In my time, I went pretty deep playing WoW and League of Legends. I noticed that both games had official forums, where Blizzard or Riot social media staff interacted with players at a regular cadence.
Like others, I’ve wondered why SGG makes minimal effort to connect with the player base. I’m not one to resent this choice, but I do want to understand it. So far my theory is this: Unlike Blizzard or Riot, SGG is operating at a lower profit scale, lower player base, on a simpler game, made by a smaller team. So it makes sense that they don’t want to take on the liability that comes with social media staff - a staff member can easily incite a lot of anger and flaming. It happens everywhere in gaming. And given SGG’s profit model - one that incentivizes impulse purchases using a system that is 98.7% likely to make each hero pull or loot roll frustrating/disappointing (at least a little bit)… Well now I can understand why they are so tepid about taking on the liability of communicating with the avid players. The liability is magnified because of the business model.
Lack of communication has been a hallmark of SGG here in the forums. Personally I overall don’t really mind that as it is a community forum, although more effort in the Bugs and Issues category would certainly not be amiss.
Lack of communication in the beta forums is certainly not what I would consider acceptable. The whole purpose of beta is to communicate with the devs on issues in the program. If that’s not two-way then the beta testers feel ignored and unappreciated and just stop being beta testers.
I agree with all of you. When I was selected to be a beta tester, I was so excited to help make E&P a better game. But as time went by, I saw that concerns by the testers were usually not addressed, and that even if there was something voiced by many testers, there was no change. So now I don’t even bother logging into my beta account every version anymore. What’s the point?
So how many people total are actually testing & giving feedback?
I get it that lack of feedback from devs can be discouraging but not providing that feedback isnt the right call in my opinion since they do still read it
Hmmm… I think people that are actually giving feedback totals less than 20? Idk. Usually the same 10 people give the feedback every time. There are probably a few more people testing.
That’s pretty bad. Sounds like 2 things need to happen
Beta needs more players that give feedback and get rid of those that don’t
And devs need to improve communication to their testers
Both parties are in the wrong in this topic
Players not giving feedback due to lack of developer response, while understandable, is pretty selfish since as much feedback as possible is needed on these new features & heroes
Devs have hand picked people to be in beta and should treat them that way rather than just a number
Intentional or not, current testers and the program and devs are hurting the game and the playerbase
Idk i mean I’ve tagged devs numeroues times in the forums
I don’t expect feedback
But i do it to draw their attention to what i see as an issue so they can fix it. It’s not about getting an “atta boy”, it’s about trying to improve a game i love playing
I do mention the lack of response is annoying but that annoyance doesn’t prevent me from doing what i think should be done
The only recent Beta topics that come to mind with decent amounts of feedback are Path of Valor, and J.F. (I suspect most players logged in when they realized how powerful the hero was), both topics with 80+ replies.
I’d say there’s still some interest left. Only few topics get big feedback though – whether it’s a new feature like Valor or a new powerful hero it seems.
This would work for me, as long as SG gave at least 1 week notice when they plan to open beta again.
Instead of posting the day of when beta opens.
Not everyone can commit time to beta test with such short notice.
maybe the devs don’t post that much on here ascould be seen as more as a threat, constantly spying! some people might not like it being over policed if they kept turning up every 5 mins?.
As for the beta testing does seem a bit all over the place from what I read,
How do you explain a hero to a Dev you have been testing is it bascailly a pros and cons sheet?
As someone who has recently been added to the beta program there’s a couple issues I would chuck into the mix that I’ve hidden in the drop down below for those that don’t care to skip:
A lot of waffling in drop down
There is a lot less engagement from SGG than I’ve witnessed in other testing environments and that does matter. Without proper engagement with beta testers it very easily starts to feel like testers are simply talking into the ether. Replying more to comments and explaining rationale for some decisions goes a long way to making beta testers feel like their input actually matters. I still remember that the first bug I found (which also happened to be in the live game) that I posted about in the beta area had to be re-posted by someone else before it was addressed – as such I have little confidence what I write there is actually read but anyway.
