Is game dead or not? [Not at all]

[ssilk]

I underline this. I was for example active in the forum of miniatur-wonderland. They managed to bring their "weekly report" out since 13 years now. Additionally they bring some videos or other content in more or less regular times. The result is a big community and a steady stream of visitors coming to hamburg to the wonderland.

Ok, not completely comparable to a game, but it has some reasons, why I'm now here and formerly where there!

And it is absolute irrelevant what you bring, but most important to make it regularly.

[rk84]

Almost-everyday-something-Factorio-releated -channel
Backup channel


I'm pretty satisfied with forum. I don't use facebook or twitter.

[ficolas]

check this site http://playstarbound.com/

devs post each day something, it can be ANYTHING, anyone who manage to find that site via google will instantly have access to new information.
you can explain how you fixed random bug and this will be better then nothing.

http://www.terrariaonline.com/
same here, index page of site provide access to all new content.

like buttons for each social network is nessesary, most users will like anything if they have chance, twitter also very popular to share news.

But what happened to me with both of those games is that updates started, and I was like awesome! wow thats cool. Then the update wasnt beeing released, and now I dont care about the new stuff because they take so long to update that I dont wanna wait moar, and I dont check the game, and I dont think I will any time soon.

This is something that happends to me idk about other ppl.

[Nirahiel]

This is something that happends to me idk about other ppl.

I'll tell you what I think about this.
I keep checking terraria and starbound every single day, because first, I want to play the 1.2 update of terraria, and then, I want to make a tons of starbound videos when this game is out, i can't wait to play it.

But that's just me

[wrtlprnft]

I'm pretty satisfied with forum. I don't use facebook or twitter.

+1. Anything posted exclusively on these platforms would completely miss me, and I think a not-too-small number of others as well.

The current concept of having the forums as a sort of in-depth view into your activity, with less frequent, but usually more relevant, information on the blog, is perfect for me. You can mirror the blog on facebook and do whatever people do with twitter (I honestly still don't understand the fuss about that site). So long as the blog has an RSS button, it's ok :-)

That being said, the blog could be updated more frequently. Maybe try to target at least one post per week, even if there is little to be said. You can always throw us some random recent screenshot or new piece of artwork if there's nothing else to report.

[Toma]

These are fair points, and I'm thinking about it sometimes.

• What do you think is the best way to provide this kind of information (Forum, twitter, facebook, blog)?
• I was thinking to have some series about interesting technical challenges and problems we met, and about the way these were solved. (There is A LOT, I almost think a book could be filled by these ^^), would something like that help/be appropriate to have as well?

Anyway, I agree that it is good idea to sum up what we are doing every few days and describe it, this could open discussions and could work.

The other things you mentioned afterwards are interesting to hear as a fan of your game, but I'll keep my feedback on the two points I quoted for the sake of keeping my post a bit shorter. Do never rely on only social media. Social media websites are an important tool these days to build up more visibility for your product, but they are horrible for actually discussing things and are often viewed as PR by fans. View them as a ... marketing tool, whereas you main tool of working with the community should be a blog or a forum, preferably the forum, because its easier to follow discussions here that will lead others to come back to talk to you and other fans of the game about it. Blog posts often have the problem that users dont interact as much as they would likely do in a forum, but they have the advantage of allowing a more streamlined reading experienced for those who are not interested in reading everything other users post and only your updates. In the end you'll likely want to have forum AND blog usage, but if the community is as small as it is now, you'd only dilute the userbase on the forums needed for in depth discussions.

You can and should however, announce new weekly reports/posts/discussion or feedback needed inquiries via Twitter and Facebook to allow people to choose how they stay updated with what you are posting.

In short, you need the content (weekly posts, updates, surveys whatever) via preferably forum with the current size of the community and then the choice for people to stay updated however they want, which means directly in the forum or via twitter,facebook etc.

The series about technical limitations you met is VERY interesting and would likely get you a steady stream of weekly readers, and would be an important part of the "content" I just mentioned. However, even with weekly tech talk, people WILL ask you every week how the progress is coming along, its basically unavoidable. You need to have a clear structure there that you are following so your fanbase can start developing an attachment and continual interest in your updates. In your example I'd probably do a bi-weekly change with a bit of an in depth look at both, like week 1: tech talk!, week 2: progress update!

That should make it easy to get your mind off of things if you dont do them every week and you could even have different people take care of the tech talk or the progress updates, so everyone writing these posts would basically only write 1 every 2 weeks.

Anyway, glad to see you guys are putting some consideration into this issue, because it would be such a huge shame to see your project fail because of negligence towards your very willing community.

[slpwnd]

Thanks for the input guys. I am painfully aware that our PR is bad and we need to change that. We really want to start raising the awareness about Factorio and that is impossible without a good and interacting fan base.

I like the idea of a regular weekly progress updates (how about Factorio Friday Facts ?:) and occasional posts about technical and game design challenges we face. The main question there is now, is where to post these. As mentioned by toma the only sensible options are the blog and the forum. To me the blog is a better place for that, because it is on the website which is a first point of contact with people new to the game. On the other hand the point about dilluting the community between blog and forum is valid. I see the usage of FB and Twitter basically in posting links to the blog forum, where the content is.

