u/Hobby-Human — reddlx

Funcom makes changes to the game to appease the negative steam reviews (they said so themselves yesterday in their livestream) and half the audience loses their minds.

This game contains far more content and massive QoL improvements than it did in the first month at release, yet the reviews are far far lower (more than 20% lower) than they were at release. Why is that?

People who leave a negative review and then quit never come back and update their review.
The community is bifurcated and when new systems that are released not targeting their user segment, they get angry instead of just letting the other side have their cake.

What else am I missing here?

The negative reviews motivate the developers. They are used as a weapon against the developers, but it's a weapon that backfires because instead of coming back to the game, giving it another go, and updating their review, the players are long gone, so each iteration merely serves to alienate more portions of the existing player base.

Funcom is obviously trying their best, and although it's not good enough for the most vocal critics of this game, it should be good enough for the players who asked for these changes to do better. Leave a good review.

EDIT: to be clear, I don't mean from a technical perspective. I mean from a change management or community management and user experience perspective.

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Mostly an FYI for Dune Players who aren't paying attention to upcoming changes to Conan Exiles.

Funcom is merging Isle of Siptah Official Servers into Exiled Lands servers.

The list of affected servers is published with details for players here:

https://www.conanexiles.com/server-merge/

I'll be paying close attention to the messaging and process over there to gather an expectation of what we will see when Dune Server merges occurs. Of course, this is a different game, but now it will be on the same engine as Dune going forward, and new functionality is appearing in Conan that is already present in Dune (like build from chest), and vice versa (character transfer).

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Edit 2:

I'm sorry. I've fallen prey to the "Curse of Knowledge" fallacy, which assumes everyone knows what I know.

Having worked professionally in software development for the past 15 years, I just assumed it would be obvious that software release success entails a lot more than mere technical deployment.

It also includes:

Communication planning
Testing
Change Management (readiness and risk analysis)
Continuous improvement (retrospective, how to improve next time)
User acceptance measures
Incident Management (customer support)
etc

It was silly for me to assume that this subreddit would easily understand what I meant by this post. I wasn't referring to the technical steps or the underlying architectural implications of the change.

I was referring to the upcoming Conan release as being indicative of Funcom's communication strategy and how they manage any hiccups in their release process. How do they deal with failed merges and communications around problems and unmet expectations? What is the Funcom culture around such things?

If other people have experienced Funcom doing this sort of thing previously, I would be curious to hear about those experiences. Of course, I have experienced a lot of their previous patches, but a server merge initiative where users are expected to do a whole bunch of manual steps to prepare for the merge is something different. And how does Funcom deal with support for folks who refuse to complete those steps?

The point I was attempting to make is that whatever happens on May 5th will likely be indicative of what we can expect from the Dune server merge release process.