AspenGrey

I'm in! Please add me to the list. This is like my dream VR control.

Sorry I missed this! I do think the tone certainly improved (text can be a bitch) in the main thread very quickly. Heck, it's even been stickied, doesn't look like that's suppressing discussion to me. I'd just like to point out that while I had some comments on some of the initial responses, I (again) feel that it was handled pretty well later in the thread and pretty much textbook in the 2nd thread. That's why I've been focusing my responses in this thread almost exclusively on the idea that having ED reach out to server owners and start up a direct dialogue (OFF the forums!) would be useful.

Yep- all of those things happen and I've acknowledged it. It doesn't seem to be the most effective way to do it. Maybe I'm not clear, but I'm talking something where the company is reaching out rather than the customer is reaching out. That, which is the only thing I'm suggesting, does not seem to happen. (Yeah- I talk about some PR tactics in the initial post, but those items of concern have long-since been dealt with on the main threads.) Yet again, I am not in any way saying this should be applied to every complaint on the forums. I'm saying, 'pick a select group of people and do it'. We know ED is OK with working with community influencers at some level- see the recent Grim Reaper's video competition. I don't have any personal complaints with the way Nine's been talking with me. One more thing- I mean... No. That isn't how business works. If it's worked out for you, more power to ya. But, a customer does not need to 'earn' the respect of a business. That respect should be automatic. Otherwise, customers will vote with their dollar and discontinue their relationship with that business. Businesses should always strive to earn the respect of their customer, never the other way around. It's not art, it's not politics, it's business. The point is to sell a product. Even if you are 1000000% dedicated to that product and it's your life's work and everything, you're still in it to sell that product at the end of the day. That's not particularly relevant to this because I think that ED does respect their customers and do a pretty good job overall, so pardon the off-topic. I'm merely suggesting one way that I think they could do even better and make a win-win situation.

Come try out Through The Inferno. They're clamoring for improved MP and they have everything you're looking for. Multiplayer DCS is definitely not just 'furball bozos' going at it in dogfights- and in fact I think that those sorts of missions work perfectly fine. Also- furball bozos... :D I'm crying, that's great and i'm using it.

I'd like to hear something from you on why it wouldn't work. So far I've heard, - DCS is a successful company that knows how to handle things and doesn't need outside help. - .... Did I miss something else? I mean, that's not a bad argument. They clearly have been doing well or they wouldn't be around. I think the customer base would see this as an olive branch. Communication and interaction with the community ideally drives loyalty, which increases sales and word-of-mouth marketing. Basically, I'd be thinking, 'How do I get all of my customers to be as engaged and supportive as Zhukov?' Arguments I could personally come up with against this proposal (off the top of my head): - This takes developers away from developing. (Cost benefit analysis- will it help us fix things? Does it require a lot of opportunity cost to try it out?) - It requires additional manpower & time that may be better spent on other things. (You need someone to coordinate it and developers to look into things. It's - The current system is providing enough data I've actually brought these up in my discussion of the idea. Personally, as a user and customer, I appreciate having more communication rather than less, so even if say, #3 is the reason, I don't see how it could hurt development but I do see benefits in the PR realm.

I just wish DCS would support SLI with Oculus. No idea if that's an Oculus issue or a DCS implementation of VR issue. I personally don't have many problems that are unique to DCS- it's the same problem of screen door, low resolution, and high GPU usage that I see in any VR game. I also play the A-10C pretty much exclusively, so spotting incoming baddies isn't really my main concern. Going to take a look myself at how VR zoom effects things- that isn't something I've noticed.

Entitled isn't how I'd phrase it, I'd just think it'd be cost effective in terms of communications per people helped to talk to server owners directly in a formal setting. I don't support taking swings at either side, everyone ought to have their fun, but like you say, there are more variables to MP so maybe working with the people who develop and run MP servers will help to fix things. More complex, more resources? Waiting eagerly to see tomorrow's newsletter.

