Sorry but you disagree that DTG should be doing the same announcements on discord and its own forums ???? why is it down to players to do what DTG should be doing sorry but I am shocked at your reply to this
Can you share the numbers you have access to then please would be interesting to see the actual numbers.
Key information/announcements - always, this is currently happening. Other updates, details we share - not feasible with our approach I've outlined. It's worth saying that, this has existed for a long time (before the Discord existed) if you consider what is shared on Roadmap livestreams verbally not always being carried across to the forums, as a single-case example.
Man what is the world coming to when people winge about discord getting more attention than the dtg forum! Personally I don't really use discord but I have an account and the app installed. When anything is posted to the dtg discord, I get a notification so I can go and read it if I like. There's a lot of developers on there posting insights and updates to projects they are working on. Some of which don't get posted on any other forums unless it's shared by someone.
I know this isn’t all down to you Alex your hands are tied I imagine and can only do your best which I am sure you do as your passion always seeps through when you do roadmaps and stuff and you always want to give the best. So I apologise if my messages are coming across as rude directed to you this totally isn’t the case. I think the main thing to take away from here is all people are asking is a tiny tiny bit more communication is all that is needed. This seems to have risen in more anger since the AABS release with the problems people are having with that route which is getting there granted but I am sure you will always try and do your best for the community you appear to care so much about and that does really show.
First there’s just more people in general that own consoles since they are more cheaper so already a basic sign we would have more players. For actual numbers there’s probably a mention in one of the roadmap streams so go hunting yourself
There in lies the problems you are having to go to a platform you don’t wish to use to get the announcement updates rather than the platform you are using here to post your comment on you state you use more.
Again you said the numbers ar higher so can you show those numbers to boost your claim or is this running in hear say
Massively appreciate the comment as a note, and I hope I wasn't coming across too stern, but I wanted to make our approach super clear. I'm with you in many ways, I want us to be communicating to as many players and audiences as we can with all the detail we have available, but there are always balances which aren't always obvious/easy to see. I must admit, whilst it's relevant but less on-topic, our community team do so much outside of just communicating with players - don't get me wrong, this is our primary objective, but planning things like Dovetail Direct, Season of Reveals, getting Ambassadors access to content and able to share reviews early - just three of many many examples of the wider work we do. I mention this, because I think we've had quite a large amount of this "outside of communication" style work in the last couple months, and when you add on holiday leave too - I think we've fallen a little quieter when talking to players than I would like in all honesty. I want us to be in the threads and discords/socials as often as possible, sharing those updates and talking honestly with players - I'm still working on new ways we can do this, and the Q&As recently have been a big positive I am hoping to keep pushing forwards But thank you - again, welcome the discussion, community is my favourite thing to talk about
57.96 million Xbox one units 117.2 million PlayStation 4 units 84.2 million PlayStation 5 units 28.3 million Xbox XS If only 0.2% of players from all of these play tsw it would beat pc so with just average consoles would more players
Chinese whispers is now seen as a strength/benefit in the DTG towers is it? Having sections of the community receiving 2nd, 3rd and more hand news is not a benefit to anyone, DTG included, the message will be twisted, embellished or important parts completely missed out by this approach. A 5 year old could tell you this, so I am actually speechless that someone who’s actual job involves conversing and delivering news to the community is so clueless and inexperienced that they can’t see the risks (or most likely doesn’t give a damn) of this filtering out of news by the community. It’s laughable but I suppose given the lack of quality in the final product why did we expect the community team to be any better at doing their job.
That’s what I said, with a damn basic average of all owners of consoles = us having more players for tsw on average
When I was still at work once did a very interesting table top exercise with a group of us sat round a table in the training room. The person conducting the session whispered a short message to the first person which in turn had to be relayed to the person sat next until it went right around the table back to the origin. Needless to say the final message was completely different in wording and context to the original form. An important lesson in communication thar the chain needs to be kept as short and direct as possible.
I use discord quite a lot, but that's mainly for channels where people have a shared interest (example: Retro gaming)...and to be perfectly honest it works really well in that respect. What doesn't (and probably never will) work though are channels dedicated to specific games because most modern day stuff is broken and the vast majority just go there to voice their despair; which is all well and good but the problem is, moany stuff is mixed in with general conversation and all that happens is each time you log in you're met with a "50+ new messages since...." and a wall of words that you just can't be bothered sorting through - and until the state of TSW has been addressed that scenario won't ever change. At least with the forums everything is categorised and you can just follow threads that you're interested in without the need to scroll down that list of general chat in order to filter out non-appropriate comments each time you log in. If DTG are focusing on discord because they think it's where all the cool people hang out then I've got bad news for them...it isn't!
