Design Council =/= Test Cluster?

[MagPrime]

Honestly, when I was invited to the DC years ago, I was incredibly excited.  

But as time goes by, I have given less and less feedback and out less and less effort into creating content suggestions simply because there is seemingly no point.  If they took the time to hand pick players and then actually forgot about them, what's the point in bothering? 

DC was needlessly restricted from the get go and has been admitted to being utterly forgotten.  Being a part of the test cluster would have been an amazing opportunity to make good on promises to Founders and utilize players talents and observations, that were already chosen for that purpose. 

No, DC shouldn't have been exclusively chosen but at least the ones who bothered to post in the sign up thread should have been given more consideration than the accounts that were created for the sole purpose of "count me in"

[(PSN)LeBlingKing]

The Council of Design being useful for a change? That's ridiculous! Who in the community would want to root for the guys who gave us the "MeMe WaRfRaMe"? /s

FOUR YEARS, I've been a member of this Council and the only useful thing I remember doing was voting for an Ivara augment for Navigator, and then watching as the thing we voted for got tossed in the trash for something that doesn't even make Navigator worth using.

We've been the laughing stock of this community for years, despite the fact that most, if not all of the councillors I know of, myself included, would die to get a chance at actually granting Warframe's developers with much needed feedback. But then we're not utilized, and we have to watch as every single update for the past year or so has crumpled down in the hands of the community.

That's the thing, too. The developers neglect us, and when we ARE used, the community DESPISES us. Do you know how ironic it was when people blamed the Design Council for picking a horrible theme for a Warframe, DE coming in clutch with the design and the ACTUAL "truly broken" theme that we have now, and then watching the community itself ask for buggy passives and stuff like "for his first ability, he should host migrate all the enemies in a 20m radius". 

But we are the ones to blame. Yes, the people that DE haven't even acknowledged as an asset to the Warframe community for literal years.

 

[phoenix1992]

The main issue with the raffle is...

1. You can't say that you are unhappy, because you will get called jealous or something along the lines.
2. You can't say that RNG testing will bring RNG results, since you will be called toxic.
3. You can't set up "well let's pull representatives" since, it is way too little sample size.
4. While both new and old players are valuable data sample, there is no way to guarantee that a mechanic will not be demolished not due to balancing, but due to... feely craft.

With all that said, I hope for the best.

[(PSN)sweatshawp]

1 hour ago, DeMonkey said:

Either an oversight, or it's RNG.

How is it RNG? Well, clearly everyone gets a random number when joining, and when you reach the required number of posts you get an invite. My RNG just broke and gave me a 5 digit number of some sort whilst every one else got 3 to 4. Sounds about right for my luck.

Although on a serious note, I think DE just don't like me very much.

What do you mean they love you as much as mag prime me and others 

[MacKerris]

1 hour ago, phoenix1992 said:

The main issue with the raffle is...

1. You can't say that you are unhappy, because you will get called jealous or something along the lines.
2. You can't say that RNG testing will bring RNG results, since you will be called toxic.
3. You can't set up "well let's pull representatives" since, it is way too little sample size.
4. While both new and old players are valuable data sample, there is no way to guarantee that a mechanic will not be demolished not due to balancing, but due to... feely craft.

With all that said, I hope for the best.

The issue with these targeted raffle/polls is that they get responded to by only one group of people. Just like the poll that was on twitter, this raffle was only seen by a small group of people overall. Thus the response is primarily from the biggest fans of the game. This is not a balanced group and will not give the overall feedback that DE needs to hear. In fact it just continues the trend of confirmation bias that DE has.

[MagPrime]

22 minutes ago, MacKerris said:

The issue with these targeted raffle/polls is that they get responded to by only one group of people. Just like the poll that was on twitter, this raffle was only seen by a small group of people overall. Thus the response is primarily from the biggest fans of the game. This is not a balanced group and will not give the overall feedback that DE needs to hear. In fact it just continues the trend of confirmation bias that DE has.

That's somewhat inaccurate.

