kylelabriola

Kyle Labriola

@kylelabriola

blogging (ashamedly)

Hello! I'm an artist, writer, and game developer. I work for @7thBeatGames on "A Dance of Fire and Ice" and "Rhythm Doctor."

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I run @IndieGamesofCohost where I share screenshots and spotlights of indie games. I also interview devs here on Cohost.

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kylelabriola
@kylelabriola

Thing that happens to me all the time while working on a team

  1. I notice someone complaining about something in our game that bothers them but isn't crucially important, or general complaints like "the updates are so slow to come out, this game is dead."
  2. I am faced with a moral choice: do I tell anyone on the team that I saw these complaints...or do I keep it to myself?

I'm always trying to be cognizant of not inflicting stress or psychic damage on other team members just because some randos are complaining about something.

Like, I try to develop this mental wall between me and the audience, and another wall between me and the team, where something needs to really pass my "Is this worth worrying about?" test to make it through the barriers.

Because boy there's a lot of hot takes and complaints out there just kinda getting flung around in casual conversation. And I feel like if we take them all to heart, it'll just make daily life miserable. Which I wouldn't want to inflict on anyone, and it might hurt our productivity and motivation anyway.

And god forbid if I tell someone and then they drop everything they were doing to try to appease that player / those players with the complaint. Maybe ignorance is bliss for this kind of thing.

I'm curious if bigger teams have someone whose role it is to sift through all the online opinion chatter and try to pluck out the ones that are worth telling the team about. (looks up definition of "PR") ...crap is this my job??

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in reply to @kylelabriola's post:

senegart
@senegart

yeah as you say, in a larger team you would generally have one or more Community Managers or similar who, among other things, will often be responsible for collecting feedback of this form and presenting it to the team.

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kylelabriola
@kylelabriola

shit that's also one of my multiple jobs 😭😭😭

joking aside, i wonder what those CMs' filter is for "this is worth even sharing in a spreadsheet" versus "this is just meaningless ranting and i'm not gonna jot it down." Especially the bigger the game is, where there might be hundreds of different opinions that might even contradict each other.

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lotus
@lotus

as someone else said this is a job for a general sentiment report by a CM/SMM instead of individual comments. that kinda thing is really laborious to track on a smaller team where everyone is juggling multiple jobs, but yeah. just putting things into buckets of positive/negative/neutral and then further sorting as you see fit (e.g. completely filtering out comments from obvious trolls or creating a special category for bugs) can be helpful over time or if you do something differently. I generally wouldn't share a specific comment with the team unless it's very personal and cool, like a heartfelt message or fanart. other than that it'd funnel down to "we've gotten a lot of performance complaints recently" or "it seems like people are getting really antsy for the next update, is there anything solid I can show/tell them right now?"

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kylelabriola
@kylelabriola

Woah this is super helpful! I love the idea of a "sentiment report", this is the first time I'm hearing about it but also the exact thing I was wondering about.

I know it's nebulous but do you know how many complaints it would take for it to register as worth putting down on the report? Especially for non-bug things, like "this part isn't fun" or "this part looks ugly"? Do you have to wait until like 5 people say it?

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lotus
@lotus

there's unfortunately no science to it imo, it's totally case-by-case lol

this is especially true since you have to try and factor in stuff like: how many comments do you get in general? are the users these comments come from "known bad actors" (i.e. those who seem to exclusively leave really rude, negative comments)? are these comments coming from people who are interested in the game, active players, longtime players, or random strangers?

one of the problems with sentiment reporting is that there's a sort of latent difference between platforms. a dev-run community Discord is usually much more positive overall than others, since that's where the biggest fans congregate (obvies they can be very demanding and there are exceptions, but generally this is true ime). so it could be worth giving critical or negative comments there extra weight, as it's more likely coming from a player invested in the game instead of some rando with no interest. on the other hand, Steam is almost always the most negative and you'll often have people who don't give a rat's ass about the game leaving the most hateful comments possible. by and large you'll have to go with your gut and try to discern what feedback would actually be useful for the team

does the team have time to redo the example "ugly part" to make it look nicer? if not, then could that information be helpful going forward? it might be worth logging that on a personal level and then sharing with the team if you see it crop up consistently from different users to help inform future development. otherwise, it might just be a couple people's opinion

to start, I'd just say "okay, I read most of our messages and here are the things I see people speaking about consistently" and then work downwards. if you can actually get into total comments and break it down into percentages that's even better, but pretty laborious on something like Discord or Reddit without bespoke tools

and that's why a robot can't do this job LMAO

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