No contact anymore to Core Devs?!

[MaxMuster]

Sorry but since the Bannwaves, it seems the Core Devs disappeared...no matter what I do, I do not get contact to them...

-> Contact the Core Dev direct via Skype <- No Answer from them
-> Skype Groups <- No Answer // Groups are dead since the Ban Waves and many Devs leaved WoW
-> Assembla Dev Bug Tracker <- Seems no longer be Used since Chinajade disappeared
-> Discord <- No Answer

and this fucks rly up...

There a Bugs where i would report, but i dont know how / where...


And pls dont say: Use the Forum...why do we have all this Skype Groups, Discord Groups and Assembla? And via the Forum we dont get a response...

 

[Aevitas]

We hear you - we're discussing this internally right now and will get back on this soon.

 

[Studio60]

I have to chime in on this one since it has been two weeks already with nothing happening.

I am one of the more quiet community developers, but I produce quality content for the store and I am generating income for Bossland GmbH without requiring a lot of handholding. I have a solid reputation among the users and I assume even among the staff. From this perspective I feel our business relationship is not honored the way it should be. Especially the community developers that care about their products and deliver on their contract should be held in high regards by your company. A first step would be to at least acknowledge our requests. The staff claims that every post in the Store Developer is being read, but without any responses such a blanket statement has no meaning.

For over a year the main argument has been "we are too busy". But to be honest: That is no excuse. I have been supporting my products with a herniated disc while barely able to sit and I also work 80-100 hours a week while providing timely, friendly and precise responses to my customers. That is how you treat people in a business relationship no matter how annoying that is at times. The way Bossland staff is dealing with community developers is (sorry to sound so harsh) unprofessional, because there is almost no interaction. Yes, we should be happy to have the store and many of us are. But let's face it: This is a two-way street.

The whole situation also has psychological effects on the community developers. Right now the community developers act as middlemen between Bossland and the user base. We try to get our customers to believe in HB and the store, but we ourselves are left in the dark with all developments and there is no one helping us believe that Bossland still wants to go somewhere with this bot. That is unless you are good friends with one of the staff so you get the inside scoop. A position I can't really get in, because I feel none of you even want to talk to us.

Just think about the upcoming Legion release. Last expansion there was (from what I heard) apparently a leak where the WoD build during beta was given out to the community and now we are supposedly not getting one. Is punishing store developers and putting them at a disadvantage really a good decision? Having a strong product lineup at launch would earn everyone a lot of money. And that does include Bossland GmbH, the company that pays every staff member's salaries. If I were in your shoes I would have set up a personalized build queue for each community developer and if one is leaked it gets identified and removed. Done and done.

I am happy and grateful for the opportunities the BuddyStore offers. I am glad that I can rely on the money being in my bank account around the same time each month. But I am frustrated with the business relationship in all other areas.

 

[@alisha]

Same as other Devs, i would really love to have more interaction with Core Devs, including answers to our requests on API improvements \ bugs found -> on Assembla and questions on Skype.

For now we are really lack of feedback from Bossland Team, which is really disappointing.

 

[bossland]

There are few things that are making life hard these days.

-> Banwaves, they really hit us hard since May 2015, they disturbed the customer flow that we had, and Honorbuddy went into a "depression"

-> Legal takes my full time for example, i barely can do anything else, Blizzard lawyers are bombarding us with so much papers and generate such huge costs that way, that we need to defend ourselves each time and each time we lose money while defending ourselves. That money has to come from somewhere.

-> But it does not, because of Banwaves and of old WOW contents that do not drive masses back to the game and our bot.

All that seems to find an end from September 2016, but until then, there will be hard times. Times in that we need to optimize our company structure - decrease expanses. Each decrease comes with a price, and you look at it at this moment.

Here is a short number: We pay monthly as much in legal costs as we forward money monthly to our store devs, with that expenses we could cover 40 % of our monthly staff costs. The legal war tends to get to an end 2016 - 2018, but as it is still not there, it is a huge disadvantage.

Another example, in 2 weeks we have our Demonbuddy case in Hamburg, a week ago Blizzard sent a writ to the court. Extension of claim. They want all the functions of Honorbuddy, that are still allowed in Germany, to be forbidden too. And they try to add this in a 3 year old Demonbuddy case. With a writ of 200 pages, 3 weeks before the hearing.

