So this is where roland said to go to gripe about a17 and the early release...

[JaxTeller718]

Jax, while I appreciate that stance, and I truly do respect it. For me it's not about just the timing of this issue and the 3 days with the streamers. As I said, I'm enjoying Fallout and probably wouldn't skip it to play this. My grudge/gripe whatever is the fact that they aren't actually giving a rats rear end about the existing playerbase. As I said, if there had been some requirement in the sign ups that said you had to have at least played 100 hours of 7 days to die to qualify for the early access I'd be fine with it. They just want streamers with over 5k followers for another hopeful injection of funds, which is a slap in the face, in my opinion, to people like me who have streamed this game when the directory was dead for the last year, regardless of what I thought it could do for my stream. That's my main issue bud.

 

I got you. And I do kind of agree here. Overall there are a lot of things in gaming in general I am starting to see that bother me, especially when it comes to streamers. But a fun weekend event designed to act as a celebration of sorts isnt on that list.

 

I'll give you one vague example of something I find WAY more upsetting than what Pimps are doing here. There are 2 games I adore. I won't name them or the streamer. But since the devs of these two games caught wind this streamer streams them consistently they have begun taking all of this streamers complaints as gospel and are beginning to make detrimental balance changes in accordance to what makes this particular streamer happy or upset.

 

THAT to me is a slap in the players faces. I've already uninstalled one of these games because it was obvious to me that the style of the game was going to change based on this streamers advice.

 

When Pimps start doing something shady like that then I will be more upset. Would I love to get my hands on A17 in 2 days? Of course, not even just to play but to check out the xmls and just get immersed in the new languages etc. But it is what it is.

[thearrican]

You wound me good sir. I would never make a negative Steam review based on my handling on a forum separate from the game itself. For sooth you slay my persona. Also, I'm not a boy Roland, c'mon, don't treat me like some insignificant fly. I know you wouldn't treat me that way if we were having this discussion face to face, because I'd expect at least a balanced level of respect when someone wasn't able to hide behind a keyboard and "mod" powers.

[Armor9]

I just hope the Streamers crash nonstop, it is buggy as hell, and the Streamers can showcase the bugs to their audience. Should help drum up some sales

 

Who knew the 17 in A17 means it would take 17 months to make.

[KhaineGB]

So I'm gonna bring up something I did mention in another thread, but Roland shot down.

 

I still absolutely believe that releasing A17-E NOW is bad idea. We're in the middle of Fallout 76 release, some folks are still going hard on Red Dead Redemption 2, plus other games have also had updates (Overwatch just got a major patch to fix lots of stuff and prep for new stuff, Warframe just dropped it's expansion, etc).

 

The ones in parenthesis likely won't apply to this community, or people interested in this type of game, because I'm pretty sure I'm the only idiot here that plays Overwatch, Warframe AND 7DTD.

 

However, Fallout 76 is the big one. It just released yesterday and TFP want a stream event to build hype in the middle of that? Sorry, but that's a competing genre game... and way bigger. I hope I'm wrong... I really, really do... but I don't see how this is going to help from a marketing standpoint in any way just because of the TIMING.

 

What I personally would have done, based off the conversations I've had with Indie and small studio game dev friends (I'm a geek, I like learning about this stuff) is something like this.

 

Stream event on the 30th so it's technically released in Experimental in November.

 

A17-E for the public on the 3rd December.

 

Look at "stable" release around the 21st of December.

 

That allows the RDR2 and FO76 hype to die down (plus Overwatch and Warframe hype for anyone who cares about those). You release just before christmas with plenty of time to fix the REALLY bad bugs, which lets people play over the holiday period AND you hit the steam sale window.

 

If the stream event was about generating publicity for the game and building up hype, then my personal opinion is that would've been a lot better (I also want to state I made some assumptions regarding steam sale dates, so adjust accordingly).

[Aldranon]

And that shows TFP released A17 when it was ready for experimental and not something else. +1 for TFP.

[KhaineGB]

That's not the right way to do it when you're having a special event to generate hype.

[Gamida]

2 things of which are just my opinion.

 

1. I can see why some are upset with streamers getting it first over other players. Us (us being players who have already bought game and have played it on a regular basis) not getting it is not going to make someone new (someone new being anyone who has not bought the game or has never seen it) buy the game anymore than if we had it and was playing at same time as streamers.

 

2. Having streamers who have played game a lot in their stream over ones who have played little or not at all. My thinking is if a streamer has never played 7 Days in their stream that would mean to me that a ot of their regular viewers may never have seen 7 Days so that would mean more exposure for the game. Streamers who have streamed a lot of 7 Days or exclusively done so may not have a lot of viewers who don't already have the game or have already decided to get it or not.

 

Again, both of these are just my opinions and there may be some things that I have not thought of that would make me rethink them.

 

 

Plus, I will be playing 7 Days again Monday (haven't played since September 19th) so that makes me happy inside.

[pahbi]

I don't see whats to be gained from the pre stream thing, except maybe some bug catches?

 

On the other hand, I don't see this as something worth griping about either.

 

- P

[KhaineGB]

Plus, I will be playing 7 Days again Monday (haven't played since September 19th) so that makes me happy inside.

