What the community needs to hear

Games Halo Infinite
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“We are listening” is a really shallow term in the gaming world. It’s basically acquired meme status. The issue isn’t that the developers aren’t actually listening, it’s that they aren’t telling their community what they are listening to. Which makes all the conversation feel one-sided, a community getting more and more agitated as their feedback seems to fall on deaf ears.

343i, right now, needs to prove that they are listening. They need to communicate back exactly what they are listening to. And be open to further discussion to make sure they aren’t missing the point.

Right now the flow of information from 343i has been very meager. We usually hear about changes about a week before they are made, and every update comes with changes we weren’t told about and often weren’t asking for, and then get dialed back into the game. The skill jump removal comes to mind.

Right now the only changes we know are coming beyond the next patch are cross-core implementation, and desync which is the only backlogged fix we know about.

No word on other hot issues in the community. We can reasonably assume some are on 343i’s to-do list, but not knowing makes it feel like we simply aren’t being listened to.

So what the community needs to hear, or rather have communicated to us, is the entire list of current change priorities (ones they are actively, or will very soon be working on), as well as a good idea of what’s in the backlog of changes planned to enter development down the road.

We need to know what 343i has been listening to, not just that they are listening. And showing us their to-do list is the best way to set minds at ease, and give us a chance to talk about which of those changes matter the most to us, which changes they seem to have missinterpreted, and whether anything in the pipeline is something noone was asking for.

I’m talking UI changes, aim control changes, weapon balance changes, movement/physics changes, map changes, sbmm changes, ranking changes, progression system implementation, customization changes etc.

A list of what 343i believes needs to change, a good idea of what takes priority and why (importance vs potential speed of implementation) and some idea of how the issues may be addressed, so that we can stop repeating the same threads over and over about what needs to change, and instead talk about how those changes should look, what changes were left out that should be added to the list, and which changes may not actually need to happen.

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I agree with the statement, but it sounds more like something the developers need to hear.

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They’re putting this here so people can read it which includes 343i. They’ve been reading the forums too. Maybe not accurately interpreting the feedback, but they’ve been reading. Or at least someone has and is relaying the information. Could explain “Collision: player feedback was mixed”. I however have checked multiple threads about this and it has continued to be 90% collision on and 10% off since launch. Sure doesn’t sound mixed to me.

I agree with you @Fos_Kuvol and I’ve been saying the same thing since about half way through season 1. We got a lot more communication when season 1 was ending, but we also had plenty of under the rug changes they never communicated. The Tank Gun was going to disappear just like the skill jumps did if someone hadn’t given us a stealth tweet about it being removed.

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ID Software’s handling of Doom Eternal will always be the gold standard of a Triple A studio staying in communication with their fans. Have regular streams talking about areas that was cut back, or cool things added. Keeping news on their news site, making posts in the official subreddit for additional info, heck even reaching out to many of the Youtubers to record and upload full interviews with honest answers.

Meanwhile it seems like the MCC team is at least keeping everything on Waypoint. And what was done for MCC served just fine.

But the Infinite team can’t decide between Waypoint, support, forums, twitter, reddit, or youtube to post their news. Then the streams are just either “playdates” where not much is said, or tin-canned pre-recorded streams that are few and far between. Oh and they have their list of forerunners, the community members that became unofficial community representatives for 343. They don’t have any community interviews and it seems like they aren’t told anything anyway. They got their fancy stuff and titles then were forgotten about. Maybe they are under NDA’s, but from the amount of complaining and how at least the youtubers of that group are moving away from Halo content, I doubt an NDA is holding them down.

They talk about having a list of priorities and known problem and for us to send tickets, but we’re on 8 months of it now, even more if you were there for the flights like I was. We don’t know what their proties are, the known problems don’t update, and support tickets are so automated that many of us don’t see a point.

Something as simple as a priority list would go a long way. We don’t need estimated dates of completion, we just need to know that our issues are on an updated known issue list where everyone can read it and how important they are. For example, the Zeta Sky codes are still glitched. Are they working on that at all, or do they actually know anything? I don’t know, it isn’t on the known issue list. What about desync, it seems one dev has said that it is under co-op and forge, but by how much? And why? Basic net functionality seems like it should be top of the list to me.

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You should tag this post under the appropriate tags to increase chances of 343 actually reading it.

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You mean the higher-ups that make all the calls. So of course feedback falls on deaf ears.

You know that "roadmap’ we should have had months ago? They have one, it’s just the community is not included.

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