Same as it started! Would love to see ED implement a program where they work directly with server owners, multiplayer mission designers, and 'community influencers' to resolve some of the big complaints about MP, whether that's by identifying and fixing bugs or by identifying problems and best practices for mission design and server operation. Let me hear a yes or a no on that, ideally with reasons if it's a no. I can copy that answer over to the much busier discussions about this on discords and hoggit. I've continued posting because people are bringing up things that I consider at least somewhat valid points of discussion, and if I believe in the idea I should be prepared to defend it or change the idea when good points are discussed. I hear you saying that it already happens, but if it does it's not on a very significant level or it's not really apparent to the community. In that case, I'd hope to see results from that. Maybe it's all under an NDA, and in that case it'd really be a shame, but that is how business works.

I wouldn't say that it's entitlement. Those server owners represent the quality enjoyment and playtime of dozens or hundreds of unique players. I think it's completely reasonable for ED to reach out to server owners and work with them to find and resolve any issues that may exist. At worst, everyone here that's complaining goes 'Woo! ED is taking it seriously!', at best it helps things get better with less effort. Very happy to hear information from the ED team on upcoming dedicated servers. Sounds like the MP experience is being taken seriously and I hope that continues. :thumbup:

:thumbup: I'll take that as a good faith reply. Professionalism costs nothing and makes everything easier. I saw comments about wanting a dedicated server and Wags reply to it, looks like it'll be good stuff. That doesn't necessarily help with the problems that servers are seeing now, unless it's coming pretty soon. Hopefully we'll find that out tomorrow and this is all a moot point! The proposal to connect ED devs with server owners and mission developers would be intended to resolve current problems which are only seen in specific, though highly popular, scenarios such as high-population, highly-scripted dynamic servers, as well as to do an end-run around the many (pretty ignorant) comments about 'ED doesn't care!' Good PR is something that can't be bought, only nurtured, and it doesn't necessarily pay out directly in sales. But if you've got a whole bunch of people who have seen that ED's worked closely with the community in a specific and highly visible case, now you've got a whole bunch of people who are going to shut down people who say ED doesn't care. Aside from my point about how I think this would be an effective PR campaign- anyone who thinks ED doesn't care about their product is... not thinking it through, to be nice! It's a relatively small team, I'm pretty sure caring about the quality of their product is a deeply ingrained corporate culture thing otherwise DCS wouldn't have lasted this long or see continuous improvements in quality and content.

Yep, +1, 100% agree with this. The important thing isn't 'cows', the important thing is 'look at what our new underlying technology allows us to do!'. Cows are a simple and safe way to implement this that doesn't have any major impact on gameplay. Bravo Zulu, ED.

Show me a reasoned discussion and I'll show you an ad hominem attack? :music_whistling: I disagree that people are complaining at a 'normal' level in this case. We see plenty of 'I get bad FPS' and 'I get disconnected' threads, and there were even a few in the original threads about the state of DCS multiplayer which were quickly shut down by the people who had concerns about the server codebase. The concerning part is when well-respected server owners and mission developers say, 'This is a problem'. Those are people who SHOULD know. Now, I don't want to derail us with a discussion of if there is a problem- that's completely irrelevant to my proposal. With this I was proposing a way to improve communications on one issue which would hopefully be beneficial for both the customers and the company. Do you see a particular problem with having, say, a dozen or so well-respected server owners and mission developers get together to chat with ED devs in a formal setting? (I have read the comments on how that could lead to trying to cater to customer whims- I disagreed with it and explained my disagreement above.) It's a bit less in the spotlight than posting it all over the forums and it could hopefully allow the devs to pinpoint the causes of issues. I am absolutely not suggesting that this should be the norm for every little problem, nor have I suggested that in any thread. This is one, relatively unique case where the community, in terms of server owners and mission designers, could provide actually valuable input to the programmers on what is going on and where. (Or, alternatively, completely disprove that there's a problem in some cases.) Certainly logical arguments can be made against this proposal- ED may not have the manpower to dedicate to it. They may already know what's wrong and it just takes time to fix it. They may have alternative solutions. Some of this information was already communicated in the originating threads, so it's reasonably certain that it is already in the works, but I don't think that it negates the value of having additional community interaction. Again, hey, this is my opinion and take on it. I welcome discussion on it of course but let's be professional? I'll do my best to respond to actual concerns that are brought up about this proposal but otherwise I'm going to just leave it here- at some point ED may or may not become aware of it but the idea's out there.

