The Shadow Council Closes

[{CH}ArticleBot]

After a year-and-a-half of communication exclusively around the development of Heroes VII, Ubisoft have announcedthe closure of the Shadow Council, transferring the communication with fans to the official forums.

We here at Celestial Heavens have always encouraged the developers of M&M games to communicate directly with the fans wherever practical, and the Shadow Council was a decent attempt at doing so: it enabled the fans to vote on several aspects of the game development, although the comments section was also marred by spamming and malicious flaming. We believe the official forums will offer little in the way of direct communication, as the traffic load is way too high for the busy game developers to follow directly. They must therefore rely on a team of forum managers/moderators (as the announcement above admits) to relay the relevant info to them. This does introduce go-between and effectively severs the direct link between fans and developers, but also filters out the de-motivating "flaming" comments before they reach the devs.

Another opportunity lies in the use of fan-controlled forums such as ours, where H7 devs are known to pop by from time to time.
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[Galaad]

the Shadow Council was a decent attempt at doing so:

Sorry but no.

it enabled the fans to vote on several aspects of the game development

Yeah several aspects like choosing factions and lineup votes fallacies where you had to vote out a creature you like if you wanted another one you like as well, being doomed getting one you hate in the process no matter what. Even if these were done correctly (which they weren't) the community had NO impact whatsoever regarding gameplay. And please don't mention GURS, as the random system delivered by the team is a total fallacy, since it's not oriented therefore is pointless to play with, all the relevant game designs decisions were decided and set in stone long before hand the SC was born so PLEASE have the decency not to make this sounds like what it isn't.

although the comments section was also marred by spamming and malicious flaming.

Jeez I wonder why.

[mr.hackcrag]

The Shadow Council seems like a bad idea in retrospect. The "communication" on their end felt manipulative rather than collaborative and the flaming (though therapeutic) reflected badly on the player base and made the process unmalleable.

[Pol]

Sure it was a little clumsy solution to an axiom, that we need to show up the care but cannot really help. Now it's gone, not missed. I guess that they have still have not finished game pages?

What surprised me was, how many people protested here, that there's flashy graphic and attention should be more devoted to actual game development. When the graphics, as well as engine of these page, was almost completely premade long time ago, without any impact to game development. In the end, content is the only thing, what counts.

Cannot also resist an idea that Indie developer would hand it better, somehow naturally better.

[vicheron]

The Shadow Council was pretty pointless. They clearly weren't given much of a budget. So they could never implement most of the ideas or changes fans wanted.

Instead, it just became a distraction and drain on their resources. They just ended up wasting money and time try to make some shallow changes to keep fans happy. I think it would have been better if they had just devoted all their resources to making their own ideas work. At least then the game might not have been in such a terrible state.

[Pitsu]

The "communication" on their end felt manipulative rather than collaborative ...

What else to expect from a corporation? If i think back to it, it wasn't even a shadow of a council.