The premise of the thread is that there is a diverse group of experienced, educated, motivated and dedicated players who want to give quality feedback on things both post and peri development that isn't being utilized.  In that group we have multiple demographics of age, educational background, physical ailments that can impede game play, as well as different platforms & time zones.

How is that not the group of people you want behind the scenes helping the team fix imbalances and blatant missed mechanics?  It's not "one group of people" as can be inferred from your comment, it's a large selection of people who have been pre grouped together via previous screening process and have been there for, in some cases, literal years.

Design Council meets the requirements of a beta tester group due to it's diversity, experience and dedication and should have been used concurrently to the current group of testers. 

[MacKerris]

15 minutes ago, MagPrime said:

That's somewhat inaccurate.

The premise of the thread is that there is a diverse group of experienced, educated, motivated and dedicated players who want to give quality feedback on things both post and peri development that isn't being utilized.  In that group we have multiple demographics of age, educational background, physical ailments that can impede game play, as well as different platforms & time zones.

How is that not the group of people you want behind the scenes helping the team fix imbalances and blatant missed mechanics?  It's not "one group of people" as can be inferred from your comment, it's a large selection of people who have been pre grouped together via previous screening process and have been there for, in some cases, literal years.

Design Council meets the requirements of a beta tester group due to it's diversity, experience and dedication and should have been used concurrently to the current group of testers. 

Not inaccurate at all. Nor did I mention the design council. However the more you target who will respond to a particular post on twitter or in these forums, the more you will be drawing from one subset of players.

As to the overall topic of this thread to complain that the design counsel didn't get preferential treatment I think it was done on purpose. If you look at the response to the broken frame there was a good amount of negative feedback. By opening it up to a more open group of people I believe they were attempting to avoid the perceived closed door preferred player concept.

However, by ignoring those that have been attempting to help for some time. While also ignoring everyone who didn't read the thread or see the stream. They have once again, like Steve's poll, just pandered to those that hang on their every word.

[NightmareT12]

4 hours ago, DeMonkey said:

Only if it's a quality meme. 

*upvotes*

[Zebiko]

Rip design council. Might as well disband it officially. 

[DrivaMain]

12 hours ago, RamonLeeYJ said:

Then again, forums are actually also the smallest of the minority

Ehhh 10% (5 million registered forumers of 50 million active players) is not a minor minority.

[Aldain]

5 minutes ago, DrivaMain said:

Ehhh 10% (5 million registered forumers of 50 million active players) is not a minor minority.

I mean a good portion of that percentage are dead accounts or people like me who do 90% snarky %^&#posting and 10% honest opinion so it isn't a huge measurement when those factors are considered.

[DrivaMain]

3 hours ago, (PS4)LeBlingKing said:

That's the thing, too. The developers neglect us, and when we ARE used, the community DESPISES us. Do you know how ironic it was when people blamed the Design Council for picking a horrible theme for a Warframe, DE coming in clutch with the design and the ACTUAL "truly broken" theme that we have now, and then watching the community itself ask for buggy passives and stuff like "for his first ability, he should host migrate all the enemies in a 20m radius". 

The reason people are upset is because they are jealous to see that Design Council have “privileges” and you the average tenno can’t participate in the voting. Warframe players hate exclusivity. We can see that from the infamous “Bring Excal Prime Back” posts. They could disband DC because of this unfriendly relation between the DC and Majority but they can’t because DC is part of the Founder’s contract. They have to make ALL founders be it active or inactive to agree to DE or they could face legal consequences.

[HexOmega111x]

Il y a 12 heures, (PS4)Crixus044 a dit :

For the future, if you, Digital Extremes, are gonna be reaching out to us players for feedback

You realy missed the point of that test cluster, don't you. But at least you have your own whinny topic of the day. Congrats.

If you don't even understand the purpose of that test cluster, I wonder how you could be an asset for DE more than anyone else. 

And no, I will not clarify anything, Steve did it already. 