You really must excuse us, everyone of us is full with work, and we can not spare money to hire more staff, we rather fire staff to survive money wise. It will not get better till Legion, but i expect wonderfull 3 months with Legion release.

If you have issues -> write to Raphus in Skype, directly. He will forward them or fix them himself, if they are needed and productive.

This was just a quick text with probably some bad grammar.

 

[MaiN]

I have to chime in on this one since it has been two weeks already with nothing happening.

I am one of the more quiet community developers, but I produce quality content for the store and I am generating income for Bossland GmbH without requiring a lot of handholding. I have a solid reputation among the users and I assume even among the staff. From this perspective I feel our business relationship is not honored the way it should be. Especially the community developers that care about their products and deliver on their contract should be held in high regards by your company. A first step would be to at least acknowledge our requests. The staff claims that every post in the Store Developer is being read, but without any responses such a blanket statement has no meaning.

For over a year the main argument has been "we are too busy". But to be honest: That is no excuse. I have been supporting my products with a herniated disc while barely able to sit and I also work 80-100 hours a week while providing timely, friendly and precise responses to my customers. That is how you treat people in a business relationship no matter how annoying that is at times. The way Bossland staff is dealing with community developers is (sorry to sound so harsh) unprofessional, because there is almost no interaction. Yes, we should be happy to have the store and many of us are. But let's face it: This is a two-way street.

The whole situation also has psychological effects on the community developers. Right now the community developers act as middlemen between Bossland and the user base. We try to get our customers to believe in HB and the store, but we ourselves are left in the dark with all developments and there is no one helping us believe that Bossland still wants to go somewhere with this bot. That is unless you are good friends with one of the staff so you get the inside scoop. A position I can't really get in, because I feel none of you even want to talk to us.

All good points.

Just think about the upcoming Legion release. Last expansion there was (from what I heard) apparently a leak where the WoD build during beta was given out to the community and now we are supposedly not getting one. Is punishing store developers and putting them at a disadvantage really a good decision? Having a strong product lineup at launch would earn everyone a lot of money. And that does include Bossland GmbH, the company that pays every staff member's salaries.

Where did you hear this?

If I were in your shoes I would have set up a personalized build queue for each community developer and if one is leaked it gets identified and removed. Done and done.

That's much easier said than done. We don't have infrastructure to support this.

Same as other Devs, i would really love to have more interaction with Core Devs, including answers to our requests on API improvements \ bugs found -> on Assembla and questions on Skype.

For now we are really lack of feedback from Bossland Team, which is really disappointing.

Sorry, but you generate a lot of feedback, and most of it is not of high quality. You report a lot of issues where you have not spent 10 minutes looking at solutions or wondered how this could be and whether we can fix it.
Net effect is that we spend a lot of time on filtering through this, and this means that your few quality reports are more likely to be ignored among the huge sea of bad reports.

 

[Studio60]

Where did you hear this?

I don't recall which of the comm devs said it to me. I wasn't around when the last expansion got released. The story goes that there was a build and it was taken away because of the leak. Since there were no official statements about your plans regarding a possible HB Legion Beta that is all I could go by.

That's much easier said than done. We don't have infrastructure to support this.

But it should be possible to restrict a legion beta build to specific HB keys without too much effort. Just let each dev give you a key, restrict beta to one region and only allow those keys to connect.

 

[@alisha]

Sorry, but you generate a lot of feedback, and most of it is not of high quality. You report a lot of issues where you have not spent 10 minutes looking at solutions or wondered how this could be and whether we can fix it.
Net effect is that we spend a lot of time on filtering through this, and this means that your few quality reports are more likely to be ignored among the huge sea of bad reports.

It's really sad to hear like this. As i can remember, there only few which can be considered such way. And many of my report was included in past HB fixes, which helps to improve HB.
And 99% of reports on Assembla wasn't made for just me (in most cases i have a workaround solution), but for improving \ fixing API, which will give only plus for all other Devs. And for which i am care.

Sure, i am mostly one person who try to use Assemla nowadays, can't argue that. But this because i am still believing it can helps to improve HB and life of users \ other Devs. And most of other Devs don't already.

But getting such attitude from Core Dev to me, just getting off all my motivation in sense to have any care of HB bugs \ or thinking about ways to improve HB and propose ideas.

And it's even more sad, as i think i made good enough profit for Bossland from Store (which should give some help on current not so good days too), to have right for getting some feedback support from Core Devs in return.
And looks like this and also my activity and involvement on HB by finding or proposing ideas, have no impact, and not care by Core Devs \ Bossland.