 

I'm totally booting it up monday since my Warframe XP booster will run out then.

[Roland]

You wound me good sir. I would never make a negative Steam review based on my handling on a forum separate from the game itself. For sooth you slay my persona. Also, I'm not a boy Roland, c'mon, don't treat me like some insignificant fly. I know you wouldn't treat me that way if we were having this discussion face to face, because I'd expect at least a balanced level of respect when someone wasn't able to hide behind a keyboard and "mod" powers.

 

You cut me first with thy base assumption that I would ban you for your mere opinion. It is exactly that false and scurrilous accusation that fills such reviews that actually do connect forum happenings to game play reporting. I wouldn’t speak to you thusly face to face because it doesn’t take mod powers to be a keyboard warrior as you proved...merely a keyboard. And without your first preemptive strike in our F2F meeting my own riposte couldn’t have happened. Like begets like in proximity or across the ether.

[Aldranon]

You cut me first with thy base assumption that I would ban you for your mere opinion. It is exactly that false and scurrilous accusation that fills such reviews that actually do connect forum happenings to game play reporting. I wouldn’t speak to you thusly face to face because it doesn’t take mod powers to be a keyboard warrior as you proved...merely a keyboard. And without your first preemptive strike in our F2F meeting my own riposte couldn’t have happened. Like begets like in proximity or across the ether.

 

Thems some purdy words there. Somehow reminds me of this here:

 

[JaxTeller718]

You cut me first with thy base assumption that I would ban you for your mere opinion. It is exactly that false and scurrilous accusation that fills such reviews that actually do connect forum happenings to game play reporting. I wouldn’t speak to you thusly face to face because it doesn’t take mod powers to be a keyboard warrior as you proved...merely a keyboard. And without your first preemptive strike in our F2F meeting my own riposte couldn’t have happened. Like begets like in proximity or across the ether.

 

[wicketness]

Woot let teh chaos begin lmfao!!!!

 

Pretzels!!!

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

LET EM CRY!!! we have what we wanted a date and it is close now to come outta the cave and get to work.

[Gazz]

I just hope the Streamers crash nonstop, it is buggy as hell, and the Streamers can showcase the bugs to their audience. Should help drum up some sales

Let's hope not? =P

 

Of course there will be some bugs. It's inevitable.

Our testers are working hard but they have the impossible job of testing a game that is in active development.

[JCrook1028]

Stream event on the 30th so it's technically released in Experimental in November.

 

A17-E for the public on the 3rd December.

 

Look at "stable" release around the 21st of December.

 

18 days of Experimental? I'm sure TFP dreams of such but seriously doubt they expect it to be less than double that. I say late January minimum for stable.

 

As for fallout 76 stealing players? From what I have seen/heard so far that game truly sucks so.............kinda doubt it's gonna be an issue.

[Gazz]

18 days of Experimental? I'm sure TFP dreams of such but seriously doubt they expect it to be less than double that. I say late January minimum for stable.

It's ready when it's ready. Right now it's pretty much ready for Experimental.

 

 

I don't think F76 is targeting the same kind of audience.

In that game you can not have a (permanent) base of any kind, no lasting effect on the world, no community of "acquaintances" because you log into a new random server every time.

It's more of a game where you log in to kill some bozos. Nothing wrong with that.

[KhaineGB]

The 18 days was just a spitball number as it'd depend on steam sales. Again, not concrete, but following a similar path and delaying to January to hit the Steam New Year sale would also be a pretty good shout IMO.

 

Fallout 76 literally just released. The reason I bring that up is because most people I've spoken to are either in the "It's a bit meh, but I'm gonna give it the weekend" camp (which overlaps with streamers hyping up A17-E for marketing purposes) or "I'm enjoying it and going to stick with it" camp.

 

That's why I brought it up. I'm in the "meh" camp myself and will be playing A17-E on Monday. It is something that needs to be considered though.

[Roland]

The focus has always been around experimental and not around marketing. We are going to experimental because it is ready now and we are doing a publicity event to lead into it. We are not doing a publicity event and then tagging on the experimental release.

 

You said I shot down your arguments in the other thread and yet you never responded to what I said in response nor did you address my points in this thread-- and yet you admit that what I said was compelling enough to be considered hits that brought down your argument. I'll quote what I said and if you'd like to refute it or at least address it alongside your own comments that would be great.

 

1) A17 Experimental is what we're talking about with all this release date stuff and the purpose of experimental is get some stress testing accomplished by the community. It isn't to compete with other games in the marketplace. Competing for market share is secondary to developing the game and if the development stage is ready for community input right when a bunch of other games are being released then so be it. In fact for experimental it might even be better with only 1000's playing instead of 10,000's at least at first so some distraction by other games is perfect.

 

2)The Pimps work through holidays all the time. Madmole has his turkey thigh in one hand while he redoes the textures and lighting again with his other hand. faatal can see what is in his stocking even as he creates the mod for 3 or 4 passengers on the jeep. Nobody is going to rush through experimental with a half-hearted attitude. Not when Santa sees all. In all seriousness the dev team loves working on this game. It isn't a chore and taking their time to do it right is what has everyone else so upset all the time. They won't change that.

