The big issue here is that Rec Room hasn’t been doing a good job of maintaining player trust. Unfortunately you guys do also have ALOT of misinformation spread about what you are working on and what does/doesn’t work, but there is plenty that truly is wrong with these new features you’s create and how you communicate it to your playerbase. Rec Room needs to be alot more honest to bring that trust back up but you’s have already put yourself in such a deep rut in that regard that i feel like it could just change the general view from “they’re probably going to make another bad decision” to more of “of COURSE they’d do this particular thing, how corrupt/grubby” in regards to something that may well be a necessary evil and would have been forgiven and better accepted/received if the company wasn’t seen in such a negative light.
Rooms2.0 trust
You’s made a blog post not long ago about how a massive majority of players primarily use Rooms1.0 and that’s bad for you’s, and i get it, you’s want everyone on the new Rooms2.0 that being rebuilt from the ground up, but some of the bugs that have been present are just so massive that i often find myself shocked or audibly scoffing at that you’s seem so confident you’s will be able to get a noticeable amount of players to primarily use it any time soon.
The heirarchy system is already a bit of a big step for people to get used to, before they had to worry about 2 layers exactly, world and object (i guess it’s more like 2.5 with tubes editing), but i feel like it’s completely unreasonable to expect players to try and use Rooms2.0 with the many massively inconvenient bugs that pop up on top of that. It’s just too unstable and untrustworthy, the few times i’ve really tried using it i just feel paranoid at all times that something big that took alot of work can break at any moment, or some plan that i’m trying to build up could hit a giant roadblock where a certain glitch or missing feature makes part of my vision impossible. I create because i enjoy it, and having that fear and dread in the back of my mind at all times when working in Rooms2.0 detracts from the experience making it barely enjoyable for me.
It’s not what is or isn’t currently wrong that keeps me afraid of using it, it’s that it has an alarming history of things going wrong already, i don’t want to put my effort into it because if anything goes wrong i cannot even port the progress i have made so far over to the significantly more stable Rooms1.0, the project is just dead in the water with nothing that can be done about it until the either very niche or very complex roadblock is found and fixed several months down the road by which point i will have lost all motivation and desire to continue the project i was working on, and that upsets me alot.
My brain always tells me that it is never ever ever worth it to use Rooms2.0 unless there is no workaround at all for some specific feature only possible in Rooms2.0, and even then i would feel much happier and more content if you’s would just create the same feature in Rooms1.0, however slow that may make the progress of Rooms2.0 become. Even then i end up preferring to create all the parts that i can in Rooms1.0 first, to then save it as an invention to port it into a Rooms2.0 room so i at least have a stable won’t-shatter-into-unrecoverable-pieces Rooms1.0 version of the creation that i can attempt to port into Rooms2.0 again someday down the line when things become stable enough to handle again.
This all must be heartbreaking for the team to see but i really think players would benefit from a way to convert Rooms2.0 rooms back into Rooms1.0 rooms. It would hold over the people who claim to hate it so much, because choosing to build in Rooms2.0 in its current state wouldn’t be quite as much of an unchangeable, final decision that sets them up for regret later, so they may feel safer in occasionally giving it a shot.
I want to use the building game i am familiar with and mostly trusting of right now to bring my ideas to life as i think of them, not struggle to maintain the same enthusiasm with a newer but often lesser experience while i wait an undefined amount of time for this different version of the game to become stable enough for me to create on it as fluidly as before.
Explaining things to the playerbase
I think sometimes things need to be dumbed down to multiple levels and for more people, not just the occassional one level for the more savvy creators. Kids push alot of the misinformation and hate in/about this game and so more needs to be done to accomodate for other levels of understanding of this industry and this game’s development. Sometimes people only understand the creations they play with and nothing above. They don’t know why a custom gun doesn’t work and blame it on the Rec Room team when it may have just been set up incorrectly by the creator. Some people only understand the creations they make and that is all, not understanding why a synced list variable would be tedious to implement immediately, or why a synced action in a circuit consumes so much NET and assuming it’s bad programming or a bug on the Rec Room team’s behalf. Some people may or may not understand QA limitations. Some people may understand well the reason for changes like new bean allowing you’s to only really need to focus on working with 1 skeleton, but not really the commerce side of things and why you’s price things a certain way or don’t do certain tactics that at first glance seem like they would make alot of easy money without annoying players but aren’t actually easy or successful at all. If people are confused about a seemingly questionable change but their more savvy friends aren’t bothered by it at all because they understand why it must be done, they may feel left behind and just start to hate every change indiscriminately. I believe it creates a disconnect between the more talented creators and less experienced aspiring creators-to-be. People feel left out of the loop.
