway95]

Sounds great to me.  Can't wait to see what sort of penalties will come with cheating death - anticipating things like going forward crippled in some way, which seems very realistic.  Love that you've found a way to incorporate the cougar's stalking nature in a meaningful way - going to make my one-zone challenges much more challenging for sure.

I haven't read comments, but would expect there to be a setting upon creating a new game to toggle the cheat death mechanism on or off.

[Pencil]

30 minutes ago, UpUpAway95 said:

 going to make my one-zone challenges much more challenging for sure.

I never thought of that, one-region survival is going to be so tough now. Now it's a completely new challenge; living with a cougar. Makes you wonder what happens if you get into a cougar struggle but stay in the region. You'd be constantly fending off the cougar I'd imagine. 

Sounds like a lot of fun lol

[Pyroxene]

16 hours ago, Raphael van Lierop said:

I appreciate what @rush247 is trying to do, warning us about a perceived issue or possible topic that will blow up against us (Hinterland). It's not like these things don't happen, and as noted we've experienced them before.

In a perfect world people would recognize our reasons for doing things a certain way, and also know that we generally a pretty open (over time...) to modifying the experience in ways that give as many of our players as much of the full experience of TLD as we can, all things considered (ex. personal tastes around challenge or the lack thereof). So the initial reaction to something they didn't like would be "hmmm...not the decision I would have made but I see why they chose that. But I really hope they consider changing that in the future for X reason", and then we can kind of have a reasonable dialogue around it.

What tends to happen instead is, even reasonable people get caught up in the mob mentality and the heat of the moment and kind of come after us and try to use pressure tactics to get us to change something they feel mad about. It "all comes from a place of passion and love for the game" then kind of gets used to excuse a lot of bad behaviour. And then if I call it out, often to protect or defend my team, that tends to make them angrier, makes things worse, I get called out personally in often very hostile/harmful ways, and the whole thing just lays like such a heavy bummer on what otherwise should be something we are all (us, as the developers, and you, as the players) are focused on enjoying and celebrating (hey, we just added new stuff to the game we both love!).

There's also a thing where new stuff can automatically feel jarring in a way that is uncomfortable, and so the reaction is to dislike it and want to revert it. There's a fear of losing something you loved in the past. All the requests to make things optional ("hey, just make ___ optional and everyone will be happy!"), come from this place. But at the end of the day we're making an experience for you and we have a specific idea of how we'd like it to work, and sometimes we want to try things out and we want you to come along with us for the ride and just experience new things in new ways, and if we realize they were bad ideas -- which we can only really know by trying them out (you and us, no matter how much armchair analysis there is about what a feature will be like before you can actually play with it), we tend to fix them or change them.

Anyways, if I seemed flippant about the "warning", I guess that's why. We can't make a game in fear of what people who don't like our decisions will do in response to that. I've seen it happen to other teams/studios where they just get paralyzed and every update becomes this horribly anxious thing where you are always just waiting for people to come at you about something. This is one of the main reasons I try to keep my team insulated from community sentiment. We read notes and feedback about features and stuff, but really try to filter out a lot of the hostility, because it really doesn't make our work any better, and we try to just focus on the players who are here to enjoy TLD in a way that doesn't take other people's enjoyment away.

Let's see what Monday brings! I'm sure it will be interesting, either way. 😅

Are you referring to my Wish list posts?

[Pyroxene]

On 6/19/2024 at 7:54 PM, Eli said:

Weiß man schon das genaue veröffentlichungs Datum?🤔

Ja, das ist am 24. Juni.

[chrislacruz]

The flashlight I found really useful during the 'Tales' as it's cheap way to get past wolves, at least for me.

On the subject of Ballistic Vest, how well does it defend you from a bear attack?

[Pencil]

1 hour ago, chrislacruz said:

On the subject of Ballistic Vest, how well does it defend you from a bear attack?

If you pair it with other high protective gear (moose hide cloak, deerskin pants, ski boots, etc.) and get a protection of over 100%, you won't take any damage at all from the struggle. Just a couple of condition points due to the bleeding. I think it's a great item if you embrace the lack of movement and go all in on protection. No need to run if nothing can hurt you 😂

[RossBondReturns]

2 hours ago, chrislacruz said:

The flashlight I found really useful during the 'Tales' as it's cheap way to get past wolves, at least for me.

On the subject of Ballistic Vest, how well does it defend you from a bear attack?

I survived Back to Back to Back to Back bear attacks in TWM when testing that very thing.

[UpUpAway95]

19 hours ago, Raphael van Lierop said:

 do know that for every person who dislikes a feature there is at least one other player who likes it. Which opinion should I listen to?

Ultimately - your own; but listening is good too.... by people on all sides of the matter. 

I really appreciate how good you and your team are at this and have never ceased to amaze me at how many unique and creative features (ones I never would have thought of) that you've added to this experience over the years. At times I've had my share of doubts and fears about new features and some that I still don't "love" myself, but I can see that they do fit in towards giving people options even when those options are not as obvious as a toggle.

You've earned my utmost respect and all I can really say is just keep up the good work.

Edited June 21 by UpUpAway95

[Looper]

1 hour ago, UpUpAway95 said:

Ultimately - your own; but listening is good too.... by people on all sides of the matter. 

I really appreciate how good you and your team are at this and have never ceased to amaze me at how many unique and creative features (ones I never would have thought of) that you've added to this experience over the years. At times I've had my share of doubts and fears about new features and some that I still don't "love" myself, but I can see that they do fit in towards giving people options even when those options are not as obvious as a toggle.

You've earned my utmost respect and all I can really say is just keep up the good work.

Much wisdom in this - what I like about TLD is the clear vision it was made from. Thats what made it a great game with tons of immersion. @Raphael van Lierop to me had a very distinct idea of what the game should be like. I dont really belive in "populardriven" development since it sort of creates a patchwork of things not really thought through. (not even my own ramblings 🙂).  Best advice to the devs is the above. Keep with the vision while getting inspired by ideas.

Pancakes f.i. came from a very vocal part of the community. In the start I couldn't see the point but now I find it great that its there.    

[Tonya1026]

Any specific date in June yet? I’ve been checking daily since June 15th 😂 

[Cattleman]

59 minutes ago, Tonya1026 said:

Any specific date in June yet? I’ve been checking daily since June 15th 😂 

The thread immediately below this one in the News and Updates tab of this forum...