DTG Alex As someone who was banging this drum yesterday.. (I had a slow day and definitely gave the forum too much attention!!) Thank you for taking the time to address our concerns and giving some honest responses! Do we (the entire community) ask for too much at times... probably.. more often then not.. I think maybe at times we do underestimate 'how much' there is for the CMs to do but we get you physically cant make everyone happy! But overall glad to see you at least acknowledge more can be done in regards to direct communications from both the dev teams and the CMs in general (not just in relation to discord...I dont think anyone is expecting every single tiny detail from Discord to be posted here of course thats unrealistic) But like you've said bigger events that only take place on a single platform should probably have an accompanying write up... for anyone not on that platform/ people who are on that platform but missed the live event.. But overall thanks for some responses that feel a bit more 'human' Side note... I also get the confusion some other users have, as to why people like me wont use discord.. personally im older!, I dont social media as a whole, and I dont want to use discord, Along with personal security concerns.. but i digress.. im old.. get off my lawn!! Forum exists, im comfortable in it, just as your comfortable with your own life choices!
You said the player base is more on consoles than PC I asked you for the numbers for the payer base as I was intrigued by your comment claiming more players on console. more pcs have been sold worldwide than consoles we don’t have numbers for any platform for player base.
I dont see the problem. All announcements (routes, patches and news) are always shared in the forums at the same time with the article releases. What you see on discord, wether its TSC or the DTG one, is that sometimes developers share some comments or minor insights too, independent from announcements. Thats devs in their spare time choosing to spend time with the comminuty chatting thats not bound to any community platform, which is their own choice. Same thing for modding, that mostly happens in the discord apart from the few active threads in the editor forum. for the q&a stream, as said, thats technically impossible to do it in the same form in here as on discord. and if you dont want to be on discord by all means, thats fine, but then you are gonna missing out on some things (again that doesnt include announcements, which are always posted everywhere). Its been kinda like this for some time with the Train Sim Community Discord, i dont get why this is such a big problem now.
To clarify, my intent was to point out how a statement can be spun into a similar but very different one that better suits the spinner.
Ha! This is the most attention from a moderator that the forum's received in quite some time. And it has nothing to do with the game itself! That's the problem, isn't it. Questions about the game posed on the forum are not being answered on the forum any more. Should we all switch to this social media platform? No, because social media is " the toilet of the internet " ( Lady Gaga ) and I spend enough time in that room already, thank you.
Regarding player numbers, a few years ago Sam mentioned that the player bases on PC, XBox family, and PS family were almost exactly a 1/3 each split. I'm sure that may have shifted a bit in the time since, but it's not unreasonable to assume things are still in the same general area.
I just think it’s great train sim is recognised so much and has a great community like flight sim and truck sim etc
i am afraid an answer to question or a comment in a discussion is not an “announcement” per se. The response might shed some light on a particular concern or problem and may be of interest to others, but it IS NOT an official announcement. If this was so, every response by every developer and DTG employee would have to be vetted before posting and would GREATLY reduce community interaction.
When Sam was around few years back, he revealed on a stream that there was about equal number of players between each platform- a third for PC, xbox and playstation. I can imagine that console player base only grew since then also but not exclusively due to, as you said, game pass and ps plus premium subscriptions (which I’m sure are generating revenue for dtg)
Nope. XB1 & PS4 can't even be considered because people upgrade and there's no way to determine how many gen8 consoles are still being used. Also, XBox achievements have a very useful stat: Percentage of players who have completed a specific achievement...and if you look at TSW5 you could see that, say, 85% of all users complete a single journey within the core game but as little as 0.5% of those have gone on to repeat that process in certain addons.....which when you consider that TSW5 was included in gamepass, that represents a phenomenal drop in users who have not continued to support the game. For that reason alone I would happily argue that TSW doesn't perform well on XBox at all because the facts clearly state that it lacks the ability to retain it's userbase. Why? That's the easy bit!
This was my point earlier. This is like saying that a response in a forum thread then would need to get posted on Discord (which doesn’t happen today either). That’s never going to happen and shouldn’t happen because it would be a huge waste of time.
The self entitlement by some people in this thread is wild. a Community Manager's job is to make sure each corner of the community is served and feels listened to, not a messenger. Disparity has existed before with differences on social media, ie DTG staff communicating on both Reddit and Forums. They just now expanded to a new social media platform that gives them extra tools to do their job. Nothing has changed with how they operate the forums, or Reddit, or Twitter or Bluesky just because they started using a VOIP channel to have a platform to answer questions in a different way, just like how they do a Q&A from forum members on preview streams! Besides anything said in Q&A will not be much different to what gets asked and answered here as CM's are limited by what they can say publicly no matter the time and any vital/official information will be shared between all platforms. Go find something else to complain about
Now going to open a "discord is left behind" thread because the Stuttgart announcement got a whole 5 minutes earlier in the forum before the discord Ping
Theres no point being an active member of a dying forum where devs and community managers ignore your views about the game. As this isnt a airport departure lounge, all I say is that I bid you all well and for the ones who have been here for many years, whilst we may not have always seen eye to eye on every topic, we all cared about TSW and wanted the game to the be best it could be and I respect you all. Sadly our views and input are no longer valued by DTG and the 3rd partys simply because we wont use Discord for a variety of our own personal reasons.