Thank you for the edit to tone it down and making a point that I can respond to. :thumbup: I disagree that what I propose would in any way hand over creative control. The fact is, this is how major multiplayer servers operate (with highly dynamic missions). If ED cares about the multiplayer component of DCS (and everything I've seen supports that they do care!), this would be a good way to help 1. identify problems in either the code base or common mission design by leveraging the community and 2. allow the community to feel engaged and their concerns recognized. Yes, done really, really, really, really badly, it could lead to what you're talking about. I'm sure ED has enough sense not to let it get there. As a public relations person, you talk with the community, listen to them, and then take a look at what you think is important. By identifying major server owners and mission designers, you're more likely to get people who will have intelligent things to comment and who are focused on specific things, which should make the entire exercise more productive. This isn't something that's limited to game development, feedback from customers is an important part of any company, no matter what their product.

Well, I only had one point to make, and I was just reiterating it to reinforce that. As always, these comments are my opinion on the matter- there are of course things I have no reason to know about, but it did seem like there was a significant push-back from quite a few people who felt the concerns weren't taken seriously. This is all just an idea for how those complaints can be channeled into something useful and productive. Your work (@Nineline) is appreciated and I think helps to make the community stronger! :thumbup:

I mean, personally, I feel like they completely missed the point of my original commentary and chose to debate how I presented it. I won't link it here, but this thread has been continued and discussed pretty significantly over on r/Hoggit, and you can see some expanded ideas and discussions there if you'd like to read them. The fact that these discussions occur with clockwork regularity tells me that the public relations between ED and the community is not as effective as it could be. That may or may not be a priority for ED. :imho: This thread was not, in any way, intended to discuss whether there is a problem with the Multiplayer implementation or with other things, it was simply inteded to say, 'Hey, I see a lot of people are concerned about this! I don't think the response from the community manager was particularly effective at the beginning. What do you (the community) think about handling it this way?' That way, in short, being: Organize formal communications between server owners/mission designers and ED developers to determine what is causing the problems being reported, and how best to fix them.

Your work is appreciated!

I'll do my best to address some of the points you brought up! :thumbup: So, this was originally crafted as a reply to the following thread: https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=215654 This post was removed from that thread as off topic- fair enough. I was encouraged to repost it as its own thread by some members in the community. There have been some significant moderator actions on that thread, and the discussion has spilled over significantly to various DCS Discords and Subreddits off-site. (As in, every discord I'm a part of can't seem to talk about anything else today.) As a public relations professional (Not marketing- not my area!), this situation piqued my interest as an excellent case scenario for training, and I decided to write up my own opinion on how something like this could, potentially, be handled. There are lots of correct answers, but I tried to pick one that I felt would be both effective at calming community concerns expressed in that thread and elsewhere, and which would result in real results and potentially ease development burdens. The moderators who act as go-betweens did significantly respond to the thread in question and (at first) in a manner that I feel didn't help the community's perception. I'm not looking to analyze blow-by-blow any actions taken by the moderator team as that's considered against the forum rules, but I don't think that the initial actions taken were helpful. One of the points I brought up above is that being able to work with server owners in a controlled and organized fashion would allow developers to identify how exactly the server is being used. The popular server owners know what make a good server- they may or may not know how to most effectively employ the DCS program to create that efficiently & with good performance. Being able to identify the difference between 'the server owner is at fault' and 'the code is at fault' in a reliable manner, rather than the devs having to do all the work themselves, or rely on bug reports from busy server owners which may not include good, detailed information, would probably help them do their job better. That's the main gist of this thread. Again, all of this was a sort of thought experiment on how I personally would handle a similar situation, and it was written in such a way to be directly relevant to the current thread that's developed over 20 pages in about 2 hours and a lot of community involvement off-forum. The commentary about whether there's actually a problem, whether it lies more with the server owners & mission developers or with the codebase, and commentary on the specific argument going on between some members of the community and ED is probably better taken to the original thread- there have been a lot of good posts there although there have also been some less-than-useful posts. It seems to be a lot more under control than it was when I first drafted this up, with some good and useful information coming from the community manager.

