History Part 3:

A collection of PressCorps shout-outs by Foxhole's developers on their dev stream.

 This has led to the classic case of jokes and sarcasm becoming exponentially exaggerated through social media and thousands of different people, to the point where it's hard to tell if someone is "taking the piss" or straight-up just insulting you. Most of the time, people don't even think they're being mean and rude, since that's how their close-knit group of friends make fun of each other all the time in their group chats. If Mark or Max or Matt are one of us as gamers (which they certainly are), why can't we treat them the same way?

With Zero Dark PressCorps, maybe this time, I thought, we could find that middle ground.

And it was fun for a good while. I felt like I was really doing something for the community of this small indie game I loved. Got a myth that would get lost in the mass of casual Discord conversations? There's a Zero Dark clip for that. Have a question about development? Here's a timestamp of a developer, on mic, answering that question from a player who had that exact question. When a scandal involving player-moderators rocked the community real bad, I felt it was especially pertinent to keep the dialogue going.

As the experiment continued however, I began to notice certain effects on the developer-community relationship at large:

1. It was a bad format for the job. I began to notice a clear pattern of questions and outcomes when it came to callers, the core of which was forcing a promise out of the developers to balance things a certain way or implement a feature. What I just described is an overwhelming majority of dev-player interaction in any format where the dev is acting in an official capacity. In text-only formats, there's room for the devs to breathe and think about an answer. The best answers balance substance to satisfy the question, with caution to not hype-up expectations. When you're in a voice chat room with someone, you're on the spot. I'm all for holding powerful people's feet to the fire, but these aren't politicians or business magnates. They're indie game devs talking about tech rates and tank balance for their war game.

2. It’s not what people actually wanted. If you didn’t like how vaguely the devs communicated outside of the show, you probably weren’t going to like how they communicated during it.

3. Personal time. Anyone who has played MMOs as an adult knows this. I loved hosting the show, and I didn't even mind being an unofficial community manager. But it did take a lot out of me, and I found it was interrupting my real life. It's a boring answer, but it was a factor.

4. It became spectator sport. The most egregious example of this is when a developer had to correct a caller who was trying to make a point on armor balance. It turned into a mess. The caller came in with loaded questions, the developer came off as “dunking on them,” and the community reacted to it like professional wrestling, instead of advancing the conversation on game balance.

5. Dishonest callers. In one call that was so bad, a caller with dishonest intentions brought up drama surrounding themselves, their group, and a banned group member. They asked a developer point-blank "you don't think [caller's group] is racist?" Later, it was brought to my attention by other players, with evidence, that the caller was attempting to obfuscate previous bad behavior in the game. And they attempted to do it in real-time by gaining the blessing of one of the game's developers.

By that episode, we had established a long-standing rule to not discuss specific instances of moderation because we didn't want the show to be public court. Despite that rule, this person, for 12 minutes, live to hundreds, and point-blank to a developer: 1) brought up the banning of one of their members, 2) disputed the justification of that ban with disinformation, 3) claimed a Game Moderator was harassing them, 4) brought up general accusations of them being racist, 5) goaded a dev into publicly saying the they weren't racist, and 6) argued that permabans for language shouldn’t exist.

The whole thing was so bad, I cut that person's call from the YouTube upload, and thankfully it doesn't exist on Twitch. I won't say or confirm who it was because the community doesn't need another round of drama. I do bring it up as an example of how people can manipulate good-faith developer time for selfish reasons. To this day, I can't believe I let them go on for that long, and it remains my greatest failure as a show host. Once the dust settled, it was the first time I seriously considered ending the show.

6. The worst job. I had tried repeatedly over the years to rotate hosting duties with other members of the Corps, but everyone was afraid to. And who can blame them? It’s two hours of media circus that can set the discussion for the entire community. Hosting/moderating that show, for only a couple hours every month, is just a taste of the community manager life. I've never worked in the video game industry, but I have my suspicions it's the worst job to have in the industry by far.

So there it is. A grand experiment I was happy to try, and even happier I did, but ultimately didn't pan out. Instead of complaining about these things publicly or continuing to live with its stressors, I ended the show entirely of my own accord. The reason why I never brought all this up in an announcement was because I though it'd bring up more drama than it was worth. Writing this history, however, I realized there was a lot of good lessons in video games, social media, and communication.

Later, I attempted pre-recorded one-on-one discussions with Lead Developer Mark. He did the best he could, but I still felt the creeping need to goad him for information the devs weren't ready to share. I, entirely of my own accord, began telling Mark the questions a day in advance because I noticed people didn't like many of the answers. My hope was to give him more time to extrapolate the important parts, but ultimately Mark's delivery stayed the same. Whether or not you like how the devs conduct themselves is one thing, but you can't deny they've got a method, and they're sticking to it.

Eventually, I personally concluded that even these discussions, while more productive than Zero Dark PressCorps, weren't worthwhile compared to the developer Reddit Q&As. In the Reddit-based ones, multiple devs could answer many more questions at their own pace, and follow-up with Reddit's reply chain system. From what I've seen since 2017, these Reddit Q&As have been the best at facilitating the kind of communication players want.

For all the talk of "communicating with the players," I've learned this: when a game community says they want communication, what they really want is to be shown progress on the actual game (discounting immediate matters like downed servers or game-breaking glitches).

And that's completely natural. You want to know as much as possible because you care deeply. However, if a developer keeps talking with nothing to show for it, they just become Peter Molyneux or the Star Citizen team. The only time to talk is when you're ready to talk. So when I brought the devs onto the show, I thought I was building a bridge, but I realize now I was building an entire show around hype the devs could not deliver on. For the past several years, Siege Camp has learned to "keep their head down," and only talk about something when they're ready. I've noticed this has led to drastically more managed expectations, and allowed the playerbase to naturally focus on other things instead of constantly thinking of new ways to get Mark to admit that, yes, your favorite tank will be getting a nerf.

One example of how this has worked out is the devs' 2024 Reddit thread on changes made to defenses, a little more than a week before the changes were to be pushed to the live server for an update. While a majority of the comments were, naturally, focused on the changes themselves, several comments were simply grateful for the open communication. Had the developers simply talked about making those changes before work was done, they likely would have been tossing out vague hope for years before disappointing everyone. Or worse, they would have killed their vision before it has a chance to be proven right or wrong (and I tend to lean on the side of letting artists make their art).

This does introduce a new question: Do the devs actually listen and put that info to good use? They have the tools, the audience, and the lack of publisher to do so, but that's something only the devs can answer for themselves. And for the players to judge for the good of the gaming landscape.

Another format I noticed success in was player-based discussions. Those did a lot better, especially without a developer in the room for everyone to constantly turn to. They were and are absolute hell to schedule, especially if they involve people from all over the world, but if any intrepid community content creator wants their hand at it, these have been the best formats at advancing the conversation, for the better.

Coming "Soon"

History Part 4: Finest Hours

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