PCGamer article: "Paradox Interactive says player toxicity is driving developers away from its forums"

[konbendith]

I'm not sure what some of the points you bring mean. I think a simple and shorter message would have sufficed:
- Please just take away the idea that Paradox thinks the entire community is toxic in nature. Just say only people that stoop to personal attacks provide a bad atmosphere.
- Feel free to take sanctions against the people that do. No one will blame you for it.
- What do you mean with "standards are different" in this case? If it's about the quality of work the dev team does, no one will agree. If you mean regarding community management, by all means enforce your rules.

If you feel like breaking that vicious circle, I'd still suggest to have more communications through community experts instead directly to developers if you feel that protects developers better. Respond as a group and not as an individual.

My inability to do short messages is why I'm normally not allowed on the forums!

We absolutely do not think that our whole community is toxic in nature, and I don't believe we've ever said that. It would be a pretty shitty job to have if we hated our players, tbh. You can quote me on that.

When I talk about the standards changing, I actually refer to both. I do think the quality standards we need to abide by for our products are absolutely different from 10 years ago, simply because people rightfully expect more from a 600+ people company than they used to from a 5-10 people development team. I also think the standards of conversation and moderation on the internet have vastly evolved in the past decade, and we need to adapt to that too.

And I absolutely agree, all communication cannot come from the developers, and we need more community experts present here, even if we also want to remain the kind of company that has the developers directly involved with the community!

It's not just about dev presence, it's also about how much impact the feedback has on the end product. If people see the same bugs go unfixed from patch to patch or constant broken releases, they're going to be more frustrated and thus hostile towards the people they do interact with, even if those devs or community managers aren't the ones deciding to launch a blatantly unfinished game.

It's, of course, a larger topic, and the question of how we ensure that the feedback shared on the forums is properly addressed also goes slightly beyond my role (but we do have some work being done on the forums to help QA teams gather feedback from the forum more efficiently, for example). Ultimately, ensuring all of our games, studios, and products ship with the same level of quality and have the same level of support is a company-wide effort. People care and are working intensely on it, I can guarantee that. We're far from hitting the mark everywhere there, I'm not going to argue against this, it's also probably going to take some time until we perfectly do. In the meantime, doesn't prevent us to do our best to improve the quality of the conversation tho!

 

[konbendith]

You sure did, and yet you said nothing.

I'd say this is typically the kind of example of snarky & unconstructive comment that has people say they find this place toxic.

I've actually not said nothing,
I've detailed my analysis of the situation, confirmed that we absolutely don't think all of our community is toxic, and detailed some of our plans and actions to improve things in the future. But you choose to dismiss this either because you're too angry or frustrated to see it, which is fair but unconstructive or to win some random internet points by answering me with a witty comment.

This achieved nothing else than participating in making this conversation more negative than it has to be, in my humble opinion. And that honestly just made me sad and a bit hopeless.

 

[konbendith]

- we don't think the community is toxic, just people that make personal attacks
- We will start banning people that do so
- We are sorry about the quality of work we delivered. We are working hard to make the new patch and DLC playable

I believe we have said all these things in various threads already, but I can say them again here formally so that you can quote me on it.

• We don't think all the community is toxic, but some people are.
  I don't believe you have to go as far as personal attacks to have an attitude that is toxic, but yeah if someone reaches that level, they've definitely crossed the line.
• We are, I believe, already banning people who break this kind of rule, and are going to continue doing so. We have no tolerance for harassment and attacks in our communities.
• We are sorry about the state of the latest EU4 release, and the teams are working hard on fixing the issues that have been raised by the community.

 

[konbendith]

I hope this doesnt mean the forum will be abandoned in favour of things like Reddit, where postings are based on ''likes''. Several subforums, as you mentioned, already have done so de facto (The Kaiserreich for HoI4 subforum comes to mind, completely dead) but this kind of forum format is better for actual discussions rather than snarky replies fishing for upvotes. I'd absolutely hate to be left talking to brick walls here while actual suggestions and interactions have to be made via external websites, personally. If i wanted a discord or a reddit account, i'd have one of those already.

I totally agree! And that's very much my plan, and our attention to ensuring we keep using the forum and focusing it on what it's actually good for, and that's very much the feedback/suggestions/interactions with the dev part.

