Wynncraft Public Relations

With the announcement of the 1.18 update, I have noticed that there are many people asking when the new update will be coming out. As someone without the money to buy hero, I have to admit that I have been wondering as well. Being a software engineer, I know how much time it can take to work on an update as massive as the new 1.18 crafting system, but the one thing that I am a bit frustrated with is the lack of communication between the content team and the Wynncraft community. The main issue is that there is no one person devoted to communicating with the community. Wynncraft has an amazing content team for development, we have Grian and Salted who are lead builder and GM them, and there is even a team of great event managers. Even though there are announcements in the forums and on discord, it sometimes feels like we are being shut down when we ask for information. Here is what I propose:

Add a new role on the Wynncraft team for public relations.

This person(s) would be in charge of a few things:
1. Communicating with the community about the state of new updates, features, or fixes
2. Answering questions that the community has
3. Sifting through threads on the forums suggestion area

The main goal of this suggestion is to increase the quantity of communication with the content team. Not only will this make the community feel more connected (hopefully), but it will also give the rest of the content team less to worry about when there are new features.

Let me know if this is a good suggestion and whether other people feel the same as myself. If others feel that this is unnecessary or think it is great, then leave a reply.

 

see they can't do that because all the staff are locked up in the basement and they can't risk them sending secret help msgs thru this kinda stuff

 

I would like some proper explaining about the page prices :(
Edit: I’m not sure but i think showing the state of updates and features is probably only for admins.

By answering the questions that the commuinty has you mean something like “Why make the prices for pages that high?” or “How can i do this?” (The difference is that the frist one only the admins or CT can answer it and the second one is that a moderator can answer it)

 

I assume a bunch of the CT are huge forum lurkers (at least I am lol), but for now we can't really say anything. I can see myself sharing what I do (since it's usually very small stuff for now), I'm just not allowed to :(
Maybe next update some CT will be allowed to do "devblog" like things on their profile and whatnot?
Anyways, the point is that I don't think this kind of rank is needed and the CT could do it! There are good reasons we're not telling anything too, with the risk of leaking big stuff and all, that admins would have to check what we share and a bunch of other reasons I can't think of right now...

 

We don't like leaks tho

 

That's a lie

 

To be honest I completely agree. There’s definetly a bridge that needs to be crossed between the CT/Staff and the community. I have brought up this subject with management but they seemed to view it as less as an issue than I did. I would definetly not only support but also actually want to help make sure the wider community knows about the state of updates, new developments within the staff team etc.

However, this leads onto a discussion about whether or not the CT is right in being very secretive about new stuff. We do have our reasons for not giving out updates about what we’re working on, but in my (and probably yours too) opinion we need to start giving the community a much deeper insight to how our team functions, progresses with updates and big decisions we make. I have a few ideas about how to kickstart this, but none too defined as of yet.

I’m also not entirely sure if any other team members agree with me on this, but I am certain that something needs to change.

If you have any questions or concerns, or want to discuss your though on this in more depth feel free to hit me up with a PM!

 

At the moment I feel like the wynncraft staff and community only interact on the forums or when there is a problem in game. Personally I feel like it would be a good idea for them to share more or even interact more with the community. However I dont think it is necessary for this to be one person's only job. Perhaps it would be in addition to something else

 

The main thing that would make me feel better is if the CT gave more information on the timeline of updates. If an update isn't going to be released on time, that is fine, but it would be nice to be informed about it. Something like a dev blog sounds like a great idea, and if the CT can run that while still fulfilling their other duties that would be fine. Overall interaction with the community and openness about the timeline of updates is what I most desire from this suggestion.

 

Because the timing of updates are tentative to change, we do not reveal a date until it is formally set. Even with a "PR" rank, this information would continue to be undisclosed. The whole "disclosure" thing is a touchy topic and can be argued a number of ways. Personally, I think it would be a really bad move for us if we "promised something on Month, Day, Year" and did not deliver (or did a poor job of doing so). We want to ensure we have a solid update before releasing it. Of course there will always be bugs, but we don't want a product that is completely broken or unplayable. The presence of a beta is usually a good indicator that it is almost ready but we are still working through some bugs.

To clear up further things:
The technical connection between the community and the CT would be Quality Assurance (QA). They work very hard ensuring bug reports are fixed (and fixes are communicated to the community) and also communicating these issues to the respective branches of the CT.

In terms of status of updates & game development, that is up to the discretion of the administration for a variety of reasons.

Moderators are assigned to answer general community questions, and QAs will answer questions about bugs / fixes as detailed above.

In terms of general suggestions:
They are read. However, the majority of them need to go through Salted, Grian, or the respective developer. I read all of the "Website/Forums" and "Store" suggestions. I consider some, I respond to some, etc.