But it's good to know open like this. I will keep this in mind for future.

Not sure tho, if it's good way to handle things like this in professional and business way, when we already lack Community Developers activity so much.

 

[Aion]

I can prove the Alisha's words regarding bug hunting in the last several months at least.

We have discussed quite a few abnormal issues, found while developing products for the store, and in most cases, even after Alisha had built workaround for the current public release of Honorbuddy client, I see her report the issue to the Assembla's BuddyComDevTracker, in attempt to inform the Core Devs regarding this particular issue.

 

[MaiN]

But it should be possible to restrict a legion beta build to specific HB keys without too much effort. Just let each dev give you a key, restrict beta to one region and only allow those keys to connect.

This wouldn't help. If the build is leaked then it can be *****ed and looked at early by *****ers.

It's really sad to hear like this. As i can remember, there only few which can be considered such way. And many of my report was included in past HB fixes, which helps to improve HB.
And 99% of reports on Assembla wasn't made for just me (in most cases i have a workaround solution), but for improving \ fixing API, which will give only plus for all other Devs. And for which i am care.

Sure, i am mostly one person who try to use Assemla nowadays, can't argue that. But this because i am still believing it can helps to improve HB and life of users \ other Devs. And most of other Devs don't already.

But getting such attitude from Core Dev to me, just getting off all my motivation in sense to have any care of HB bugs \ or thinking about ways to improve HB and propose ideas.

And it's even more sad, as i think i made good enough profit for Bossland from Store (which should give some help on current not so good days too), to have right for getting some feedback support from Core Devs in return.
And looks like this and also my activity and involvement on HB by finding or proposing ideas, have no impact, and not care by Core Devs \ Bossland.

But it's good to know open like this. I will keep this in mind for future.

Not sure tho, if it's good way to handle things like this in professional and business way, when we already lack Community Developers activity so much.

All I'm urging you to do is to spend a little more time when you open your issues -- attach logs, give us easy repro (for example profiles, step-by-step), etc.
I just bluntly told you that that is not the state of the issues you report today.
It would really help us a lot and it ensures no time is wasted on both sides (our side by being able to more easily work on the issues, your side by finding your own acceptable workarounds and such).
We do appreciate feedback -- but we don't appreciate having to decline a lot of issues for (more-or-less) obvious reasons.

 

[raphus]

Like MaiN already mentioned, we are being swarmed by unnecessary issues or reports that are no issues at all.

I agree that there has been some lack of communication last few weeks/months. Before that, Chinajade has been doing a good job at filtering out all the requests coming from comm devs and regular users, so we weren't wasting any time.

However, nowadays we have to deal all with the filtering and then fix the proper ones due to CJ being semi afk because of personal issues.

If you feel that you have an important report that we have missed, just poke me on Skype. I answer all pms on daily basis (except for Alisha sometimes as she loves to spam me).

 

[Thecamel]

I'm a very fresh Dev- so I have little weight here.. How ever I've been around hb and the forums to see the good and the bad..

May I make and suggestion to help relive your workload - particularly on the forums..

There are a lot of jobless/retired/self employed/unable to work users on these forums with a lot of spare time - some of them although limited do have a very good understanding how their works from user end.. They have been botting for years..

These guys/girls are generally more then happy to help with user support- however they just want a bit of reconision for there efforts. I know it sounds silly but it can really drive people to help buy a simple forum title change.. Such a community support team or simliar.. However generally speaking when a user tries to give "correct" advise they are generally dismissed by official support..

I get some filtering would be needed but I feel there are some users that would generally be able to help support the support section of the bot at no charge to boss land for a very small caret.

I understand you need to be careful with this - giving a user a official title then finding out they teamvier into someone's pc and does something terrible.. But there are plenty of ways through disclaimers to help with this, explaining they are not officially part of boss land company and are simple volunteering there time to help.. - with a bit of filtering I'm sure you could weed out the weeds. .

Because right now I can tell you from 3rd party sites such as elitepvp and simliar support for users is not doing hb well for sales.. Just about any post you see is... The bot is amazing until you need support then..

Just my 2 cents.. Quite happily go back to my corner now.

I personally have found raphs contact with me to be semi decent - sure it's not right away .. But with in a few days.. He is the only core Dev I have much to do with.

 

[MaxMuster]

Would be nice to get some response on this tickets: