*Sigh* Leave. The Game-Devs. Be. (Criticism)

by INSANEdrive, ಥ_ಥ | f(ಠ‿↼)z | ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ| ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, Friday, June 03, 2022, 20:03 (901 days ago)

So uh, I'm just gonna like... blog, er jabber-about real quick. Yeah?- Cool?- Sure, sure.

...

Shoot, I know what I want to say, but gosh darn how do I start this...

Hmmmm....

?? ??? ? ??ℝ? ?ℕ? ???ℝ?? ℕ??ℍ?!...

Suddenly! Then I realized "Oh shoot it's Thursday". (Which seemed to come by REALLY quickly this week, and I'm not sure why.) Jumped on to the TWAB, and prepared to regale in its potential infos. The part called "Operation Muy Caliente" was... interesting in a number of ways. I suggest everyone here at least read that part in full.

First of all, and this "feeling" may be more to me than anyone else... this part here;

As we've said in the past through TWABs, socials, and other dev updates, we'd much rather ship something a little too spicy than something bland that makes a bad first impression. I think with Solar 3.0, we landed somewhere in the middle, and the team feels very passionately that this is the wrong place to be.

It may have been said, but... I missed it. Does any one else recall this being said? I ask as this as I couldn't help but feel like this a sort of rebuttal to my... really out there observation. It would have been nice to have had a link to an example. Despite this assertion given in this TWAB, I can't ever say I've seen such a declaration made before, hence in part why I wrote what I wrote. Maybe such was implied? To whatever, I missed it.

Then we get to...

Solar Warlock:

• Heat Rises:
  • Added behavior: Consuming your grenade now also releases a burst of Cure x2 around you, healing you and your nearby allies. Consuming a Healing Grenade increases the strength of the burst to Cure x3 and consuming a Touch of Flame Healing Grenade provides Restoration as an additional benefit.
  
  
• Icarus Dash:
  
  • Added behavior: While airborne, rapidly defeating targets with your Super or any weapon Cures you.
  
  
• Celestial Fire:
  
  • Each Celestial Fire projectile now applies 10 Scorch stacks. This is increased to 15 stacks with Ember of Ashes equipped.

Solar Titan:

• Burning Maul:
  • Buffed damage in PvE by 25%
• Roaring Flames:
  • Added behavior: While Roaring Flames is active, your uncharged melee attack now deals Solar damage and applies 30 Scorch stacks to targets per hit. This is increased to 40 stacks with Ember of Ashes equipped.
• Consecration:
  • Fragment slots increased from 1 to 2.
    
  • Raised the height of the secondary attack's ground wave by 25% to more easily catch players who jump too late.

Pretty cool! Progress is progress. Thank you. ...but... then, the mood changes a touch.

That's no small list of changes. The team takes feedback seriously—we're players ourselves, so when things don't land, we also feel that internally. To say it out loud, a hotfix of this magnitude comes at the cost of other changes, so to set expectations here, the team is unlikely to take another balance pass until much later this Season. It's important to our team that on top of doing amazing new things, we maintain a healthy work-life balance and this patch necessitates some breathing room.

And man, when I read that, I was... "Well, that felt oddly specific, and a touch passive aggressive."

...and my brain, meanwhile, gave me it's interpretation...

[Han] It'll take a few moments to get the coordinates from the navicomputer

[Luke] Are you kidding? At the rate they're gaining?

[Han] Traveling through hyperspace ain't like dustin' crops, boy. Without precise calculations, we'd fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova, and that would end your trip real quick, wouldn't it?

A fair point, right? ...Oh! For those of you don't understand what it said, Han in this case is Sandbox Discipline Lead Kevin Yanes, and Luke is the fanbase. Hyperspace is the GameDev Job... so on so on.

It was just... curious. I knew there was subtext, but I wasn't too sure of the what.

And then... a little later on I came across this reddit thread about a twitter post made by Mr.Yanes ("Titans will never get air dodge (I.e. Twilight Garrison) back", as per Kevin Yanes a Sandbox Lead at Bungie). When I went to click the link to twitter, and see the chatter about this, the link to this tweet was gone. It had been deleted.

Uh oh. Curiouser AND Curiouser.

And well... now it seems the answers can be filled in by the response.
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Sandbox Lead Twitter Account Gone.

https://twitter.com/Tocom?t=iFrBDM75D-BQuGBXG0t0EQ&s=09

Essentially all tweets are entirely gone now and it may be likely that he will never share design information and answer design questions like he sometimes did ever again, or at least not for a long time.

I sure as heck wouldn't wanna interact with the community for awhile after this

It's a real shame, he was one of the most transparent developers and would often gladly share a peek behind the current to people and talk about design choices, but I guess this community can't handle themselves

GG community, we did it!

https://twitter.com/DirtyEffinHippy/status/1532739474345455616?s=19 thread from hippy tangentially related about the nature of transparency and feedback

There's so many things I want to say but I can't, either because it wouldn't be professional or because I know exactly how it would be twisted, but I just want to say more often than not, we get demands for things we've already publicly talked about. But when devs get punished,

— Liana Ruppert (@DirtyEffinHippy) June 3, 2022

for giving you the transparency you want, then it's time to change the conversation. This goes for all studios, not just one. I've been in this industry 20 years now, seen the worst of the worst and the best of the best, but social media has created this double-edged sword,

— Liana Ruppert (@DirtyEffinHippy) June 3, 2022

where players have direct access to the teams and that access gets abused daily. This is why many studios have a strict "no talk" policy with social because some don't understand what transparency means, that transparency doesn't always mean you're going to hear what you want.

