Ben Lesnick: Howdy folks,

First of all, I need to say anyone telling you we aren’t communicating is wrong. We produce two (sometimes three) weekly shows, do a weekly Q&A livestream, a monthly magazine, daily Comm-Links and a monthly report that, while dry, literally lets our devs tell you everything they’re doing. We consciously try to have a variety of tones, from the highly polished Jump Point, the detailed wall of text of the monthly report to the informal Reverse the Verse sessions. Less formally, I spend time in the live chat every week answering questions, and I know that a number of other developers do as well. I try to answer questions here, on the great subreddit and on my personal Twitter when I can. I make it my goal to do at least one fan podcast each week, answering any questions they come up with.

Second: anyone telling you that we’re spending all of our efforts on social media is full of it. We spend no money and very little time on social, which should probably be clear with one glance at our Twitter. It’s 90% links back to the day’s Comm-Link and then occasionally fun things like office candids. There’s no new Star Citizen information presented there. I see the claim all the time, and I think it’s purely a case of ‘grass is greener’ syndrome… but no, social media isn’t getting any additional Star Citizen content that you aren’t privy to.

(If you’ll spare me an extra paragraph, I’d like to stress that my philosophy for social is that it’s necessary but needs to be genuine in order to matter. I know that a lot of our backers believe that it’s the devil incarnate, and I don’t entirely disagree… but it’s also a necessary communication tool in the 21st century. My goal with social is to keep it as genuine as humanly possible, because I feel like that’s a better sales pitch than anything artificial. So we use Facebook and Twitter to promote the Comm-Link primarily, and we don’t do any of the pretty easy “GET A MILLION FOLLOWERS!” social tricks we probably could (after all, when you see a stupid hashtag in the corner of a TV show do you feel anything but sad pity? And I’ll end with repeating my bias, which is that I met my wife on Twitter… and that happened because she liked my dumb jokes, not because I had a good Klout score :))

[And since I’m seeing it elsewhere in this discussion: Reddit is not social media. It’s simply another Star Citizen forum, one with an active userbase that’s pretty much the same as here. I like answering questions as a person in both places when I can, and I would never ask anyone on the team not to do that.]

I say all that to let you know our communication is a serious thing; it’s something we put a lot of thought and planning and careful limited-resource management into making possible. Is it always perfect? Absolutely not! But ignoring the effort (and the considerable success of that effort as it has changed over the last two years!) boils this down to a totally incorrect us-versus-them mentality. That is to say, if you’ve decided we’re out to get you, you probably aren’t going to change your mind. The reality is that every single person here (with the possible exception of some trolls) wants exactly the same thing: the best possible communication. So, remember that as we descent further into this debate! Compare AtV1 to AtV20 to AtV50 and you’ll see how much we believe in improving things (or, how the forums worked six months ago versus a year ago versus two years ago.)

Now, all of that said, constant improvement is absolutely the name of the game. Discussions like this with the community about expectations and desires have led to lots of great things that I think everyone takes for granted: the weekly Comm-Link schedule, reporting concept prices a week out and (coming soon!) the ship status grid. In fact, Turbulent is building the entire ‘Community Hub’ based on a lot of this feedback. Any time we can come up with an idea and implement it together, we do great things. So let’s use this discussion to make that happen again!

My biggest takeaway—and you can certainly correct me—is that we need to spend more time being visible on the forums. And to that I completely agree. I’m going to sit down with my team and figure out how to make that happen. I know James and Jared popped in earlier and shared the details of their week (which I had to force myself not to do, because it sounded like a fun thing to write out) and I certainly appreciate how insanely busy they both are… but we do need to be on the forums more.

I also know already that we need to be more visual. We want to share more of the game, we want to put out fancier assets… but no matter what you’re hearing, it’s NOT a case of making this incredible content appear out of thin air (when I see the expectation, I always think of a gag from the Simpsons with the softball team, and Mr. Burns crowing that ‘I told him to do that!’ after one of the ringers hits a home run.) We’re currently looking to hire a position that will allow us to do exactly this... but it’s a struggle even there, because one of my core beliefs is that the community team needs to stay small and not take resources away from the game. One thing about our workflow today is that we try very hard NOT to JIRA developers with community or marketing content… because every hour we pull someone from QA off their game task to capture a video is time that can be spent improving the game. It’s a balance we’re still working on, and one that will hopefully change a little in the near future.

Let me set some expectations, though. There’s two Community Managers (really, less than that since Jared spends three days a week as an editor) for a million backers… and every subgroup of backers wants something different. If I can make a thousand people happy by finding some rough Banu merchantman art in a crevice then there’s ten other ships whose pilots want more on their ships (some of whom are now offended because one of the other groups got a toy.) But this is a forum that generates thousands of posts a day… just reading them would be a full time job. We can try very hard to appear more often, but if you’re imagining a CIG employee showing up in every thread with a definitive answer for your questions it’s never going to work out.

And let’s be clear about those answers. When you don’t see us today it’s almost always because we don’t have anything new to tell you. When your question isn’t answered on AtV or 10ftC or RtV or in Jump Point or in a chat session or when you tweet or Facebook or REddit or PM it to me it’s because you’re asking something we don’t necessarily have an answer for. And that’s not intentional ignorance or even accidental ignorance (Star Citizen IS a global project with hundreds of people doing different things around the world, many outside our immediate view)… most often it’s because the answer isn’t something that has been decided yet. If you’ve ever listened to me on a podcast, you know I’m willing to address any question… but a lot of the time, the answer is going to disappoint. If you’re cool with understanding that no one knows exactly when the modular Cutlass will be ready then I’m happy to spend more of my time answering questions like that.

And if your takeaway from the current material we produce is that it’s bad because it’s sometimes wrong (which I’ve seen mentioned in this thread) then you are likely not going to be happy with our going further into the speculative areas of the project. When I go on AtV and say a patch is coming out on Thursday it’s not because of I’m notorious for getting things wrong or because of my well-known plot to lie to everyone (I still have a hard time believing this is a repeated thought!)… it’s because when we filmed the show on Tuesday, everyone believed a patch was coming out... and because I tend to prefer informing you guys of what I know rather than keeping it a secret. We share information as we get it… and things are always going to change for any number of reasons. Probably the number one biggest expectation issue comes from treating anything anyone on the team says as law (and without blaming anyone—because it’s a natural thing--that has definitely made less-public-facing devs more cautious about posting their work-in-progress.)

Anyway! That was a lot of text for this morning, but if I have to boil it all down: we’re all on the same team, I believe we do a heck of a lot… and we’re eager to improve. Let’s all stay positive and figure out what the best way to do that is. Because if there’s a single thing I can absolutely guarantee, it’s that my team will raise heaven and Earth if it means a chance to make the Star Citizen community better.

(As for this thread specifically: I'll do whatever I can to keep talking about our philosophy and how things can change, within the limits of the fact that I have seven other jobs :) )