[Scyris]

Let's hope not? =P

 

Of course there will be some bugs. It's inevitable.

Our testers are working hard but they have the impossible job of testing a game that is in active development.

 

I expect bugs myself in the experemental build, some bugs are really hard to find without a bunch of people playing it to run into them. I've not really complained about bugs in 7dtd, I know its early access and it'll probally have some bugs/issues. Hell most AAA gone gold games have a ton of bugs at release (Bethesda ring any bells?). I do admit TFP is far better at fixing bugs than Bethesda is. I was going to buy Fallout 76 but decided not to bother and wait, as it doesn't seem all that great and it has a ton of issues that just shouldn't have been in there this late in its dev cycle.. and it still does have them even now.

[Roland]

 

I was imagining more like...

 

[pApA^LeGBa]

I still don´t see any impact on the marketing if existing players get it at the same time. There is literally no negative effect on the marketing if we get it at the same day as the streamers.

 

Giving it out to both at the same time is win/win. Marketing for the streamers and no angry existing customers.

 

Go try any other argument then marketing please.

 

But anyways, more importnant: Why no free weekends? Way more people do start steam on a daily basis than than people watching streams on a daily basis. Without doing any reasearch i say at least 4 times as much and that´s propably way under the real numbers.

 

Free weekend reaches every steam user starting steam. Not only those who watch people that play that certain genre on twitch.

 

Do you have to pay steam for free weekends? Or what is the reason they don´t do it?

[Prisma501]

Because its their game and decided thats how its gonna go?

 

It has been a success in previous release. As i understand it was such a success that they are gonna repeat it for A17, A18 etc etc.

 

Just go with that flow. You have no influence over it. Why stress yourself like that?

 

Cheers

[Katitof]

I simply couldn't care less about experimental release.

 

I'm going to wait for stable and then a month longer, so all the crap gets hotfixed, so I can finally play without having forced world restart every single week.

[OzHawkeye]

I simply couldn't care less about experimental release.

 

I'm going to wait for stable and then a month longer, so all the crap gets hotfixed, so I can finally play without having forced world restart every single week.

 

It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of people do that actually. A17e0 will almost certainly not be anywhere near as stable as a17.4(5?6?) will end up at.

[KhaineGB]

The focus has always been around experimental and not around marketing. We are going to experimental because it is ready now and we are doing a publicity event to lead into it. We are not doing a publicity event and then tagging on the experimental release.

 

You said I shot down your arguments in the other thread and yet you never responded to what I said in response nor did you address my points in this thread-- and yet you admit that what I said was compelling enough to be considered hits that brought down your argument. I'll quote what I said and if you'd like to refute it or at least address it alongside your own comments that would be great.

 

I originally didn't respond because...

 

1) I'd just woken up so wanted coffee. Wanted to kickstart the brain rather than give you a half-baked, possibly rambling reply.

2) I'm pretty dumb and forgot.

 

Really should've replied after acknowledging it in this thread, but see point 2 regarding being dumb. So, regarding your reply...

 

1) If the purpose is some stress testing, then you absolutely need to bear in mind that releasing the same week as an AAA game in a similar genre (regardless of what Gazz said regarding 7DTD and FO76 not being the same, the CONSUMER isn't going to see it that way) is not going to help achieve this goal. As it stands, I doubt most people will be playing it much longer than a week based off feedback from various friends... but pretty much all of them have said they don't care about A17-E right now and will be going hard on FO76 instead. That is absolutely going to eat into the potential tester base by quite a substantial amount.

 

2) This part I will admit was partially an assumption on my end. I say partially because I do remember WAY back in the single-digit alphas, they often took holidays off, even if just a day or two... and honestly? I think it would be well deserved AND expected this year since they've all been working their collective nuts off to get A17 out as quickly as possible. So, my apologies on that assumption in this regard.

 

I'm going to address the top half of your comment as point 3.

 

3) If this is true, then what's the stream team for? I don't mean to be sarcastic asking this, but I've only been given two explanations for streamers getting early access.

 

The first is that they're going to be streaming it early to get the hype going. Lately, hype is exactly how publishers and game devs have been marketing their games (looking at you, Todd Howard) so it's not an unreasonable leap of logic to assume that. I've also had some of the streamers in the program outright TELL me that's what it's for (and been exceptionally rude and elitist when doing so) so I don't think it's unreasonable of me to have that point of view regarding the early access.

 

As for the second explanation, I have seen folks tell me it's TFP's way of saying "thank you" to the streamers who have promoted the game for god knows how long. I have to say, this is the one I actually prefer over the "hype machine" one I've been fed. But if that is the case, then why don't modders ALSO get access so they can start playing/tinkering with the game? A lot of folks I've chatted to agree that 7DTD likely wouldn't be as popular as it is if it weren't for TFP embracing the modding community and us bunch of crazy sods applying our own spin to their product.

 

So yeah... I think I covered everything. The reason I mention it being a marketing thing is because that's literally what I've been told... and if that's not the case, then I don't see the point in streamers getting it early.