— Liana Ruppert (@DirtyEffinHippy) June 3, 2022

I support any game dev that puts boundaries in place because there are official channels for feedback. These teams trust those tasked with feedback to gather all of it, we wade through it all; the forums, socials, pigeon carries in the middle of nowhere,

— Liana Ruppert (@DirtyEffinHippy) June 3, 2022

So when that feedback because abusive in personal spaces, those devs have the right to protect their space b/c that doesn't limit the ability to give critique, it just means you lost the privilege to be hateful about it in personal spaces that are not related to the job. The JOB.

— Liana Ruppert (@DirtyEffinHippy) June 3, 2022

Some of the things asked for are not doable. Funnily enough, a lot of things people ask for have already been in-progress but can't be talked about it yet (all studios do this because things change. Plans fall through, sometimes they don't make sense anymore, etc, etc).

— Liana Ruppert (@DirtyEffinHippy) June 3, 2022

As a CONSUMER, you have a right to your voice. As PEOPLE, we have a right to protect ourselves if that voice transforms from critique and feedback to blindly attacking, actual threats, and personal attacks that have nothing to do with the dev's job.

— Liana Ruppert (@DirtyEffinHippy) June 3, 2022

Consider that you don't know *everything* - nobody does. But games are evolving art forms and a large part of that is because of you, the players. No matter the game. Don't lose that by being hateful. Contrary to popular belief, yelling and screaming just makes people shut down. pic.twitter.com/fFvZrNKJUD

— Liana Ruppert (@DirtyEffinHippy) June 3, 2022

One team, one fight. We're in this together. As for our teams, we will continue to monitor feedback, continue conversations about the future, and we will continue pulling at those heart strings because the story is actual fire. Also, therapy is really cool and highly recommend it

— Liana Ruppert (@DirtyEffinHippy) June 3, 2022

This is not an attack on anyone, I mean it with every fiber of my being that the love the teams have, the love I have even before I joined the team, for this community is immeasurable, that's why I feel it's important to stick up for the integrity of it. (Please drink your water)

— Liana Ruppert (@DirtyEffinHippy) June 3, 2022

i really don't like being serious all the time, so pretend there's a super witty butt joke or something here.

— Liana Ruppert (@DirtyEffinHippy) June 3, 2022

DMG just posted a big thread too

I admit, it can be difficult to push for transparency when a small group of individuals harass and attack folks with hateful messages.

Our goal is to serve the community. We want to provide that bridge between fan and developer.

I’ll be damned if anyone tries to ruin that.

— dmg04 (@A_dmg04) June 3, 2022

We will not tolerate harassment of any form, especially in the places we own.

We will uphold our code of conduct as often as possible, not only to protect our developers, but to help keep our community clean.

I can’t help but apologize to anyone who deals with this.

— dmg04 (@A_dmg04) June 3, 2022

I don’t want to put this on any of you to fix in the grand scheme. We have our own forums to clean up, and we need to continue standing up for our employees when lines are crossed.

Every bit helps, though, and guiding your spaces to stand against harassment can truly help.

— dmg04 (@A_dmg04) June 3, 2022

If you encounter this treatment of anyone within your own communities, speak up.

Stand with those being abused. Make sure your groups and spaces have rules in place to remove this kind of content, or guide the conversation to a constructive space (even while being critical).

— dmg04 (@A_dmg04) June 3, 2022

This community is massive. It’s so bright. It stands up for what’s right, and does so much to better this world.

Between the Foundation initiatives and all of the social causes you’ve helped to support, it’s so very clear how amazing you all are.

— dmg04 (@A_dmg04) June 3, 2022

I’m proud of so many, and so much that this community does. And we’ll keep on going.

Much love.

— dmg04 (@A_dmg04) June 3, 2022

Since this thread is getting a ton of comments and a bunch of them are asking what happened, the TL:DR is that Yanes said on Twitter titans will not get twilight garrison back, then people got very angry, started harassing him, and lead to this.

There was a thread here about that tweet yesterday that got locked from people being uncivil there too.

I'm hoping that in the future he may come back, I really appreciate the transparency some devs have at Bungie and I'd hate to see that go away. I think people really don't realize and appreciate how transparent Bungie is, especially compared to other studios. Very few studios give weekly blog updates of what's happened and even fewer studios have developers interact or share information with the community at all. I absolutely loved when Yanes went on that podcast and talked about void 3.0 and gave some amazing insight. I loved when other developers went on a similar podcast and talked about pvp balance changes that were coming and gave us some amazing inside information on how things like aim assist and accuracy work. I hope that we can get more of that and give Bungie constructive feedback without having to resort to harassment of developers.

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I am... SO DISAPPOINTED. Indeed, not the only one. There was a reason why I included his twitter in the big 'ol list at the top of this forum. He gave fantastic, frank tidbits of Destiny Game-Devery, with out all the neighborly "fruit basket and a pie" vibes we can get sometimes from the Community Managers (<3). It was refreshing to get from a lead "Nope, not gonna happen." Or "We're doing X because Y", and he could say that because... THE LEAD. He gave FANTASTIC incites behind the curtain, that I for one used in turn to understand the... what I can't presently see.

And now it's gone.

I lament the requirement of this change. I lament the requirement of idiots who never do. Dang it. It was so good, and once again idiots soiled it.