Gaslamp Games gonna be active on Steam forums?

Or are you gonna try to divert everyone to these forums?

Gotta suggest that it would be wise to spend a bit of time getting yourselves the [Developer] tag and making a few posts per day over there to at least address the biggest issues that crop up. The general Steam forum goers can be massive asshats but the average joe will have more faith in making an Early Access purchase if he/she sees that the devs are active on the Steam Community.

 

Beware the early access trolls

 

Early access trolls? That's a new one for me.

 

For Gaslamp's sake, I sincerely hope they have save games working by tomorrow. I really, really do. Because if they don't, the first wave of steam early access people will be trolling soooooo hard. I mean, save games has been the most abused question on these forums with generally cool people on them. But throwing it at something as big as Steam forums? Lack of saving doesn't bother me, but that's because I knew what I was getting into and I like to consider myself a reasonable person.

But Steam forums?

Get ye asbestos lining, gentlemen. And then hide in the Tardis.

 

Choice: feed trolls missing feature vs feed trolls broken feature.

 

You really think that makes a difference to the trolls?

 

People that misunderstand early access, (as well as early access trolls) will have no problems finding things to rip this game apart with.

If updates are too slow, they'll rip on it. If game content isn't added fast enough, rip it apart. Bugs in alpha and beta (what a concept), again, rip it apart. No save feature, oh yeah baby, gonna rip this game a new one. If updates ARE too fast but introduce bugs... You guessed it, rip the game a new orifice.

It really doesn't matter what the developers do or don't do, they're will always be people that don't understand what early access is, nor what alphas and beta's are for as well as all the folks that just live to rip on early access games.

Oh and one of my personal favorites... Those that love to rip on a game because their charging more than $5.00 for an early access game. After all, no early access game should cost more than $4.99. Right? Right?

 

Recently I bought Sunless Sea and was surprised by the amount of people on their steam forum that had not played the game but made threads about early access being awful.

 

Yup, those are truly early access trolls, those that simply run around to all the games that are on early access release and post topics or messages touting how bad early access is. The real trolls in that group can be found in many many MANY of the early access games forums on steam doing it to every one of them.

Sadly, if you come down too hard on them, it's exactly what some of them are looking for, and they'll start screaming that they're being silenced because the game sucks and the devs don't want anybody to know about it, so their topics are being removed / deleted / locked etc.

I hope though that this turns out to be a win situation for Gaslamp, although in it's current state of developement if it were my game, I'd likely have to think really hard before releasing it as is on early access as it really is very rough (and people will undoubtedly see that and won't care that games are many times rough at this early stage of development, if you charge money for it, they'll complain plain and simple)

 

There are some really awful Early Access games though. The devs of Godus haven't even acknowledged my bug reports I posted in uh... January? about how I can't even load the game.

 

I agree but there are great ones as well - Don't Starve, Kerbal Space Program, etc..

 

Long Pork for lunch at GG on Friday!

 

Yeah Starbound Hub is filled with those, weird obsessive bunch of folks always trying to prove developer of [game] is the worth ever and all the employees are either ignorant jerks which proves it's a scam, or unskilled weakling ban-happies which proves it's a scam.

I really hope that Clockwork Empires ends up with way less attention than big titles like Starbound and all the conflicts will be more tame and trolls will resist less

 

I've been on the Prison Architect Steam boards since Introversion used it as a distribution platform.
The IV devs don't ever visit those forums and it's a haven of repeated questions and whining about the game, as are most Steam forums. I'd suggest either a developer presence or nomination of some Earliest Access users as moderators if you're choosing to open the Steam forums.

It's really up to you on how you want to do it, but if you're going to embrace Steam, please don't do it half-assed.

 

Dunno I'd really vote for minimal involvement of devs on the hub in that case, unless the activity turns out pretty low, since them hubs are always filled with headache-inducing trolling and that might be a bit too much to handle that everyday for people who already spent months working on this game.

 

I know people love their reddits, but you're saying you're going to use Steam as a distribution system but ignore their integrated forums and do official communications on Reddit? And you're going to maintain these forums as well? That makes no sense to me.

My recent experience strongly points to Steam users sourcing Steam forums as a first point of contact, but it's your ship. Steer it whichever way you want.