Statement GPC

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DeletedUser12705

Guest
Grepolis Player Council, second term.

End of may 2018 the Council members for the second term were selected and in June most of the members where pressent on the Beta forum and on Discord.

We all had to agree to the Code of Conduct, also with the terms of the NDA, so in this statement you will not find anything that should not be public at this moment.

Why this statement made by the GPC, second term, we will explane to you, the players.

The purpose of the GPC is to forward ideas and suggestions from all the markets that are reprecent by chosen players to Innogames and to be a additional Feedback Channel for Inno.
Also come with ideas/suggestions to improve the game and advice Inno about changes or improvements.
Common goal is to improve the game so that players enjoy it.

The tools for the GPC are an section on the Beta-forum where the GPC can put the ideas/suggestions from their markets.
Confrence call with Inno staff, meaning the LCM and a member of the development team.
Q and A on the forum with both.
The GPC have their own Discord channel to debat the ideas or brainstorm over big issues linkt to the game and everything that belongs with it.


What is the status at this moment regarding the GPC.

1. No commitment from Inno staff

2. No responce on questions, suggestions or ideas for the last three months

3. Ignoring the GPC by bringing big chances to the game without even asking for advice

4. Not keeping promisses

5. No communication about this term, when it ends, is it already ended, will there be a next term

6. Several members left the GPC and/or the game due to point 1 – 5

Without any possiblity to communicate with Inno staff since november 2018 and also no updates on the Devblogs since september 2018 gives us great concern about the future of the GPC and the voice of players in general.
 

DeletedUser4460

Guest
This statement above does not reflect the opinion and experience of all GPC members, it was posted on behalf of whole GPC without prior consent of all Inner Council members - please take it as an unofficial statement or personal opinion.
Since this version is already out & unchanged you may have questions and concerns, I will keep an eye on this thread.

I wish representatives of Innogames would finally share their vision about GPC future if there’s any... before frustration takes the best of us.

GPC Term 2 should have ended in November, but there is no closure ever since because we are left alone with our questions, without a deadline of any sort. It is hard to evaluate a program even for participants this way (based strictly on the signs and the last period, the above statement covers the main problems), easy to forget the results, good things.

I am very disappointed in how the Innogames representatives lead this 2nd Player Council, we all started with great enthusiasm but the lack of response and attention killed the spirit on long term. I would not recommend other players to participate unless Innogames made visible efforts to share their passion and create a real program (deadlines, fixed events, roadmap...) in exchange for the high expectations that we have had to fulfill (NDA, weekly reports and participation). It is a missed opportunity, because during the productive months more players participated on forum, they visited it just for GPC, we opened community chats - the game still has a big fan base that truly cares but without real interaction with the company, developers a Player Council will never function like in other games - currently it seems like the Player Council had no practical use other than good appearance in front of community, but without a bare minimal effort to maintain such a program ‘these efforts’ will backfire by time.

Unfortunately US market didn’t have a good start with GPC, because the elected Term 1 candidates coudn’t join the work due to a communication failure (our previous CM’s mistake) and Term 2 doesn’t seem to end as we don’t get info from Lead CM. Before Player Council was introduced and if I’m not wrong.. it was exclusively Community Manager’s job to forward community feedback to the company and developers. We barely have any surveys, so safe to say it was CM’s own discretion which ideas were selected. I don’t question CM’s good intentions, but is it even possible to find out from a few forum posts what would the majority of players prefer and is that true for other markets? Player Council puts this work into active players’ hands who are not affiliated by the company and are not responsible for how feedback is used (= freedom) but are interested in the result (= motivation), win-win for players. Too bad that communication is the hardest part here... otherwise it is a cool idea to get players involved and has many good precedents in other games.

The period that I meant to sacrifice for ‘making the game better’ has beyond ended, I’m only here out of courtesy to look for a closure. Hereby I want to thank everyone who helped, suppported me in this work, I hope you enjoyed our discussions! I eventually quit playing 2 months ago, it was a tough decision, but necessary. I hope you enjoy the game just as I enjoy sleeping without alerts :p
 
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Meg TheBeagle

Philosopher
I am really sorry to read this. I had high hopes you all could make a difference.

