Community News
posted on June 30, 2020
Greetings Squaddies,
It’s been a very eventful few months within the Squad community, with a lot of new and necessary changes in the works. We were happy to see some great community conversations as a result of our most recent Producer Letter – if you haven’t had a chance to read it yet, you can find that here. And as we’ve mentioned before, we have more content in the works for you all – a roadmap (we’ll get to that a bit later on in this post), some new content reveals, and some new design blog updates. We will continue to increase our content and communication. We have also deeply appreciated the player feedback we’ve received about employee engagement and community issues that need to be addressed – issues such as toxicity or harassment.
The staffing changes that we’ve undergone have helped to further solidify our new approach. We want to thank the Squad community for your patience as we have taken the time to replace some key team members. The newly in place Squad community team has begun executing our new strategy of transparency and firm, but fair engagement. Based on recent player feedback, and the ‘changing of the guard’ on the Squad community team, now is a great time for us to revisit our community’s core values.
Today we are introducing our new community Code of Conduct. It will be the standard by which all other guidelines will be based on, whether it is competitive, server hosts, or players. We expect anyone playing Squad, engaging in its community, hosting servers, or creating new events, to be adhering to these guidelines. Failure to do so can result in being banned from community spaces, the game, or both.
We are halfway through the year, and a lot has happened in 2020. The video game industry and the world as a whole are going through a lot of changes. It has been tough, there is pain, progress, and people are coming together more in creative ways when most are physically apart. We feel this has given a lot of individuals, companies, and organizations time for some introspection, and OWI is no different. As hard as it has been the past few months, this has allowed us to make ourselves and our community stronger.
We have an amazing, helpful, resilient community made up of members of all races and creeds. It is a beautiful mix of individuals, and we cannot stand for injustices, intolerance, and toxicity to seep in. When it does, we need to look at ourselves and look to each other to figure out where the failure is and adjust. We are in one of those moments. So, we are taking steps to ensure we square ourselves away as a company and community.
On the content side of things, we were saddened to see that our future Roadmap was somehow leaked. This Roadmap was a ‘work in progress’, and its leak meant we have not been able to present it to the wider community with full and proper context. We will be doing that soon.
Some may have noticed that our forums remain offline – our team is currently investigating new long-term solutions, as part of revisiting how we can improve Squad’s community spaces. We will provide more updates as they become available, but for now, our team remains active and engaging across social media channels, Reddit, and Discord.
Thank you to the players whose feedback has led to our updated code of conduct. Thank you once again for your patience as we have lost some team members and gained new ones. We are in the process of building out both amazing new game content for Squaddies everywhere, and a new community space that will do our amazing game justice.
SgtRoss
Director, Customer Experience