Q&A - Round VI
Posted: Tue Apr 05, 2005 10:04 pm
Round VI of our Q&A with Nevrax has just begun. Please post your new questions to the folks over at Nevrax in this thread. Players from North-America are more than welcome to join us here in this thread.
In case you've missed it, answers from Nevrax to our last Q&A can be found here: http://www.ryzom.com/forum/showthread.php?t=13154
Below you can find some general information on the Q&A and about what kind of questions have the best chances of getting an answer to:
In case you've missed it, answers from Nevrax to our last Q&A can be found here: http://www.ryzom.com/forum/showthread.php?t=13154
Below you can find some general information on the Q&A and about what kind of questions have the best chances of getting an answer to:
Xavier wrote: The goal of the current HOWTO is to provide you with a short overview of how to participate in one of the Questions & Answers rounds that I publish weekly. If you want to get a chance to have your questions included, I highly recommand that you read the current article, as there are a number of rules you will need to take into account.
A]What is a Q&A round ?
It is my main mean to interact with you. Community managers from each community interact directly with you in the forums, but due to time and language constraints, I do not intervene directly in these boards. But since I want to be able to answer your questions anyway, we have set up the Q&A rounds to create a feedback loop.
To keep the process smooth and the reading of the Q&A article interesting, we have also established a few rules as to which questions I answer and how.
B] Asking a question
1) Check that your question is on-topic
The number of topics for the Q&A is large, but since we have other feedback loops, it does not cover everything. Choose carefuly the topic of your question, since it will definitely influence the chances to get your question included in the chosen set.
The Q&A is a good place to ask about gameplay related questions, anything that's currently in the game, things you are confused about or would like more information on, things that are inadequately documented. You can also ask us here about policies, processes or procedures regarding patches, customer support, events, the website or the game itself.
As explained in the patch-release proccess article and in this Q&A article (7th question), questions related to ETA's ("when will feature XYZ be added to the game?", "will we ever see feature XYZ?") are tough to get an answer on. Very few get included in the Q&As.
Questions which simply suggest new features and "wishlists" do not belong in this Q&A. If you have suggestions or ideas for the game, the best way to submit them is to use the in-game support tool - there's a category dedicated to suggestions.
2) Check that your question wasn't posted before
You should definitely have a look at the previous QnAs I posted. You will perhaps get your answer sooner than expected.
Please also consider having a look at the questions the other players posted before you. Also, sometimes, we do not select some questions, because they were already answered by others directly.
3) Post your question !
Finally, if your question meets all the previous criterias, post it in your community-specific forum :
English community - General forum
French community - General forum
German community - General forum
There is always a specific Q&A topic sticked in which you can post your question.
C] What happens next ?
Every Wednesday, the community managers for each language choose a set of about five questions among those in the Q&A thread opened for you to post in. They do their selection according to the rules given in this HOWTO and try to pick the ones which represents the best the current interrogations of the community they represent. Once they have made their choice, they send it to me on our internal mailing-list.
Once I have got all the questions, I start looking at them to know if I already know the answer. If not, I sit with the relevant developpers to see if we have an answer to provide. Sometimes we don't (for example, if the question is about details of a feature design which is not definitive yet, or about a bug which we have just begun to investigate), so I can either postpone the question or scratch it if it won't be relevant to answer later. I also answer some questions more in depth as separate articles (such as the current one, the patch release process, etc.) - that's good to know if you want to influence the topics of these separate articles. During this phase, I also add questions to the list sometimes, if I see some to which I want to answer on the boards or in-game.
When I have got all my answers from production, I write the answer to them (or sometimes I directly quote a dev's answer) in an article, which I post on the beginning of the following week.
--
Xavier.