What part of "Community feedback" do you not understand?

I just want to reiterate a couple of the points @TobyZiegler made in this because I think it's really important something is done about this as soon as possible, especially with new mods along the way.

You remember a very long thread I posted a few weeks ago? If you don't it's here: https://www.brawl.com/threads/59571/page-4
It talked about a lot of the issues that CTF had (and still has for that matter) and tried to encourage people to both talk about the problems they had, as well as the solutions they had for the problem. I'm pretty sure all the staff read it, but in reality I got serious responses from 2 staff members. One of those didn't post on the thread for all to see (I got the response though so at least there was one) and the rest didn't even come to comment on it. That document was over 5000 words long, talked about some of the issues in the most detailed and reasonable way that's been done on those forums, and encouraged discussion to come up with ideas to solve the problem. After all that, to say only 2 staff properly responded is kinda crap. The fact is that it doesn't matter whether someone is flaming on their suggestion thread or not at this point, the staff are ignoring pretty much all of them. I actually feel quite lucky that I at least got some response from the staff to my thread, because I certainly didn't expect to. Nothing's really been done to help solve the problem since then, and I hope to god some of the changes recently announced will address some of those points I raised, but it would be really nice if we could actually get notified whether our suggestions are any good. Even if they're utterly terrible, at least we're trying to put something forward to address the problem

Please keep doing this, because right now it's the only notification you get. On another note, you don't allow community members to really test the class changes, and then wonder why it doesn't appeal to the majority. Different people see classes differently, you can't just assume that the 1 player knows how best to treat the class, it might end up being something totally different to the overally community would like.

See my above response for part of this. However I'd like to add that yeah, a lot of the community give the staff members unreasonable hate when suggesting changes etc. I get that it's not reasonable for you to put up with it. I also get that the staff have a lot to do, involving those very important jobs like removing hackers. However, I'd argue that this is another really important part of the job. Getting involved with the community, helping make the gamemode better for the future. I would say that it's part of the job of being the staff - to make the place better for us all. Right now that certainly isn't being done, and CTF is just stagnating. What's more is you're probably causing more problems for yourself in the long run. Staff complain about the unreasonable community and about how it deters them from responding. The problem is when you don't respond, you frustrate them, making them more hostile the next time.

And this is what happens when you don't respond to a lot of people. You get a situation where a suggestion forum is bigger than some of the brawl gamemodes, yet no "good" updates have been in place for months and little to no announcements for the next one. Yes, I agree, we want to change stuff. And yet, here we are, @TobyZiegler writing another post on the forums about it, and me responding to it. I know I'm not going to stop until something changes, but right now it feels like I'm talking to a brick wall when I'm trying to be reasonable about it.

 

Elf is far from underpowered. It has enough mobility, deals damage and has 5 steak. I've played it a few times and I suggest you ask around more people that play elf like @YouAreBestBae and @Forums

IIRC the staff did host a test server for elf back in the day but it was only accessible by staff, just so they can test it for bugs on the class and what not.

$2.50 for a worthless class? Excuse me but elf was far from worthless when it came out. Maybe a little bit because of the lower protection armor but that doesn't excuse the fact that it was hella mobile at first (and still is quite so) and could counter pyro soldier heavy and archer simultaneously. The only issue w/ elf at the time imo was that no one was ever used to a playing style or learning curve such as itself.

Other than that, good thread. +1

 

If the mods spent more time pushing community backed updates than trying to create something perfect, things would move along much more smoothly. Trying to please everyone is only going to end badly; hclewk and Wiki_Kiki tried it, they created Paladin, then hclewk threw a tantrum because we didn't like it.

That said, we as a community are pretty garbage - just recently an SMOD suggested a legacy server, which has got to sting a bit. So we're not blameless. While the mods need to respect our wishes, we need to respect that their decision is both final and made in our best interests.

 

Elf isn't useless if you know how to fkin use it xdd

 

For context with this, it was just because the pyro rework that the community had already known had been released for staff testing ingame, just so that we could see how it played in regular gameplay. I wanted to test it out on someone, there were no mods on, and since you seemed to like the pyro rework when you saw it, I asked you. Since you didn't reply, I waited until Nom was on and used him to test it out instead. By the time you replied, I didn't need anyone to test it on anymore. That's all. ^^

 

Hey Toby. It's feather here. Firstly. Great post. I read through each and every bit of it as well as every single comment thus far. I won't go over everything in an organized manner because that's not really me, but I wanna truly give my input.

I completely agree that the community and the staff team need to work together. Not just the forums community either. I firmly believe that we are nothing without you guys, so therefore we need to take opinions from EVERYONE. However, it's a double sided coin. We've tested listening entirely to the community on wildwest and they ended up hating the result. That was a failed idea and I believe we don't want to do that again.

Of course, there have been really good things that came from listening to the community such as raid changes, some wildwest changes, and multiple ctf alterations. Through good communication between the staff team and the community, we have been able to pinpoint exactly what you guys wanted while catering it towards something that was feasibly possible. We didn't listen entirely to you guys, but you played a major part in it (just look at raid for instance).

However, I don't agree with you when you say the staff team doesn't care about the community. I know I myself care very deeply for you guys and I do everything I can to make your game time enjoyable. There are others as well, all busting their butts to bring you a good experience. The reason you guys don't see that is because we are inhibited in what we can share with you guys. That isn't our wish, that's upper staff, but that's policy and I'm not obliged to fight them on it right now. They must know something I don't, but please understand that a lot of mods and especially jmods are "left out of the loop" so to speak.