It's not that at all. I remember when Nat was in charge of the forums and instead of the usual 'it's been logged and will be passed on' response, she used to proper get on Matt's case (even Matt jokingly said during a stream that he was fed up of her nagging) to try resolve the queries folk were asking, so it just goes to show that live responses to queries can be done equally as efficiently on the forums.
Yes, she did nag him. And Sam didn't let MP get away with stuff either. It was after those two and Adam left that the streams were taken over by the PR scriptwriters and became less than interesting.
Sorry but this is not true. I've asked multiple times about which class 170 the patch notes here https://forums.dovetailgames.com/threads/train-sim-world-6-game-update-28th-october-2025.94991/ refer to and I've been met with complete silence. "Where we see conversations" - as for that, you or someone would have seen me asking that question because as i had no luck getting an answer in any other thread, I posted my own thread in general discussion here: https://forums.dovetailgames.com/threads/class-170-fixes-still-waiting-dovetail.95280/ Instead of getting a reply, you, or one of the other community managers simply moved it to the troubleshooting forum without replying so it was seen and ignored.
Can is so if Dan can provide a long update on discord why can’t he or one of your team do the same here ?? No a complaint or a rant a genuine question
I'm not going to answer on behalf of Dan or All Aboard but personally. We have a plan with DTG in place on how we communicate things, DTG in this particular case handled the comms on the forum which did happen so not entirely sure what the issue is. I read the forums daily and useful stuff I pass on so we can ensure we are not missing stuff as something reported on the forum via the feedback thread may not be reported on discord. If I don't pick it up DTG always do and pass it along, they have been brilliant at that. What doesn't help on the forums in my own personal opinion and this does not reflect the stance of All Aboard in anyway shape or form but I see a lot more "general moaning and ranting" than I do see constructive feedback. Not to say everyone does that because they don't and we have seen some really useful feedback and constructive commentary on the forums regarding birmingham to crewe. I get peoples frustrations but the best way to have something get fixed is to be constructive. That being said we look at both platforms regardless. Again these are my own personal views and not representitive of any decisions made at All Aboard, can not stress that enough.
For all those bickering over console vs pc player numbers, Matt addressed that exact question on the latest roadmap, which ironically is on YouTube rather than either Discord or the Forum.
Maybe the "general moaning" occurs because people like me are sick and tired of mentioning faults which never get fixed, let alone acknowledged by anyone, be that from dovetail or the dlc developer? This wasn't aimed at you or AABS but I'm sick and tired of mentioning problems, asking about supposed fixes listed in their own patch notes and the only response is a wall of silence from dovetail, who at best might click a couple of mouse buttons to move a thread out of sight to the troubleshooting forum. Sure, they might not like that my later posts are getting more and more sarcastic but maybe just a simple answer, acknowledgement or anything might have helped when the problems were first mentioned instead of being completely ignored repeatedly hence my ever increasing sarcasm.
Heres the thing though, All Aboard is a new third party, so the more constructive the feedback is the better it is for us to assess how we proceed. Again I get frustrations but for us the best thing that people can do is provide constructive feedback and we will aim to address it as quickly as possible. I think we have proven time and time again to care about the stuff we do but for some reason people seem to think for example we are never going to fix things, well hasnt the evidence shown the opposite of this? This is a personal opinion and is not an official statement on behalf of All Aboard.
thats just life people will always be quick to complain and moan but not praise. Take the lack of praise as a good thing people are enjoying the route and to busy to come and say positive things
As i said, this wasn't directed at you or AAS (I have Birmingham to Crewe and really enjoy it) but more about why there is general moaning. If people post repeatedly that there is a problem with something, or post repeatedly asking for clarification on something and dovetail seemingly choose to ignore all those posts maybe that causes more problems than simply acknowledging and saying "yes, it's broken, no we don't have an eta on when that is going to be fixed?"
