edits: grammar
Hoping out of the Rec Room conversation for good and leaving the community in general, and thought to make one last post for anyone who cares enough to read. Player or staff member alike.
This is a creation centered forum and I do touch on a lot of creation aspects, but this is feedback of the game as a whole. I won’t get to everything unfortunately, so I’m just jotting down the biggest points I can think of.
Community
Comms
Please talk to your players. They are the lifeline of your game. They are what keeps the content coming because you are a “UGC first” game. Your words. Don’t let low morale stop you from engaging with them. It is a cycle of despair when you don’t talk to them. Please get a dedicated community manager to talk to them, or make an effort as a company to engage more with your players. This goes for everyone, no matter where in the ladder you are.
Back in the 2016 - 2018 days dev comms were constant. This was critical during the game’s early days as an indie game with angel funding that needed to prove itself to warrant its continued existence. You needed engaged, hooked and enthusiastic players to get through the hardships of starting from 0. I was one of those players, I remember just how good the dev comms were at the time, because I was a player in the receiving end of those efforts. I think that same energy is needed again today if you want any hopes of getting through the next 2-3 years. Obviously 1:1 conversations are impossible. Use your blog, use your YouTube channel, get as many eyes as possible using the least energy. Be authentic and transparent. Non-answers will be seen through and critiqued.
Events and Interaction
Please do more with the community in terms of events or interaction. It doesn’t have to be flashy. Doesn’t have to be elaborate. Doesn’t have to be expensive. Rec Room used to do a lot of great, low budget events and community centric pieces of content like Game Jams for very cheap and easy to run events, or something as easy as an afternoon getting clips together for a “Rec Room Highlights” video. So many low cost initiatives have been let to die that could have a big impact if you play your cards right.
Lift Up Your Most Valuable Players
I’ve seen a severe lack of attention for Volunteer Mods, Creators, Player Leagues, Video Partners lately. This lack of attention manifests into people leaving, creators covering other games, leagues shutting down, and creators moving to other UGC games or outright leaving to make their own indie games now that you have them a creative spark.
Institutions are falling apart that should not be. Please take even just the minimum amount of time to talk to these important segments and listen to their requests, or simply just let them know how appreciated they are & hold events so you can get to know them better and vice versa.
Establish Better Community Norms
Rec Room currently has a cycle of bad culture. People being encouraged to cheat or not be their best selves because the game is “trending downwards” anyway. People making low effort UGC content to try to nickel and dime both the players and the company while the piggy bank still has money in it. Try to promote a better player culture. This ties back to the “Comms” section. Good behavior and community begins at the top. Set a good example.
UGC Related Feedback
Room discovery
Fix. Your. Play. Menu. The short term gains of letting “low effort content” live are not worth any immediate relief. You don’t have more goodwill to burn. All of your talented creators will eventually leave if you can not accommodate them. If you claim this is not a real issue and the real problem is player perception, please reference this post for more information and elaboration.
Rooms 2
Kind of a technical mess, but I know work remains on-going and I’m not going to claim I could do better, because I can not. Way out of my expertise.
If you folks are still hosting a creative contest soon, this is your big chance to prove that Rooms 2 is ready for prime time. As much as people would hate the contest being delayed more and more, this is probably the best chance to prove that Rooms 2 is worth the effort on the dev side, and to prove to players it is worth using. Don’t miss this one good opportunity.
Contests and Events
Ties back to the Community section, but you don’t need to hold expensive, convoluted $50,000 contests. Simply just hosting something where people can achieve prestige and publicity and making a well edited awards video is enough for some people. Don’t repeat the mistakes of “Rhythm and Rooms.”
Obviously you care, but putting in the work to show that you do care is most of where your attention should go. The last contest that started the drought by all intents and purposes, made the community feel like the game did not care.
Monetization
Short Term Gains Can’t End Well
The time for Rec Room to quickly monetize off avatar items and lore hype is over. The same strategies will no longer work. Please adapt quickly and deliver features that will monetize while minimizing negative player feedback. Consider attempting previously requested features with some type of monetization as a one-off and see how that goes. (example: Selling a New RRO Quest for $10). Push any new “killer” feature with accompanying monetization plans the community has been asking for with extensive marketing and outreach to get as much eyes and buzz as possible. Latest efforts and marketing from the company for things like “My Little Monsters” and “Run The Block” pale in comparison to how marketed the older RROs used to be back in the day.
Avoid Previous UGC Pitfalls w/ Avatar Studio
Avatar Studio is still new and fresh and curated regularly. Please don’t let the quality down like what happened to UGC Custom Shirts. That’s the feedback there.
Be Honest
It is refreshing to see some transparency about Rec Room’s financial situation, but it should not have taken so long to say something, nor should it have taken a drastic event like layoffs. Players are down to be reasonable and supportive if you give them the complete picture, preferably before things are dire. Just a note for next time.
Gameplay Experience & Obsession with Doing Things “Your Way”
Split tests
I don’t understand the continued obsession with split testing. In theory if they were successful, the game would not be doing this poorly right now. Shouldn’t those small percentage increases have added up by now?
Maybe it’s time to give up the old industry habits and just go back to making things that make the game better because they’re solid features. Seemed to have worked from 2016 - 2019. Not everything needs a split test. For every 1 “good” split test, there are 2 outright terrible ones like capping someone’s frame rate or making a RRS version of the Rec Center that is deeply inferior in every way to the regular Unity made room. Having said that…
RRS for RROs
Every RRO made with RRS has been a downgrade over what could be achieved with Unity. I understand the importance of using the tools yourself to keep improving them for players, but that should not come at the cost of deep quality sacrifices. From the various promotional rooms like Destiny and TMMT, to the more limited scopes of MITM or MLM as a result of using RRS, or even just the new RRS Rec Center that is a downgrade over the existing Rec Center, it is embarrassing and it needs to stop. No disrespect at all to the teams tasked with the monumental tasks of trying to achieve quality with a tool that is still not ready for prime time.
If you really need to, go back to Unity for your RROs and RRO updates. There is no shame in that. In fact, users will likely welcome it.
Avatar Identity and Art
Not much to say here because the Rec Room look has long since been butchered with FBA and now the new body sliders in an attempt to chase the deep customization of Roblox and VRchat, and incorrectly thinking the art style had something to do with your lack of popularity. I think this was frankly all a mistake, but you can’t walk away from it now that most if not all of your plans have shipped here. Best to just own it and move on gracefully.
College Aesthetic
It’s not too late to recapture what made Rec Room magical for a lot of earlier users. You still have some solid worldbuilding here. Use it to the best of your ability while not sacrificing it to instead market more hastily put-together lore that only serves a one-note purpose.
The Watch
This one is all good feedback, promise. The watch has been in a rough spot since the move to RRUI in 2020/2021. However, I have nothing but good things to say about the new Widget Watch. My most important piece of feedback here is., please actually finish the Widget Watch and ensure no watch pages are left on either the old Bubble UI (2017) or RRUI (2021). Please actually finish translating the watch in full and making it a good experience. What I’ve seen of the Widget Watch is very promising and makes me believe other parts of the game can begin changing for the better too.
In Conclusion
Thanks for the 7 years of fun and memories. Thanks to everyone I got to talk to. Thanks for the sense in community and for helping shape me as a person. Whether you knew me as a player, a mod, a former co-worker, etc. Whether you were a creator, a video partner, a regular player, or even a trouble maker, Thank you. It was very great talking to you. I mean that.