[(PSN)sweatshawp]

24 minutes ago, HexOmega111x said:

You realy missed the point of that test cluster, don't you. But at least you have your own whinny topic of the day. Congrats.

If you don't even understand the purpose of that test cluster, I wonder how you could be an asset for DE more than anyone else. 

And no, I will not clarify anything, Steve did it already. 

You missed the point of the thread

So sad

[zakaryx]

Was there a reason given for keeping it small? Server load or something?

 

I don't understand why it's a closed testing server in the first place. I didn't even find out that it was happening until the thread was already locked. 

[(XBOX)ECCHO SIERRA]

15 hours ago, DrivaMain said:

My concerns is that allowing everyone on the Design Council might also spark at outrage to DE for being "only listening to the minority".

People are already upset with only the DC's authority to vote on the community warframe theme. Let's not make it worse

I think there would be resentment among players for "only listening to the super special cool kids club" that most players, realistically, have no hope of getting invited to.

15 hours ago, Myscho said:

Design councils members doesnt have anything to do with experienced players, Founders also mean jack sht, thats why they do lottery, because they need wide spectrum of players. You know, not all category have same opinion what is good or bad for game

They do need a broad spectrum. Warframe isn't meant to, and shouldn't try to, appeal only to one specific type of player. They shouldn't be trying to appeal only to casual players who only play an hour a week and they shouldn't cater only to the super sweaty min max try hard 60+ hours per week "elites" either. 

14 hours ago, Xaero said:

And 100-500 absolutely random players are not a minority, right..?

I mean, i feel like if anything the sample of players for the test cluster should try to be representative of the player base as a whole. And I couldn't tell you if this is a good way to achieve that goal or not. 

[DrBorris]

I think the reason DE did not give test cluster access to everyone in the DC is the same reason that they only gave access to partners who were active in the last month. I think it is safe to assume that quite a large portion of the DC is inactive, or at the very least they don't keep track of what Warframe is doing these days. DE wants people who are active in the game and keeping track of news to join the test cluster as those people are probably the most likely to give accurate feedback. Especially given that the slots in the test cluster are so limited, it would have been a shame if a large portion of those slots were taken up by people who forgot about Warframe three years ago. Maybe I am only saying that because I am still a wee bit salty that after six years of being an active forum warrior I never got an invite to the DC.

 

That said, I think it would have been fair to give all DC members who replied to the lottery thread a guaranteed slot.

[(PSN)Crixus044]

There is a lot of complaint about inactivity. Let's take into account the reason why the activity is so low.

First off, there isn't really much to be active about. The game has had a bad rap in terms of what it is. Worse yet, the Design Council itself has no activity to be active about to help it, as is its purpose.

"If you build it, they will come"

- Field of Dreams 1988

Bring in the activity. Give purpose and entice people to come. Councillors will return, bringing with them the new perspective of the returning vet. The active and persistent members will still be there with their perspective. Non members will have a chance and gratefully accept the opportunity to enter.

Considering the number of active numbers from our last activity, we'd be 600-700 strong. Of those, if DE guaranteed the active founders a spot and maybe 100-200 additional DC members to opt-in, you'd still have around 200 spots of the general public to opt-in to reach 500. That's more than enough diversity to the community, fairness to the DC, respect to the founders, and probably the best result FOR DE.

And that's what bothers me. Including the DC WOULD have been best for DE. They are already approved players that can give good feedback. That's the main purpose, for DE to hear us as clear as possible. It's a trump card. DC members were entered due the quality of their feedback, a rare quality in a game forum.

As it stands rn, I'm sure DE would disband the Design Council if they could legally and the rest of the community and YTbers would say good riddance or wouldn't even bat an eye, which is a sad state for a game and shameful for a community, to try to tear down a necessity for any game, out of jealousy and entitlement. I cannot accuse everyone of such because that would be false, but there is a vocal existence of this with some mad following.