I understand why smods+ do what they do. There are some ideas that are purely that, just ideas. There is no point in sharing them with anyone until they have transformed into a concrete project. On the other note, though, if there is a change that is definitely going to be implemented I feel that it is important to get your guys' input on it so if you don't like it we aren't wasting our time with it.

So what's my main idea with all of this? I believe we should take the time to truly communicate and not just say we are. If an idea is being discussed, don't discuss it with anyone outside of the staff team, so we don't raise anyone's hopes before we're sure it's going to be implemented. Once we decide we want to go through with the plan, get the community's input to make the experience better and also more efficient. No one likes unnecessary work, so I can imagine asking the community if they even like this change would save a lot of time and effort on the developers' part. Also truly looking through the idea section on the forums (I'll volunteer to compile them into concrete ideas that are complete, short, and easy to understand. I'm sure others would as well). Not everything will be accepted, but it could save a lot of time attempting to create new ideas instead of just listening to someone that spent a lot of hard work on thinking of the same idea before you.

 

I'll play ctf regardless of the changes, but I'd like someone to at least tell me what's happening. Really hate getting on ctf to find some game changing update occured and I have no time to adapt.

 

elf is op if you know how to use it, lots of ppl who say it is bad or underpowered barely ever play it, and when they do they arent using its full potential

 

Sssshh dont tell everyone man :///

 

i mean, you brought up elf so it was relevant

 

Back on topic please. No arguing and let's keep it calm.

 

Yes ma'am

 

This is complete nonsense. Elf takes about as much as any other class to learn. All you need is to dedicate time to playing it like other classes and you'll be able to play its full potential.

 

The thing about classes is that if you master a class, you can usually do many wonders on it that the average joe wouldn't be able to. Just because you can play it well doesn't mean it is a good class, you have just mastered it inside and out. Look at league of legends, vayne sucks but people who can play her well show very good results.

 

As I was the one who created the doc:

That suggestion was done ages ago. Like, probably last winter or longer ago, and it was a pain getting all staff members to give their feedback. We read through the forums back then, but as a necro update was not planned, only few reworks existed. Those we looked at and evaluated, but felt the original idea of Wiki_Kiki was more suited for necro, not least because of the nostalgia factor. This one is pretty much identical to his, with the exception of a few minor tweaks in design of the beacon and functionality. Then, because obviously being asked about, we started spreading the info that we were planning the necro rework for reals, at which point this thing was more or less done.

What we didn't know was that Brawl was hit by EULA in the meantime, which meant that priorities changed, and we had to set back necro. At one point we wanted to do assassin next, since blocking would not be possible on 1.9+, so we focused on that for a while, but for now it seems we're staying on this hybrid 1.8/1.9/1.10 version, so that can be set back as well.

So, back to necro. During these months, people heard we were redoing necro and started coming up with ideas and reworks themselves, although, as stated every time when I told someone, it was more or less done and required testing to see if it even works as a pvp option. Then for a few months nothing happened (nom on other gamemodes), and now we want to do Wave XII and brought up necro yet again, sadly someone got hold of the doc and handed it to a regular who in turns posted it here on the forums.

We should have probably posted the doc contents to the forums as soon as it was done, but, as you can see, posting it does not mean it gets done immediately. It's a draft. If it was posted back in Dec 2015 or whenever the doc was made, people would either have assumed it would be a thing in a few weeks, or would have criticised it from the start. So we kept it back until we actually had nom to target it, which so far didn't happen.

If you're keen on seeing it, I offer to post it as a forum thread for you all to see and give feedback, but keep in mind that it is a draft and no guarantees given that it will be implemented or even tested any time soon. This is yet another case of something being told towards the community without a release date, people getting excited about it and being disappointed through the leak.

Anyhow, I don't want to argue here or turn this into a lengthy discussion, this is what happened, so you can make an opinion about it yourself.

- Pce

 

My comment was removed for saying the truth lmfao

Just by saying how so many false bans are going down.

U was one of those people who try so hard to get un false banned but with a garbage community we have, it's not possible. Everyone is leaving for a reason. Idgaf if I get forum banned but brawl used to be good and I absolutely hate false bans for anyone who gets them.

I hate what this sever has become

 

To be honest I can remember about, uhh, only the one engineer update (which nerfed engi heavily) which people didn't get salty about (ok, there were like two engineer nerds with their eyes covered and not knowing what balance is but heyyy pretty much no one got salty about it [GoT pun not intended btw]). I don't even know if sometimes is the correct word to be used here, shouldn't it be more like... usually or even... always?
Sure I haven't been as into CTF the last 9 months as I was a year or more ago, but I still got the impression that there were always more than just a few people getting salty about updates.

Aaaanyway, I can almost fully agree on other points you made, but I'd like to point out one thing again:
The communication is bad. Terribly bad.
Sometimes I got to know something through a player in-game who stated that the mods are working on a rework of whatever because a mod told them per PM or through any other way which is not the public forum.
What this does is to just ignite rumours, hopes, anger etc. so either make sure that absolutely not a single tiny piece of information gets out or, even better, as probably the whole community wishes: make it public.

Improve the information/communication. A lot of people will get salty about it when reworks or the like are being posted, but it'll prevent further problems like even more people complaining that they didn't know when the reworks are actually live the next day instead of informing the community two weeks or even more before.

Tbh I'm kinda tired now and don't feel like writing more (even if I could) but I'm still linking a thread which was made a few months ago: Democracy to which I replied something which I think is still relevant now.

Maybe I'll try to reply and explain further later but ehh idk, not now for sure