We need to be given far more transparency on why Rec Room does some of its more questionable endeavours, like really pushing hard for UGC clothing creators to make their items more expensive when the super cheap prices have been a HUGE selling point for them and they are able to pump them out much faster than the RR team themselves as they don’t have to put in as much work to make sure everything seems so professional. Like every now and then advertising so hard towards the children that have gone on to severely crush Rec Room’s reputation of being a safe place, and who make public spaces absolutely vile and toxic. Like worsening the RR economy for free-to-play players through sneakily reducing token rewards making it barely even possible to achieve as little as 1000 tokens after a week or two of casual frequent play. Some of these are necessary evils that any company needs to do if it wants to grow and become capable of more expensive and impressive features and projects, but this is never well communicated to players. There is barely any official attempt to reason us into these changes, at least not that anywhere close to a majority of all levels/ages of players can understand, so the less involved/optimistic people in the playerbase begin to feel like the people running Rec Room must be some team of hooded money-hungry barons or something dramatic.
Lack of faith in bug reporting
The QA is shocking sometimes. And i’m sure alot of the times it’s just unexpectedly hard to catch certain bugs or to fix them before the next update ships and they aren’t toooo consequential. But there have been updates where something massive slips by and it is very disheartening for people that want to believe in the QA team. I remember once the entire notifications tab broke. You could still receive notifications, but if you didn’t immediately open them, they would not appear in any part of the proper tab. As far as i’m aware, this went completely unnoticed by the team for days. A core feature of the game just wiped for a week or two. One update, the makerpen menu being open absolutely tanked performance. One update, framerate in Rooms2.0 had plummeted to a fraction of what it usually was and became nearly unusable. I don’t know what really goes into QA but i feel like some weeks the proper public build of the game mustn’t have been booted up for longer than even 5-10 minutes of testing.
I also feel like players don’t have the most faith in the bug reporting of the game. I feel like we need to be educated on what can be assumed is a bug, and what may just be someone creating something poorly or using circuits incorrectly. I don’t know how this would be done but i know there must be a massive pile of “bug reports” that are really just “inconvenience reports” or “i-don’t-understand-this reports”. Maybe an AI would be good for giving priority to the reports that can reasonably be assumed to be actually about bugs?
I also feel like something needs to be changed to make interaction with bug reporting feel more effective. Perhaps it could benefit from feeling more personal/casual? This Creator Forum feels like a step in the right direction but in every format for bug reporting we’ve ever been given that i have used i still find myself feeling unheard if the bug isn’t something already very widely known. I made a post with many creation bugs last October and 1 of them was addressed this January in all posts related to that particular problem, it was the glitch where in Rooms2.0 objects shift position over time, which i think i’ve still been seeing people complaining that they’re having issues with. All the other bugs to do with creation like using direct move with the transform tool not being undoable/redoable, the configure menu’s “collapse all” and “expand all” completely not working for CV2 components, the clone tool sometimes not cloning when an arrows is clicked but only when held, the clipboard copies of objects having inaccurate/randomly images in the clipboard menu representing them, etc etc. haven’t been responded to or fixed at all. Maybe even noticed. Finding some way to get through and mention a bug directly to any person on the Rec Room team at all has always felt tremendously more productive and easy and successful than any single one of my bug reports through any other method of reporting them.
(2nd paragraph was a tweaked message i wrote to someone else in the RR Discord already that i’ve kind of just appended to the rant. The original used alot of “they” as i wasn’t talking directly to anyone on the team, and came off somewhat unkind because i get a bit passionate about these things once my messages start to reach a certain length)