Here's why we may miss posts: As I said in another post, there are over 20,000 threads in just the troubleshooting area alone for TSW. And the suggestions threads are pretty dang high in numbers, too. In Discord, it's not as large, but I am focused on trying to get feedback and other info from specific areas, which is harder to do in the Forums. Forums: I'll have 7-10 threads to comb through with people reporting the same issues over and over with the same screenshots. Or I'll have an issue reported for a train in one thread, then the same issue reported in a route, then one person reports it as an Xbox issue, so now I've chased around the same exact issue, but it took 3 threads. Discord: I usually see it in the thread for that DLC/Route/Train. If not, it's posted in Troubleshooting and is usually easier to find. Each has its pros and cons. When we post information, it is easier to miss in Forums than on Discord because we can't tag a group of people who are interested in News or a Topic. Also, Forums can be bumped where Discord runs more in a "new first" format. The issues I've seen with Discord is that you may have a post talking about something from 5 months ago, someone wants you to find it, and Discord just does a spinning wheel. Or that a lot of times it has server hosting issues. Anywho, if you think we aren't listening, please don't, but personally, I'm only one person, and I'm coming into take on a mountain of work with just a kid's sand castle shovel. I also need to be focused on my other tasks. Add in the ADHD, and I'm definitely at a huge disadvantage coming into this community after YEARS, so I'll be talkative on some days and quiet on others. Some weeks I'll be on here constantly replying, and others I won't. Usually, if I'm not replying, then I'm talking with Devs. Silence doesn't always mean we aren't listening. Sometimes it means we're working on huge things, like my presentations for the US Community. Also, just for a note, I'll probably be quiet the next few days and probably most of the rest of this month as year-end stuff has to be handled, and I want to get all my US Community and US Routes notes in before I go on Christmas Vacation. I'm also adding in a screenshot of one of my lists of issues showing where we get feedback and bugs reported from. (These aren't tickets; this is just my list where I put the info to make the ticket before I submit it.) Surprisingly, Forums and Discord aren't always the places where the most issues are reported. And some days I do miss reports, but we fill this out so we have the link, can gather images and logs, and also tell devs the platforms and where it was reported, so they have all the information you sent to us in one ticket. Here are the socials the US team gathered info from on Nov 4, Nov 13, and Nov 14:
A good comparison to think about is Windows Vista I feel. I've heard from enthusiast circles that with proper hardware it was actually a solid operating system from day one, albeit with a few driver issues certainly. The fact 7's so similar yet is much more beloved shows that quite well. However because they put it on so many machines which had no business running it that killed its reputation entirely, even for those on higher end systems that could've ran it fine, Similar cases here, you got to bare in mind, most people don't really care about specific developers. Lot of people see a Sony game and they see just that, they ain't nessicarily going to distinguish between Naughty Dog, Santa Monica, or Insomniac. Much less things like changes in studio staff, like Amy Hennig leaving, and Neil Druckmann taking a bigger role at Naughty Dog. They'll likely pay more attention to the Sony label, know they've made other enjoyable games, and buy it off of that. People underestimate how much of a "core" thing it is to actually know the names of teams working behind the scenes. Most people ain't looking that far into it, for most they ain't gonna see "Just Trains" and have that change anything for them. If DTG burns them on a TSW DLC multiple times they ain't nessicarily going to go "Well maybe someone else in the game's made better content" in the same way people on Vista didn't just go "Maybe I should've spend more on hardware".
Nominally yes. But the forums are not social media in the same sense of the word as are Facebook, X, Tik Tok or Instagram, just to name a few major apps. I think most everyone on here understands the difference. You may not.
I was just thinking about her today when I was near a Metra station and saw the incoming push-mode train do a Nat, with the first four of five cars passing the platform before it stopped.
Frankly DTG’s comms are poor enough as it is without stretching to another channel. How often has there being an answer to a community wide issue on discord & the only way the forum has seen it, is when someone’s pasted the message over here. Most of the time it’s not even DTG doing the pasting. Things like the Birmingham-Crewe mess are a hot topic right now & yet there is very little consistent comms about it. It’s not necessarily that the devs aren’t communicating, but it’s being done in several places with 0 centralisation of information. Another good one is DTG stopping ambassadors from doing console previews. No announcements or anything, just a comment left on a dead conversation. It’s not necessarily that Discord is the problem, it’s just compounding an already existing issue that we have very inconsistent communication. I couldn’t care less if DTG want to use 50+ platforms to communicate on, but anything that pertains to something of importance needs to be communicated across all of them, or at the very least, on their official website forum. Honestly though many of DTGs comments that people like to see the most are explanations to decisions or issues, those comments should be made in conversations during streams & Q+A’s, but the heavy handed marketing & PR structure of them seems to prevent quite a lot of development insight. People miss the likes of Sam & Nat because they were the last community team that genuinely batted for their community, we weren’t having to resort to constant 20 page threads of pissing & moaning to finally get an answer to something (and yes I’m aware that was happening, but not at the level we’re seeing it at now).
