The Gronk

Where am I posting this? The latest bug-reporting thread is surprisingly well hidden.

This is the question. Should the supplies be buried within a claim block? The green bar in the background is how far the claim block extends from the central keep. One side of the argument says that if it was buried within the untouched dirt below the farm blocks then there's a strong possbility that the character has just missed it and been unlucky. The other side of the argument is that removing a random dirt block from a player's base can, if they're very unlucky, cause a failure in structural integrity. I lost two seedlings to this very issue while digging it out.

Within the bounds of the claim block, not sure about the sleeping bag though, I happened to have the claim block bounds shown at the time.

Quick question: A "buried supplies" mission spawning inside of my base. Is that a bug or a feature? Do you want me to file a bug report? Here's a screenshot of the incident...

My bad, I forgot that public relations aren't an integral part of product development.

As you and I both know the forum rats tend to get more rabid the longer the devs stay away. Why do they get more agitated? Largely because they don't know when, or indeed if, the next interaction will take place. Keen Software House, for all of their flaws, had something good going with "Update Thursday". Of course, being Keen, they tried to post regular game updates at the same time which was a horrendously stupid idea and gave me no end of amusement watching the same bug get fixed and unfixed on a regular basis. Regardless of that, the weekly update thing was good, all it takes is a single sentence from each department about what they're working on, possibly the occassional amusing anectode. Do that once a week on a regular day and it'll help the community feel more included and less like a puppy with separation anxiety. This would likely make your job much easier and slow down the rate of posts being shovelled out of the way.

I thoroughly agree. If only there was a job title for someone who managed social media for the devs, passing messages back and forth in a clear and concise way. Some sort of social media... manager? Unfortunately not, if you're looking for someone too scared to lose their shot at "the big time" to argue back with forum rats then anyone over 30 has likely become too jaded and contrarian to do it, myself more so than others.

I realise you're just following orders but such things are why I no longer work for other people. This is an overflow area for things not considered relevant to the development. It's literally an area set aside for irrelevant discussion. placing or leaving anything in here denotes it as to be avoided by the devs so they don't have to search through crap for questions. Why would a dev come in here? It took three weeks and me causing a stink to get poor fataal to come on and answer the relevant questions*. TFP have needed a dedicated community manager for years, some millenial with a boy band haircut and a pair of permanent finger-guns to pull out questions and stuff that might interest the devs from the maelstrom. I love you Roland but you're a bit too goadable for social media management. *Do you think TFP have a system to determine which mechanics to completely rip out each alpha or do they just pick names out of a hat 🙂

Fair enough, apparently discussions about the state of the community are indeed unworthy of the developers attention. Justify it how you like, I've been lurking for quite some time now and the strict rule system is what killed the vibe.

A straw man argument? Dude, I expected better of you. "Did IQ's just drop suddenly while I was away?" Ripley - Aliens

Human nature I suppose 🙂 Obvious troll is obvious

Every form of social structure built by humans suffers from a single fatal flaw, the people involved. That's not to say we shouldn't try to build something better,

The only game I've got time to play at the moment is coinbase, turns out my score keeps going up so there's that... The problem is that every day or so the discussion is cut short which stifles the development of the conversation unless everyone is pottering back and forth between the dev diary and the dev discussions. What happens if a discussion goes around to relevant again? Does it get shifted back to the dev diary? Is the development of the community during this release cycle not worthy of proper discussion? There are companies who would pay a lot of money to develop a community which the TFP are casually discarding.

Nice guess but wrong. T'is not the new system that stifles me but the new sprog. Check my post count, it went downhill swiftly after November 2020. Do what you like with your own forum, I'm just pointing out that what was once a vibrant communty now feels like a sterile Q&A session.

You know half the staff are European right? I don't know about you but I've been a lot more productive since the only thing I can do is sit behind a computer and piddle about with code.