Thank you to the GPC members for your work, time and effort.
smiley_emoticons_frown.gif
 

DeletedUser4460

Guest
Anna, the Lead Community Manager of Grepolis posted this message today on Beta forum:

Dear Grepolis Player Council Members,

From the bottom of my heart – thank you for all your messages and suggestions posted in this section of beta forum. I am aware, that our cooperation did not always work how you would wish for it and I would like to apologize for that. We did, however, benefit greatly from your help and based some important decisions on your feedback, so we are very grateful for all your work and passion.

It is unfortunately clear to us now, that Grepolis Player Council, even though a great project, requires way too much time and effort on our side. Currently we do not have time and will not be able to continue the project in the way it existed so far. It also seems that we did not manage to explain the role of the GPC well enough, as there have been many misunderstandings on this topic. Grepolis Player Council was intended to be a channel for feedback and gathering new ideas from all the communities, which was not always the main discussion focus. But we did get some great input from your side for which we are grateful.

What will happen next?

We would like to ensure you that after very busy 2018 (new edition of Grepolympia, new endgame, Casual Worlds) we are working hard on bringing even more cool new features to the game but we also plan to continue realizing community wishes. So please, do not worry - we will continue asking our players for feedback and implementing changes that will improve Grepolis. So with this last message I would like to mention list of ideas you created at the beginning of 2nd term. We looked through it and would like to comment on a few top ideas (hidden in a spoiler). We will keep the whole list for the future as it includes some nice suggestions - thank you for them!
  • ‘A search function in the PM's with which you can search for conversations per player’ – we will look into it and implement the feature if technically possible.
  • ‘Exclude new worlds from events’ – we will not exclude new worlds from events. We understand that this comes from players believing that events influence the worlds and we would rather work on making sure the events are well-balanced then disable them on the new worlds.
  • ‘Search option for reports.’ – unfortunately impossible due to technical limitations. It would require re-doing the whole report system from a scratch, which would be a massive undertaking.
  • ‘Disable morale once the world becomes eligible for world wonders’ – we consider it as something mostly top alliances and experienced players would benefit from and morale are there to protect weaker players. This would be too big of a change to the current system and strategies our players know and use for years.
  • ‘Making sieges visible on the commands overview’ – Good idea. We hope we can make some improvements there.
  • ‘Runtime (travel time) check on App / Mobile.’ – We would like to make a change that would allow players to choose the number of units they want to send even if they don't own the units (currently not possible on mobile, but possible on browser).
  • 'Integrate administrator overview for starting city festivals on App / Mobile.’ – We will look into it and would like to bring a simplified version of the browser feature to mobile.
  • ‘Show the number of incoming attacks on App / Mobile.’ – we will into it and would like to implement something similar.
  • ‘Search a city by typing its name on App / Mobile. (Some players find it difficult to find a city if they got a lot, for example 150)’ – we would like to bring it to the app.
  • ‘Tutorial Overview: The current Turtorial does not achieve the desired goal. It should serve to show beginners the functions and the meaning of the game.’ – we will be working to make small changes to tutorial. We do not plan currently reworking the whole system.
  • ‘Make it possible that a player can change the title of own topic on forum ingame.’ – good idea, we would like to add it to the game,

Grepolis community is great, we very much enjoy working with our players and are happy to see their passion. That's why we are grateful for every suggestion and every opinion we read on the forums. Unfortunately, there is one last thing we always need to keep in mind – there are hundreds of ideas and small things we would like to change in Grepolis. But we simply do not have time to do all of them. However, that will not stop us from trying to improve Grepolis with every new game version, so please keep posting your ideas on our forums!

Feel free to share translated version of this announcement with your communities. This forum section will stay opened until next week.

Once again – thank you very much for your help and you will most certainly hear from us again!

Best,

Anna
 
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