Reading indy dev blogs always seems to give me hope

[wipeout 1,355]

So there is this game called atomic society when it first started popping up i was excited but i knew id probably have to wait a long long time before before it would be worth buying, Well some steam shenanigans and sales later i bought the game figured id give it a try as i figured "hey its been a while right it should be fine right".
Well ya kinda? So the core is the same as 99% of other games out there its a city builder with limited features geared around a certain topic with no real uniqueness to it(outside of its weird ui) but it was a fun afternoon kinda game to play once or twice then shelf for a year and try again.
So fast forward to today im cleaning up my installed games list and checking each game for any updates before installing them(if there where content updates id give those games a try again) and i see a dev blog and a update since i played so lets go read them in order of them coming out.
So dev blog first here is the link for if you want to read it https://store.steampowered.com/newshub/app/514500/view/2735324887767900335 and boy was it worth a read turns out its a tiny tiny tiny team(smaller then wurm) with like 1 part time paid dev who had been stuck on a project for 6 months trying to get it to work(not due to lack of experience but due to what the feature was and their engine), Anyway reading on i read about how the guy in charge talks about how everything he and his dev have done was mostly guess work and always alone no outside help and so on until 1 day where a dev from a growing indy game contacted them and helped them out.
And the things he wrote the lessons he learned they are inspiring i will post a snippet of it below but i encourage you to read it all.
 

Quote

Deep Breath

So after my chat, I decided to read every single bad review and every single refund reason for the game in a single night. I hadn’t done that for a very long time, and never with the right attitude.

Reading 100+ complaints about something you’ve made isn't pleasurable but this time I could handle it. I didn’t feel so sensitive because I viewed the bad reviews more like a "how-to" manual on what to tackle next. I summarised all the complaints and ordered them by frequency so I could see what the biggest issues were. A plan of action unfolded. I didn't need to guess anymore. People were being very specific about what they disliked!

Naturally, certain complaints will always be beyond our meagre resources to fix. We’re a no-budget tiny team making our first game, and some early mistakes can’t be undone. However many of the issues appeared to be relatively easy things to resolve (or at least mitigate). For example, recent bad reviews tended to focus on two things: slow updates (because we were stressing out over the path system) and certain bugs... Nobody was leaving us a bad review because we didn't have paths.

This led to an obvious conclusion: why don't we put the path system to one side and put out an update that happens to contain bug fixes - thereby curing our two biggest types of complaint in one go?

It kind of sounds so simple in hindsight. And it is. But I needed experience to make it sink in.
 

And so much more is stated in it and i cant help but think this sounds familiar a lot of the issues that this dev has faced up until that point really came from living in a closed shell system where it was him vs the world and it reminded me of wurm's development over all the years from the time of rolf and notch too just rolf too rolf and 1-2 devs too now and what i see with this guy is that after talking with this other guy about what worked and what didnt work that he went from "im making my game my way screw everyone else we will bash our heads against the wall and implement things and work on things that we want regardless of what others want" in his case a road system that just wasnt working the way they wanted it to and it changed into "lets look at the issues that plague our game and focus on fixing them fix our game first to make it more appealing to players and then add more"

And frankly that is something i have been yelling at wurm staff and other game's their staff and business people for years with varying degrees of succes, When it comes to the companies i worked with and the products they wanted to expand onto they listened they sucked up their pride put expansion idea's on halt and started looking at what their clients where saying and started to fix those issues resulting in better reviews and more favorable posts being made and an increase in revenue and clients.
When it came to some of the games i mentioned it to in long properly written out emails to who ever i could reach as highest person it often helped 1 person ended up saying how most of them got so caught up with wanting to implement their ideas and the new ideas that came from it that they didnt stop to take the time to polish and treasure what they had and focus on pleasing the customers.
With wurm well maybe im not sure sometimes it feels like there is a moment a period where they try and then they give up and go back to their old habits and its sad to see really.

Anyway the game's rating dropped way down over time due to low player counts(peak players of 10 in march last year for example) combined with older graphics meant that steam isnt really showing it and thus the game isnt really growing now reviews have since then been improving its starting to show again sometimes and well the game started to grow sure its in the dozens of players and not hundreds as the damage was done and the game is small and tiny and will remain so but the fact that there are people still playing such a bare bone game is saying something that there is something there worth trying out.
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Now lets look at wurm steam stats when it came out 1103 peak players on steam yesterday's peak 519 and this is steadily dropping down and why? 52% rating means steam isnt showing it much to anyone there is no hype no nothing
Now lets look at the bad reviews we can pretty much sum these up into the following.

1. troll reviews there are many
2. people who have no attention span/refuse to read giving a bad review
3. "game is buggy no one fixing bugs"
4. "staff is horrible"/"staff have a conflict of interest"/"staff are banning people left and right for speaking up"
5. "the game is not f2p why is it listed as such" 
6. "the game is dying and they needed a cash grab to stay afloat they recently sold the company so they must be in hot water"
7. And finally "hey im a ex wurm player here is my bad review because im pissed that im banned for x reason"

Those seem to be some of the most common reasons and most of these come down to either people miss understanding or wurm staff going over the top or the game just genuinely isnt for them, now there are some things that could be done to fix a part of these
1. do what others have done stop trying to shove weird new features and content down into the game for the sake of "we like this idea lets put it in because we like it" and focus on bug fixing for a long time
2. Try to be more passive and dont instantly fall for people trying to cause trouble as there are quite a few staff posts on the steam reviews where you guys fell for the bait and came across as exactly what they tried to get you to look like
3. make things more clear as to what the game is and how it is without grandeurs words and statements clear up what you get as a f2p player explain the restrictions dont just list them somewhere hidden away write some proper documentation that isnt a wiki page that is mostly outdated
4. Listen to the reviews listen to the players stop being so focused on your own goals and focus on making the game more successful if it means a long period of bug fixes with active communication then do so stop writing patch notes that require emoo's magic 8 ball to figure out how a feature works be upfront about it
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Going back to atomic society is it a game that makes me say go out and get it? no, why? what they have now is what most city builders had at 0.1 this game is going to take years to get there and frankly i doubt it will get there based on what is going on but if they do manage to get there and get to 1.0 in a few years then yes go get it it has promise for a fun game to play
One thing i hope that that dev will keep doing is learn from his mistakes and grow and not disappear like so many other game devs and looking at their road map for this year it has got some nice things in the works

[Finnn 3,302]

You have buried this thread from it's creation.. but can tap you on the shoulder for the effort, wasted effort sadly😕

[wipeout 1,355]

3 minutes ago, Finnn said:

You have buried this thread from it's creation.. but can tap you on the shoulder for the effort, wasted effort sadly😕

Don't see it really as wasted if it gets even a few people to go read his dev post and see the lessons he learned from it and maybe learn something then it did its job

[kochinac 1,395]

I disagree on holding new updates for endless bug fixes. Its what nearly killed my interest in Wurm.

Yeah bugs need to be fixed, and properly fixed instead of putting ducktape over it which is not easy, but i seriously don't understand people for complaining how game is buggy to the point of unplayable.

Like everything there needs to be balance between bug fixing and new features.