 

[konbendith]

Some overarching answers to some of the messages and remarks above:

Yes, the suggestions and plans I've shared are relative to the communications/community end of things, I'm perfectly conscious this doesn't solve the issues with the games themselves. But I happen to be the Head of Comms, so that's the part of things I can actually influence and share a plan for. On the game side of things, this involves of course many more parts of the organization, and I certainly wouldn't want to make promises or speak in the name of other people.

I understand this can be frustrating to not already see a clear answer and plan for the next steps about the issues that have been raised, whether it's regarding Leviathan or another release. I hope you understand that we're a 600+ people company and getting all our ducks in a row can take some time (especially working remotely, especially for a brand new studio, etc.). Also while the team is hard at work getting issues fixed, they generally lack time to formalize & communicate their plan for what's coming after that. We're reporting to them the feedback and expectations of the community, and I'm sure as soon as they can, they'll provide more perspective on how they plan to address it. But right now, from what I understand, they're pretty much just focusing on actually fixing stuff.

 

[konbendith]

I sometimes edit Wikipedia, and one of the core rules for editors there is civility: "editors should always treat each other with consideration and respect" to "maintain a pleasant editing environment by behaving politely, calmly and reasonably, even during heated debates." If only the internet was more like that.

I actually like this quite a lot! I think we often fail to understand that the opposite of toxicity is not mindless praising, but rather this: civility.
This is not to mean that one cannot be frustrated and express it, it happens, sometimes for good reason. But I'd say generally when you feel that all respect is lost, it's hard to have a constructive conversation.

(that being said I don't find @Deliberus message this bad, I understand he feels his trust in Paradox is broken and this takes time to fix, we understand that)

 

[konbendith]

@ero_sk Not quoting the full message to avoid the wall of text, but yes, I agree. That's why I talk a lot about finding balance, and constantly try to remind that yes, negativity can be understood as well.

If it was easy to draw a line in the sand that defines when civility stops and toxicity begins, I certainly hope we would have done so a long time ago. The reality is yeah, sometimes we mess up and people are going to be rightfully pissed about it. Does this mean we should be understanding and allow them to vent and be more negative than usual? Most certainly, yes. Should we give them a free pass to express their anger with personal attacks and the like? Absolutely not. Where is the point of balance in between both these extremes? Well, it's not that easy to define.

And I'm not about you guys giving us a free pass either, but bear with us when we say we genuinely want to improve things and can't do it any other way than together.

 

[konbendith]

Hey Konbendith,

This being the case, is there a chance PDX could reconsider the black listing Republic of Play and Arumba? As an audience member, it certainly felt like they ended up on the chopping block because they were a little too critical, and it's something that's majorly left a sour taste in my mouth as someone who cares about Paradox games and the eco-system around them.

I know that's how quite a few people have interpreted these situations, but that's actually at no point what has motivated our decisions to not work with the people you're listing or any content creator/influencer we work with for that matter. You can find tons of examples of people who are critical of us and who we still work with on a regular basis. I don't want to go into too many details on the cases above and reopen these conversations we've addressed before, but in summary, I'd say every time we chose to not work with someone, it's because of how our work relationship with them is going, not because of what they say about our products.

 

[konbendith]

@DavidBrewster
I'm sorry, I understand this might be frustrating, but I won't expand more on this. We've provided answers to that before, and if they weren't enough to convince you then, as you pointed, they won't now. It's absolutely fine for you to have your own opinion on the matter.

 

[konbendith]

1) thx for engaging with us. And keep in mind there's a loong context for why people are being very critical. Quick example: ai debt spiral hasn't been fixed in a year now........

It's honestly been nice to find/have the time to do so today. I know this doesn't solve all the issues, but hopefully, it brings a bit of perspective.
And as a EU4 player who follows (usually more quietly) the community and has more than 2k hours of play on the game, don't you worry, I'm aware of the issues and frustrations

 

[konbendith]

I think the main problem does not come from true personal attacks, rather posts which are neither legitimate criticisms nor personal attacks, but instead complaints about a product that are written in an extremely snarky, condescending and insulting tone (e.g. every complaint ever made about Leviathan).

Now I know what everyone is going to say, Leviathan deserved those responses. The problem with this response, and the similar 'why is paradox complaining about toxicity when they messed up so badly?' is that it is beside the point. Whether they deserve insulting criticism or not, the devs and the company are not going to spend their time scrolling through the forums having their hard work insulted in such a manner whether they deserve it or not. It is not just about your right to complain in such a manner, it is about the receiver having no obligation to sit through it if they do not want to.

I think that's actually a pretty good summary, and that's very much what I'm after, or what I'm trying to help putting into perspective and solving at least.