We as a community cannot have such division and use whatever resources we have to get our point across. As it stands, DE has little ear to the community. Not as much a fault of their own, since they can only do so much. A person can only read 300 words per minute and as you see, there must be at least 1 million words posted per day. Their solution however was to use a keyword aggregator instead of their own personal community quarters of Partners and Councillors. This is where our solution lies. We cannot push eachother out of the way for the futile chance of single handedly being heard. If we want to be heard, councillors, guides of the Lotus, founders, AND partners must be promoted so that DE can hear what all of us are talking about.

[zakaryx]

Why have slots at all? Just let people log on if they want to. Just set a max player limit if server load is an issue. 

 

That's how most games do it these days because of the low retention rate of test servers. 

[Paradoxity]

Man, IDK what you're on about. 

DE still haven't forgiven us for cooking up Nova. You think they're actually gonna listen to a word we say? 

 

 

[RamonLLLL]

2 hours ago, Paradoxity said:

Man, IDK what you're on about. 

DE still haven't forgiven us for cooking up Nova. You think they're actually gonna listen to a word we say? 

I don't see anyone complaining a lot about her 

Not to step on my own foot but, do you think making Broken Frame was a better decision?

[Sean]

It's definitely an odd route that DE took.

I'm not part of the Design Council, but it seems like something they should have gotten automatically.

 

DE gave out automatic instant invites to partners, reddit-mods, and other select groups, but then skipped over the Design Council which was originally made for this exact purpose. If the DC is going to be skipped over, then why not just have it purely random across the board? Why give anyone automatic invites then?

 

If it ends up being a question on activity, it's easy enough to send invites only to those that have logged in recently.

Edited April 27, 2020 by Sean

[Thundervision]

Thing with DC is... Everyone who has an access to DC should just visit the main thread there, read the first point of DE's Manifesto, look at the last time it was edited and remember all those YouTube partners DE prefer to listen to. The irony of the DC existence in this case is truly amazing. Heck, other than voting or suggesting ideas once a year, nothing significant has even been discussed in the main thread for years (haven't even seen DE staff popping up there, either) so people just use the thread for verification for Discord's fancy club I doubt anyone who's been sticking around since 2012-2014 takes the whole DC idea seriously anymore.

 

4 hours ago, RamonLeeYJ said:

I don't see anyone complaining a lot about her 

Not to step on my own foot but, do you think making Broken Frame was a better decision?

Nobody will complain about her now, but back then? Remember that DE gave the Council a blank check and it created the first broken frame in terms of balance (specifically her Molecular Prime):

Spoiler

And many more threads.

Of course, you can't compare the early years of the game to its current state, because everything was different back then: from the game's flow/pacing to community being less overreacting and vocal. Now every single idea to tone something down for the sake of balance that comes from DE or the players will be met with an overblown outcry, hate even.

 

Edited April 27, 2020 by Thundervision

[Oreades]

On 2020-04-25 at 1:28 PM, MagPrime said:

No, DC shouldn't have been exclusively chosen but at least the ones who bothered to post in the sign up thread should have been given more consideration than the accounts that were created for the sole purpose of "count me in"

DC would have been given more consideration because the due diligence they went over in the dev stream more than likely included an account creation check. Which undoubtably kicked accounts created fo the sole purpose of responding to the thread to the bottom of the barrel if not excluded them entirely. 

[Almighty_Jado]

This may sound harsh, but for the record I'm a design councillor as well.

I wish that DE would either kill it entirely or use it properly like the old days. Getting cockteased once or twice a year is a bit upsetting. All of the active DC members I know are objective individuals, many of them with years of playing this game under their belt. We care about the game. We want to help it. The DC's purpose was to provide communication between DE and its playerbase. Now to be fair I've only been a councillor for 2-ish years now, but I got into it not randomly, but because I showed how passionate I was about Warframe. The same goes for all the other councillors, the oldest ones being so passionate that they financially supported the game during its infancy. These are trustworthy members of the community. How could randomly selected accounts from the forums be more trustworthy than the DC?

A bit of pent-up frustration on my end, but I had a vision of being able to help shape and improve Warframe when I was inducted at the beginning, and its been disheartening to see how little use we get.