Withholding crucial information negatively affects ability to comment on balance – The first batch of costumes went through many rounds of beta testing and yet at no point was it indicated that costume quests and summons would only occur monthly. Indeed even by the point that Jean-Francois was being tested for the first time many were viewing him through the assumption that costume quests and keys would drop with a frequency that it could be reasonably assumed a F2P would get a costumed Sonya relatively easily by then but we didn’t find out about the actual frequency for all of that until the feature was announced for launch. Naturally if we known in advance then it would have affected people’s feedback. Even now with Season 3 the reveal of 2 new 4* Dark heroes has met with requests to change one to Holy to address the shortage of 4* Holy heroes but at the same time we’re totally in the dark about what the current plan is for the number of new 3* and 4* heroes they intend to release in each colour and class would help inform this discussion a lot. We don’t necessarily need to see all the heroes and their cards but some feedback to say we currently have plans for x 4* heroes broken down by element would help a lot.
Personally I’m finding it hard to get excited for Season 3. Now I personally try to keep my expectations low at most times but when I look back at the 2019 Sneak Peak, I can’t help but think that despite having low expectations from the outset that SGG has disappointed on pretty much most of them. Now I won’t go into each point at the moment but focus on Alchemy Lab and Raid Tournaments. A long-requested community feature of Alchemy Lab was mangled into a waste of a building and Raid Tournaments have underlying logical issues that continue to persist even now. Now when Alliance Wars was released there were teething issues that went through a number of iterations to improve and fix. Now however it feels like SGG doesn’t mind releasing features with clear problems and no longer cares about fixing them and just wants to pump out the next hero to make money from. In that environment where you are not sure if the company cares about things like that any more you wonder to what extent you’re wasting your time just raising it – especially given point 1 there doesn’t seem to be much engagement with points raised and little explanation for decisions made. All I can stress is that features for using the heroes you have are in my opinion far more important than having new heroes be added. We’ve loads of heroes in game already and at the end of the day what is the point of having heroes if not to use them. Considering that most players are unlikely to get the next 5* being added but everyone will play with a gameplay feature that those gameplay features shouldn’t be treated as secondary considerations to hero production. And yet when we consider how much production time will have been spent on 12 x HOTM, 5 x Wonderland Heroes at start of year, 15 x Challenge Event Revamp Heroes, 20 x Costume Variants of heroes and now another 9 x Season 3 heroes I do wonder if a little less time was spent on pumping out heroes and more time on the likes of the Alchemy Lab and Tournaments that the game may be in better shape right now.
Setting up beta appropriate for testing – In this latest beta we were given 3 new 3* heroes to test alongside the new 4* and 5* heroes. Appropriate places to test the 3* in raid settings were difficult as most raid teams were initially set to 5* defences to test the new 4* and 5* heroes against – which should easily be anticipated by the dev team and a 3* tournament should have been made available in beta to test them in. But it wasn’t. I did personally try to help by trying to create a number of duplicate accounts with various raid team configurations with loads of different combinations of heroes so there were more 3* defences in beta for people to face with the new 3* heroes but with all the moving around of emblems and powering up some heroes the exercise meant that it took up a whole afternoon to do half of them – though by the time it came to do the rest someone else had ignored the request message I’d put in the test alliance I was using to track the accounts by parking a dead account with a 5* defence in it which coupled with the number of 5* defences also multiplying from people re-importing their progress it was clear it wasn’t really worth the effort to create the remaining accounts I had planned especially as currently one of my dogs has an aggressive cancer which means they’re unlikely to make it to Xmas this year and so given the choice of continuing in that futile endeavour of making dupe 3* defences instead of spending more time with them I chose the later. But the point here really is that the testing could have better been planned – either by giving us a 3* tournament in beta as well OR potentially it might have been more sensible for us to first test all the 3* heroes they plan to add in Season 3 in one round, then another beta round for all the 4* heroes and then another could have the first batch of 5* heroes.
I don’t think the forum being the only method of feedback is necessarily conducive to getting that many responses. If someone else has already posted a point then it feels redundant/waste of time to echo it. I personally try to confine myself to only commenting to raise something that either hasn’t been spotted or I think may not be being considered.
On a separate point I note someone mentioned beta players leaking cards on LINE, is that still going on given all the relevant info is posted in the Beta Beat posts? I mean this could easily be resolved by SGG by having each Beta Player’s account number appear across the hero card that would be in any screenshot and then use the leaked screenshots to track who was leaking.