Honestly, how to deal with people that cross the line is relatively easy, that's why the question of personal attack is quite easy to handle, it's a clear breaking of the rules, we act on it by taking moderation actions, end of the story.

However, defining when something/someone crosses the line from being rightfully annoyed and negative while complaining about something, to becoming unconstructive and generally toxic in helping to solve the situation... Well, that's not as clear of a line in the sand, and not as easy to define. We can of course set moderation rules, but they're always open to interpretation. Ultimately it's a cultural question and needs to come from us, but also from a general agreement with the community as a whole on what's ok or not in terms of tone, behavior, attitude, etc.

Typically, that's preciselly why I called out an answer earlier in this thread that I believe what super unconstructive. It's not the shame or punish the person who did it, they probably had all the right reasons to be annoyed and to want to express it. It's about clearly defining what I believe is ok or not.

 

[konbendith]

@Brynjar
Sorry if this was unclear, I meant that coordinating communications and response to the current situation is more challenging because of our size, and of the situation with Tinto being at a distance from us. If the same thing was happening a year and a half ago, coordination would have been bringing 3-5 people in a room in our Stockholm office and putting a plan together. Right now, we need to coordinate with a dozen of people who are all at a distance, and a studio that face this kind of situation for pretty much the first time, so it's a bit less smooth.

I didn't mean to say the reasons above where the cause for the issues in the first place, once again, I'm the communications guy, it's neither my expertise or role to analyze and see what went right or wrong in the game development process

 

[konbendith]

It's up to @konbendith if he wants to go into more specifics on why embargos are used by Paradox and Media as a whole

Not really the topic here, but to answer quickly, we don't typically do embargoes to hide the quality of a release by preventing people from talking about it before the release day. It's something that has sometimes been done in our industry but always backfires, which is why I, and my PR team, always advise against it. I'd say the most common reason we often have embargos are that we have other exclusivity deal (whether with press, influencers, first parties, etc.) that make it so we need to control when who has access to which information, or just because we want to be able to control when the conversation is happening around our game (always better from a marketing perspective if 30 people are talking about your game the same day, rather than if 1 person is talking about it every day for a month).

 

[konbendith]

To answer globally on some of the points above:

• I'm the Head of Comms, so most of the answers you'll get from me are communications/community-related, I can't and won't give you answers on the dev side of things (but I'll help the dev eventually provide them to you!). I can help you with what I'm in charge of, basically.
• I know what matters first and foremost is for Paradox to fix and improve on the things you've escalated and have created frustration in the community. The main reason the actual devs have not been super active here themselves (and you're therefore stuck with me) is that they're actively working on the next hotfix. You'll eventually get news about that, and their plans, and everything, but the priorities for them have been "fix things > talk to the community", which even if it's a bit frustrating at times, is probably still the right set of priorites.

Edit: I remember now reading my message that "globally" doesn't mean the same thing in English as it does in French and I keep making that mistake, but I can't find a good alternative, so you'll have to suffer my Frenglish.

 

[konbendith]

We absolutely know and accept that the current situation will take time, and more than words to be fixed (as I believe @BjornB as also pointed into his earlier answers). My hope is to bring perspective and context to the comments and conversation on toxicity, more specifically on these forums. It's a larger topic than the Leviathan release, which is why I wanted to share it in this section of the forum.

I've no intention or hope that my messages will make our players more ok with the situation on EU4, I know this requires more actions than words. Sadly I'm a man of words, and other people are right now focusing on the actions

Unpopular, but personally I think it is perfectly fine to communicate with the dev team through a proxy community manager. Not everything has to be up close and personal, and devs don't have to entertain the users.

At the moment, the community manager, who's here in Stockholm, and the community ambassador, who's located in the UK, are also having difficulty getting direct info from the team as they are hard at work on fixing things in Barcelona. If they're too busy working on the game to let you know directly, they're also too busy to update us thoroughly enough to give you that info ourselves. I know it feels a bit weird to think that we don't necessarily have that much more info than you at the moment, but that's kinda true ^^'

 

[konbendith]

With the current setup of division of work, would it be better to have the community manager/ambassador located in Barcelona or Stockholm? Having 2 that don't know more than us seems to defeat the purpose of the function.

