Updates from the News Frontier - August 27th 2020 (A Short Update)

Hello Troopers!

And welcome to Updates from the News Frontier!

This will be a very short update today as my focus this week has been on preparing as entertaining a stream as possible! Considering the Event does not actually go live until next Monday, there were a few things I had to make sure I was doing correctly! So thanks for your understanding on this being a brief update. The Updates will definitely continue, but for now, I will be moving them to every two weeks instead of weekly. This will tie in much better with the games Patch Notes and updates and hopefully mean much more meaningful posts.

The stream tomorrow on TWITCH is going to be awesome, I have new allies to show off, a brand new Eddie with a Fury animation and Talismans galore. By now, I am sure you have all seen this umbral image of the upcoming Eddie, and many have made their guesses at who it is. I, however, am keeping my lips sealed until tomorrow morning at 10am PST!

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One last thing for today.

We are discussing in the studio how best to provide a Question and Answers session for everyone in the Community. At the moment we are leaning towards a Twitch stream where myself and a couple other members of the team will be available for a set amount of time to take questions from Twitch chat and answer them to the best of our ability. To go along with this, we would provide a way to submit questions in advance via a Google form or another similar method. This will ensure we can gather the most prominent questions that everyone has on their minds and have answers ready to go.

If you have some suggestions as to how you would like to see a Q&A session happen, please let me know in this thread. This is for the Community, so I want to make sure it is done with YOU in mind.

That's it for this Update! See you all tomorrow morning for the Twitch Stream!

Signing off,

Ceeg

Looking forward to it Ceeg! I enjoyed the last one with the unveiling of Blackbeard Eddie.

Might be a noob question, but will the stream be available to watch later. 10am PST is 5am NZT.

PST? It's currently PDT in the US, not PST.

https://www.timeanddate.com/time/zones/pst

Unless you're referring to Pitcairn Standard Time (which well, seems a bit small to use as a reference) then I think you've got this time wrong.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Cefiar

PST? It's currently PDT in the US, not PST.

https://www.timeanddate.com/time/zones/pst

Unless you're referring to Pitcairn Standard Time (which well, seems a bit small to use as a reference) then I think you've got this time wrong.

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The original post said PST. If it's 10am PDT... it's still 5am NZT according to google. Or presumably 3am if you're in Melbourne, so I'm guessing you're also interested in ability to watch this sometime after the live stream.

Yes and no.

Yes it'd be nice but really the main issue I have is that all the times (streams or in the game) tend to be incorrect. This makes it hard to plan anything, unless you really know the schedule well and can guess what they're implying.

My big thing is I want all questions answered including hard ones. Too often we're only seeing answers to easy ones or the hard ones are left completely untouched until the resolution is going live.

Another thing I would love to see are those announcements on Facebook and Twitter to happen here as well. The same text is copied and pasted between those announcements and if video/images are an issue you can always redirect with a link to either the Facebook or twitter post. Both of those social medias have posts get buried by algorithms but the forum is one of the last rare sites that still have a true default chronological display of posts/comments.

The streaming was really nice and good to watch, gz on that and yes we are already hooked waiting for the event to start!

That Q&A is very welcome, but also it was an overdue issue. Already waiting for that one!

Ceeg thanks for putting this on, please make sure the time and date are posted clearly so they are idiot-proof so players like me can understand when to log in. Also tell us when/where to submit questions.

I stayed up late to watch the stream, rather enjoyed it. Some good improvements, could clearly see the extra planning that went into streamlining what you wanted to show. Nice work!


A Q&A stream is a cool idea. Always liked those from other games I've played over the years. Was even part of an online talk-show for an mmorpg a few years back, and the times we had a developer on for a chat and an interview were always some of the most enjoyable. From experience, there are pros and cons for whatever format you choose to go with, and you'll never be able to please everyone.

Having pre-submitted questions allows your team to provide more in-depth answers, especially for questions requiring a little bit of research (or ran past legal, etc). This is a good choice if you're looking to go into the more technical side of various gameplay systems. If you stick to the lighter questions, you'll likely get accused of cherry-picking them and avoiding anything that might make you look bad. Can get around this somewhat by making it clear what the focus of the Q&A will be ahead of time. If it's for technical stuff, if it's general questions, if it's a mea culpa, etc.

Even if you don't shy away from answering potentially difficult questions, the main problem you'll run into is the lack of follow-up questions. I'm sure we've all watched an interview where someone only answers half the question, or sidesteps entirely, only for the interviewer to move onto the next question. Same thing can happen if an answer brings up something unexpected, but isn't further explored. Easier to handle this when you've got someone with interview experience outside of your team asking the questions. You'll never be able to please everyone though, so as long as the person running the Q&A is inquisitive and curious, and asks for more information rather than "yeah, I guess that kinda makes sense?", you'll be going in the right direction.

You don't have to get everything right the first time either. If you keep going with these monthly streams showing off new content, they'll provide you with a solid foundation to play around with and see what works. New content stream at the start of the month, regular Q&A session in the middle of the month. If that works out well, could then start to showcase something more in-depth, showing how a character is created from earliest concept to final release, or how an ability is conceived, developed, coded, and balanced. The sky is the limit! Excited to see what you come up with either way :)