Communication - Dev Blogs / Patch Notes

[GaspardGhee]

My biggest issue with New World is the lack of information/communication.

From a players perspective there is a sever breakdown in communication. Constant unnoted changes in updates, and the Dev Blogs causing far too much confusion in the player base. These are things that need addressed immediately.
I do want to say I have seen an improvement in patch notes, and the team has done a decent job at answering questions on the forums to help with the confusion. Unfortunately this breaks up the information into a bunch of different locations, which means most players are missing these clarifications. Simply put it just needs to be better.

Dev Blogs
At the moment the Dev Blogs read like cliff notes of the patch notes; which I believe does more harm than good. Players are getting incomplete information where we have specific numbers mixed with vague wording like “small reduction”. And some of the changes seem to come out of nowhere. I have seen few reactionary post giving the Dev team’s insight.
As a player, I want the Dev’s insight in the Dev Blog. We already have an introduction to the update via PTR announcement, and Patch Notes to tell us what is changing. Use the Dev Blog to focus on giving players the dev’s insight on the upcoming changes.
Simplify the Dev Blogs by using it as a way to explain changes, and utilize it as a place to tell tell players the direction the team wants to take New World. This will help alleviate player confusion, and give players a better understanding of the teams vision for the game; which in turn should result in better feedback from players.

Patch Notes
I’ll make this short; there shouldn’t be this many missing notes. I understand the complexity dealing with multiple teams and builds, but create/improve the system to relay those changes properly. It just has to be a top priority.

Ideally these changes would reduce player confusion, increase feedback quality, gain player trust, and provide 3 distinct yet synergistic posts to inform players and generate excitement. Thank you, for taking the time to read through 3 paragraphs of my opinion.

[derWachter]

Replying because I agree and I think this post deserves more attention.

Something I’d like to add to your post is that I believe it is important to communicate to players how to access this information.
That is to say that on the Main Menu in-game, it has tiles with information such as the PTR, Patch Notes, etc. but until today, I did not know about the Dev Blogs. The only information I was aware of was the Patch Notes because it was on the Main Menu. I had used the forums before but mostly to see if anyone had a similar problem to myself and how they fixed it.
I think it would be helpful to give the players information on how to access the different modes of communication with the Developers.

A possible solution to this would be to add a tile on the Main Menu in-game that links to a webpage explaining the purpose and locations of the different modes of communication.

I am still new to the game but I believe that this would be helpful.

[BRADLEY]

AGS has always done hidden changes in patches since Alpha 1 and it definitely adds to the lack of trust from the community big time. We’ve called them out countless times for pushing changes without mentioning them in the patchnotes and they constantly ignored it, not realizing that they severely hurt the relationship with their playerbase each time they do it.

It’s just not the kind of transparency that you expect from really any developer nowadays and it’s also happening far too consistent to be “an oversight” anymore. Each patch people have to figure out major changes to the game by playing and the developers are confused as to why people are upset. It more or less feels like they do it on purpose, trying to deceive us and redirect our attention to whatever they want us to focus on.

At this point they’ve shown that they don’t understand how to properly communicate with their community and it’s blatantly obvious no matter where you look. It’s just a shame that they don’t learn.