That's something we've been discussing in the team for a while! And Tinto is actually the studio we've had in mind from the get-go to test having a community manager embedded on-site (aside from all the ones working close to PDS here in Stockholm of course). It hasn't happened yet because, well the pandemic. Not really relevant to hire or relocate someone to Barcelona when everyone is working from home anyway... But it's absolutely something we're investigating for next year potentially!

 

[konbendith]

Imagine you are at work, drinking coffee non-stop for the past 27 hours and having giant red eyes from staring at the screen, and a guy appears behind you every hour and taps you on the shoulder with "Hi Joe, so how is it going? Are were there yet?"

Now we know the real reason why they left Sweden!

This is a more aggressively accurate description of a CM job than you can possibly imagine. The fear and discomfort you have when you go interrupting a dev that has been super hard at work on something to ask them for an update... It's real.

 

[konbendith]

Also, for those of you who hadn't noticed yet, echoing to the 'actions not words', another hotfix has been released for EU4 Leviathan just now.

EU4: 1.31.2 Majapahit is now LIVE! - Checksum [3ad4] - Not for problem reports

Its up on steam now, and here are the patchnotes. For instructions on how to play the game on a previous version, please go here! As usual, please report any issues in our bug report forum or submit a support ticket. Thank you! Older...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

 

[konbendith]

Hey everyone, just giving you the heads up that I'm turning off work things for the day (and I'm a big believer in the value of my free time, so don't expect too much of me outside of work hours). I've kept an eye on this thread super actively today, it's unlikely I'll be able to dedicate as much time to it for the rest of the week because you know, I'm in charge of a 20+ people department which, among other things is in charge of shipping a certain event happening later this month, including the announcement of a new game that I'm sure you're all excited about (I actually only gotten quite a bit of time today because most of my crew was in rehearsals ).

So still expect me around here, an answering the questions I can answer, but probably not as fast and often as I did today!

 

[konbendith]

Will try provide some broad answers to some of the points above, bring some perspective and manage some expectations:

- I know and see that a lot of people are often asking about the 'why' something went wrong, and I want to be very clear and manage expectations there: we probably won't tell you that. The reason is, why something went wrong often boils down to who made a decision, and we're not going to play the blame game. Our culture is that when we fail, it's as an organization, we fail and fix things together. We don't point fingers. Not saying we'll never provide public explanations on anything, we sometimes do, when it make sense. But if what you're hoping for is someone or something to blame, it's unlikely that you'll ever get it.

- We often refer to how much we've grown on the past few years, it's also true for the community. Nowadays, more than 5 millions of players play our games every month. I've just checked and it's almost 10 times more than only 4 years ago. Whether we want it or not, this kind of scaling up does impact a bit how we can interact with the community. If there are ten times more of you, there is still only one game director for your favorite game. So the likeliness that they have as much time for everyone as they did 5 years ago is pretty slim. So, to some extent, yup, the good old days are gone. Doesn't mean we want to go the whole other way around and become the kind of company where the devs only talk to the players once a year in a super PR controlled interview, quite the contrary. We still support and encourage all our teams to interact directly with the players, that's why we have our live streams, pdxcon, and these forums (and the reasons for the intended changes I've described above). It won't allow us to magically bring back the Paradox from the 'good old days', but it still makes us one of the company of our size that is the most open and transparent with their players. And that's what we want to be.

- Bringing back the question of toxicity, I want to say again that I don't believe toxicity is strictly summarized by people going as far as harassment or personal attacks. I'd say that if you reached the point where you've crossed that line, you're probably already miles ahead of the limit that made you contribute to a toxic environment. As I pointed earlier, it's not easy to define where that exact line in the sand is drawn, because we do know conversations gets heated, that some people talk from the heart, get passionate about what they care about. And it's not about labeling someone as 'toxic' or 'not-toxic', we can all end up contributing to a toxic environment at one point or another. As someone who's worked with community for almost a decade now, I strongly believe moderation is not about judging the individuals, but about defining which behaviors are OK, and contribute to a positive environment, and which behaviors are not. And a behavior is not necessarily a specific action or infraction to a rule, it extends to tone, attitude, intention, etc. We often get stuck in judging the individual, and trying to define if they have broken any set rule, instead of thinking "OK, is this kind of behavior contribute to the environment we want to build? If no, how do we correct it?". This is very much theory-of-communities-in-an-online-environment-welcome-to-my-ted-talk but I hope you see the point I'm trying to make. When I say we want to explore adjusting the moderation, it's not about making it harsher or more lenient, turning it into another platform or going back to the good old days, it's mainly about challenging a bit how we're approaching it.