And yeah we are sort of nerds and not that good in talking to people or presenting stuff we work on / have done. That is another thing we need to improve:)

[RawCode]

you can post anything and this will be OK.

got new creature? post it

got new device? post it

did nothing? post something you did before or random concept you not going to implement anyway.

as long as you post something in regular intervals more and more users will come to check

[Goddohando]

you can post anything and this will be OK.
as long as you post something in regular intervals more and more users will come to check

Exactly this.
+1
As long as you are doing it all the time, say every Friday. People WILL come to check.
That includes myself.
I check your site quite ofter but I am always disappointed by the lack of news... even though I am sure you are working hard on a new version.
It is very important for indies to be close with the community.

[Lukasecicek]

.... The main question there is now, is where to post these. As mentioned by toma the only sensible options are the blog and the forum. ...

Blog as a nice RSS feed is valid for posting news. Every kind of news, be it small stuff or big tech talks, you can post it here. Discussion about this stuff is a whole different story - the same stuff as the blog has really should be posted into "News" section here. Separating "News" and "Updates" part on the forum could be a nice idea, because people interested in changelog dont need to go through all the blog parts here.



----

Too bad i don't have enough time to play factorio, but i check the forums every day and really care about what is happening here. If you guys would want some help with the writing part, just PM me short info what have you done in a past week or so and i will make it a blog post. (PM me in czech if you want, it is my first language)

[ssilk]

The main question there is now, is where to post these. As mentioned by toma the only sensible options are the blog and the forum. To me the blog is a better place for that, because it is on the website which is a first point of contact with people new to the game. On the other hand the point about dilluting the community between blog and forum is valid. I see the usage of FB and Twitter basically in posting links to the blog forum, where the content....

For organizing our LAN-parties I wrote some years ago a hack for phpBB, which goes into the database and gets the most recent post from a configurable board. This was displayed on the website as blog and when you clicked on it you landed in the forum on that article and could comment. For others than our team, the board was closed for new articles.
Easy, simple, fast.
When I'm home again (next week) I can grab, if I found this small script, otherwise I would write you some new script.

[LoSboccacc]

there is this one game, dwarf fortress. the game gets updated once a year, but the communication is so awesome people is excited and amused by the communication.

nobody really complains and many not only wait but supports the development effort.

have a look at their post style:
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/

and the dev status
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev.html

[Balinor]

Posts should be to the blog with a link to the forum at the end of each one, eg, "Discuss on the forum". On the forum itself there should be a section that deals with the blogs only and the only new posts are those created by Factorio staff with the post being the same content as the blog post. This seems like the best way to deal with having the two visible places without splitting the community between them.

[slpwnd]

Posts should be to the blog with a link to the forum at the end of each one, eg, "Discuss on the forum". On the forum itself there should be a section that deals with the blogs only and the only new posts are those created by Factorio staff with the post being the same content as the blog post. This seems like the best way to deal with having the two visible places without splitting the community between them.

This sounds like a good idea to me. So here is what we have decided to do in the end:

We have started a series of regular Friday progress updates on the blog. Also the "News And Updates" section has been split into (surprise) "News" and "Updates". The News are for more official announcements and the Updates will be for irregular developre ramblings about what we do. For now it will also have posts to comment on the blog stuff. Let's see how this works out.

[NotRexButCaesar]

I think the game died for real this time: no news since April fool's day & no game-related news since 2022-02-25 (six months).
Recent updates are small & rare with only one or two bugfixes, & last big update was Nov 23, 2020 (two years).

If the developers (assuming they are alive & the office was not taken over by malicious AI) want to renew interest, I suggest doing something like weekly updates on a website: it could be linked on the forum & maybe also on reddit to not split the community.

This post is sarcasm.

[ssilk]

This post is sarcasm.

Ah, and I thought you mean it; after successful release of 1.0 and 1.1, a promise to have 1.2 about this year and 9 years after the initial post.

[Tertius]

a promise to have 1.2 about this year

This year? I mentally postponed it to next year. That's no issue for me, just a thing to keep in my mind about what (in my gaming realm) will happen when. I have well enough to do in the current Factorio, so no need to rush things.

[Kewlhotrod]

a promise to have 1.2 about this year

This year? I mentally postponed it to next year. That's no issue for me, just a thing to keep in my mind about what (in my gaming realm) will happen when. I have well enough to do in the current Factorio, so no need to rush things.

this aged well, me scrolling thro dead lifeless forums for news.

[aka13]

this aged well, me scrolling thro dead lifeless forums for news.

The forum is either bug report or mod interface request nowadays, or Pi-C, ptx0 and mmmPI having their love-hate orgy.
I still check it daily out of old habit, but it gets less interesting every day.
The last interesting thread I remember was about ups optimized furnace setups, and that was propably half a year ago.

[mmmPI]

The forum is either bug report or mod interface request nowadays, or Pi-C, ptx0 and mmmPI having their love-hate orgy.
The last interesting thread I remember was about ups optimized furnace setups, and that was propably half a year ago.

No that time you tried to stop a derailing argument between me and someone else was with user mrvn, i have no problem with other users you mentionned and i think unfairly associate with my sometimes poor behavior

Part of the reduction in interaction i guess comes from the already existing vast amouts of tutorials, questions, and build show case already existing (and not only on the forum), Discord was not a thing back then either, now is a place where people hang ou to get in touch with a topic, be it a specific mod, or community , or the official discord https://discord.com/invite/factorio , i am not present on discord and therefore cannot have orgy of any sort there.