Ok look, as a 14 year old, helping to manage his first ever ‘successful’ game one of the biggest challenges I have been faced with is player feedback, and I need advice on how to respond to the players ‘correctly’.
While I know it is rarely their intention to be rude, when they are going on about ‘scamming’ and ‘refunds’ and ‘you are a trash dev’ and ‘why don’t you just work’ (I got this on Christmas Day) because the pet inventory wasn’t loading, it is hard not to get provoked. And while I have always kept my temper and tried to respond professionally its hard to not be sarcastic sometimes.
So I want to know what I should do, say I get 50 ‘aggressive’ private messages a day reporting bugs and also trying to simply rip us off, asking for refunds on things they have never bought.
Do I ignore them? Although having tried this it just leads to harassment
Do I just create a bunch of copy paste responses just like roblox customer service?
Do I try to respond in a certain way?
Please tell me what you would suggest and what you personally do getting a load of negative feedback on a game.
Try to keep an open mind to every player, everyone is different, if anyone acts rude towards you, the game developer, you can always ban them from your game.
Try to respond in an way that they would understand, I know that this may seem hard for you to deal with, but if you get on their bad side, that will be fuel for them.
There’s nothing wrong with being sarcastic at times, just be sure to respond in an way that doesn’t seem negative towards them, because that will also be stressful on you.
I don’t think you should do the copy and paste response routine, it’s best to make every message personally written, that way it means more and it can make you more connected to them when talking to them and helping them through something they don’t understand.
You can always block an player incase they act offensive in any way, you can also report them too.
I hope this helped and I hope you have a happy New Year!
Firstly I feel it is a valid point, and yes. if I were programming the product then I would do a good amount of testing before publishing, however the game’s code is painful for me to look at so we have to employ someone to make systems.
Secondly I’m not a she
Thirdly, im not asking about getting feedback, im asking about responding.
You’re 14 years old. You’re impressionable, emotional, and hormonal. This is typical and this is okay. So you’re taking the mean words of people to heart. This is also typical. But you don’t have to do that. It benefits you to look at some things from an agnostic/objective point of view. Especially feedback from your players. It doesn’t usually benefit you to react to your problems with emotion over logic. Look into Stoicism
You don’t have to respond at all, of course, but for the messages that have a hostile tone, and clearly not meant to be constructive, I would first note whatever bug they were experiencing, and then either
Ignore them
Give a short response humoring them and assuring them you’ll fix the stuff soon (which you should do, because you want your game to work properly), and then if they get blindly hostile with you again, ignore them. I don’t think that merits a reply.
It can be hard to take criticism. I get that. I am a sensitive guy myself, so whenever I am cyber bullied by someone, I take it pretty hard, and it makes it tough to let it go. Players usually can’t be in a developer’s shoes, and that’s why you have to be understanding. Players (usually) don’t understand how a developer works their games.
But try to stay positive. If you had to edit the ‘aggressive’ messages, and get those ‘aggressive’ part of the message outta there, what would the message say then? Respond to them as if you were in their shoes, in other words, be understanding as I said above. Tell them in a positive way that you’re working very hard as a developer. And hey, if they’re gonna be really mean, ignore them. You’d have better things to do than speak up and try and tell them something.
Anyways, negative feedback is normal for games. What could you do to make that feedback positive? How are you going to make that feedback positive? It’s easy to listen to them if you ignore the hate.
Tl;Dr Wash away the hate, and stay positive (I said that word a lot in this response).
I Can understand what you feel, this is happening right now to me.
I tell you to do the same thing that developers do:
-Ignore very rude messages.
-If you want respond them then don’t be aggressive.
-The same player sending you more aggressive and toxic messages will not be responded and you can send him a message about you will not take care about his messages because he was toxic.
-If they are very very very very mean then block them.
Well, adding to Conejin_Alt’s message, what if the people who send the VERY RUDE messages calm down? If they do calm down, you could probably respond to them. But, if they become rude again, then ignore them for a few weeks or months to let them calm down, or just ignore them entirely for good.
I myself am also 14, and I know how it feels. Honestly, it really is crappy hearing your players say “ew i hate this”. But hey, the best way to respond to them is “How can I make it better?”. If you talk to your players like that you will always have lots of fans. I highly recommend making sure that you inform your players that you are listening to their suggestions. Make announcements saying you have taken consideration and that you will be making some game updates regarding those suggestions. I hope that I answered this post correctly, if not then sorry!
I wish you the best of luck and I hope your players appreciate your hard work and goal to make them happy.
Mhm, that is true. Maybe you could just be really active within your games and kind of hang out with your players and just talk to them. I don’t really see developers on Roblox do that much due to how busy most of them are.
Its not really the players in the games I have problems with, they typically tend to be very pleasant. and yes, I don’t have anywhere near enough time to play games.
I have more problems with people who decide tossed me out on discord / twitter.
I truly wish I could help you, but honestly, I’m out of ideas. It almost feels like trying to imagine another dimension. lol. I really hope the people who do this to you will stop. I’ve seen some of your work and its nice. I have no idea why people would say stuff like that to you. Anyways, have a happy new year and uh, cya.
I’m not exactly a developer for a game but I have gotten criticism (including terrible ones before) as have been someone who makes small projects. I think a really important aspect of taking criticism is that you do not need to see it immediately or as soon as possible. For example, if you have too many people acting very rude when giving feedback, I’d suggest taking a break to feel a little better when you come back, so you would think more rationally about what to do and not feel the urge to respond back in a similarly toxic manner and escalate the situation. Secondly, given how you mentioned where the more toxic feedback come from, I would suggest you also keep in mind to not take all the feedback literally and with quite a bit of a grain of salt, as things on discord and twitter can often be described in a more dramatic way than reality, as these 2 platforms are actually pretty toxic in general, so many people act this way. As for insults, I do not think that ignoring them is actually a bad idea and would probably be the best course of action to do. I would (at least for discord, for I do not use twitter so I don’t really know how it works), disable private messages from random people and have a dedicated channel in a discord server or something similar, as moving the harsh criticism somewhere less in-your-face can help your greatly improve your situation. (Getting a lot of direct messages often is a lot harder to avoid than some pings from a server in a channel, as direct messages are sort of in your face and harder to ignore.)
Hopefully this can help your situation, as this is how I would deal with such a problem.
P…S: I don’t really suggest muting/banning unless it gets very serious, as sometimes you’ll just anger the person a lot more and they may come back for revenge (worsening it) and I think it would be better to try and calm things down instead of potentially causing the situation to go out of control, as many people do not take punishment well. Avoiding grudges can help prevent extreme cases as well.
Firstly, thanks for taking the time to write such a detailed response, and I hope you do not take my breakdown of your techniques as aggressive, but more how some of them have turned out
Sure I mean this could actually work, however when there is a critical bug that could effect your entire playerbase leaving it for an hour or so doesn’t really help the situation.
As a developer who is constantly buying and investing (would be dev ex’ing too if roblox cared to take respond to support emails in under a fortnight) I tend to accept all my discord friend requests in order to not miss potential deals. Twitter DMs are disabled, but people can just tag you in publicly which if anything means you have to respond before others join in on the issue.
Valid, yet impractical, after a long day, as a 14 year old who I know will not think completely rationally. if someone is deliberately annoying me, by pinging me on already reported bugs or moaning at me to fix them despite it not being my job this is a quick, immediate solution.