As a Public Affairs/Public Relations specialist for my RL work, I’ve been watching the recent threads over concerns about DCS MP with interest, and what follows is how I would handle a situation like this. As a little back story, people have been raising significant concerns over the current quality of how the DCS MP works. The current thread is located in the Multiplayer forum. In order to handle this in an effective manner, ED should have someone (the community manager?) engage with the server owners and act as a go-between between server owners/community leaders (important streamers, squadron leaders, etc.) and the development team to help to identify what issues ACTUALLY exist, and how to fix them. ED is likely already looking at these issues, but by engaging with the community, it makes people feel valued and included which significantly calms community emotions. To help calm down the current firestorm which has blown up both on this forum and on every DCS Discord I'm a part of, ED should quickly acknowledge community concerns and announce a date for when they will make a concerted effort to ENGAGE with the community about these concerns. For example; “Hello community! We have heard your concerns about DCS MP, and we take them seriously. On ## Day we will be reaching out to the following people to get their feedback on the current DCS MP experience.” Right there you've stopped 90% of people bitching, because they feel valued and included and like their concerns are taken seriously. This costs ED almost NOTHING to implement- it’s literally just emails being exchanged with maybe 20-30 people who are identified as being either major server owners/operators or who are highly engaged with the community. I could draft that list up in about 30 minutes. Once you have reached out to these people, have the community manager) take the concerns of these server owners/important people and put them in front of the Dev team. This allows the dev team to analyze these concerns. The dev team can then say, ‘hey, we want to investigate this, please get us THIS data’ which could be mission files, server hardware lists, logs, etc. Boom, the Dev team can get the data they need. During this process, there may be cases where it really is all on the server owner's end, whether that's shit hardware or bad scripting. I’m sure that would be the case in a few examples. The Community Manager can then report that back to the server owners and it can get fixed on that end. However, if problems are identified it could also REALLY help the dev team to identify what those issues are without them spending a ton of their own time trying to hunt down the bugs. As long as this isn't all thrown under an NDA, streamers (remember those ‘important community members’) will throw this information out into the community for ED and people will feel like something is being done and that it will likely be effective. They're also more likely to trust people that they've been watching on YouTube for years and who they feel they have a personal relation with. That stops people from blowing up a firestorm and a really bad, Star Citizen-esque kickback towards ED. With all of this, we’ve effectively: A- handled the current community blowback. B- identified a solution that works with the community instead of against it. C- Gained a valuable insight into how DCS MP servers are being ran, implemented, and scripted. The current actions of the community, including significant lashing-out seen in the forums and on various discords are 100% being exacerbated by the community managers’ responses. It is ineffective public relations and will have no result other than angering people and making them less likely to engage with the company in the future. As a note: If this is the incorrect forum for this discussion, please let me know, but since it has to deal with the community and the DCS 2.5 MP system, I felt that this general DCS 2.5 forum was the best place to post it. Please do not use my post as an excuse to attack members of the development or community team- just because I wouldn't handle something in a particular way doesn't mean that it isn't a valid way to handle it. Note 2- The topic has moved to forum and site issues. While I feel that this has more to deal with a development of DCS 2.5, that's fair enough since I don't know where else you'd put it besides the DCS 2.5 forum or here.