idk what radio silence everyone is talking about.
They clearly have been following the same 4 week schedule since 2017. They have a list of open issues that gets updated periodically too. They talk of the main fixes on the stream and put the full list everytime an update drops.
It is extremely comprehensive as well.
They havent been great at the updates but communication isn't really a weakness. Their marketing team was atrocious for sure, but this update announcements run all the way back from 2017 in the same pattern very consistently.
More meant silence in regards to addressing the issues. I don't really consider planned "PR event" stuff like Forza Monthly as communication really, as it's basically one-sided "good new guys!" type stuff where they can talk up the new cars and what they have done while ignoring the rest, but maybe I'm just being unfair. Admittedly I do often forget about the known issues page though, although it amounts to little more than a massive collection of Post-It notes stuck to an overworked person's monitor really.
I guess I think of the customer service/relations side a bit like a restaurant. If you order a meal and the kitchen totally screws up your order, and you point that out to the server and they just tell you they won an award once and also have cheesecake that is really good as the special dessert tonight, and then turn around and walk off, how do you feel? You would likely sit there irritated and confused as to what to expect. A little transparency, like an acknowledgement, what the mix up was, how long it might take, or whatever goes a long way towards placating frustrated customers.
Obviously they know there are a ton of issues, and I know they are busy since the game has been such a mess, and of course they can't address
every issue either, but it would be nice to see them address some of the critical areas at least. Like missing/broken/regressing features for multiplayer or whether any hope is on the horizon for painters or so on, what areas are being given priority, what kind of feedback/reporting the community can help most with, and so on.
Also no, they don't put a full list of fixes out with the updates. They put out a lazy, incomplete list that leaves out details and has vague things like "other various fixes" on it.
A good example was the drafting changes, the patch notes just said "improved balancing and overall impact of slipstream effect" which means... what exactly? It's so vague there are all kinds of theories in the community with some people swearing the draft no longer works (which is obviously wrong), others saying the draft has just been reduced in strength, others saying it's actually had the range reduced but strength is the same, some saying it only changed things for faster cars and doesn't impact slower vehicles, some saying it did nothing to the draft but reduce the aero wash effect, others saying that aero wash is worse now... it's all over the place. We don't know if they are thinking they have "fixed" it or if they are looking into it more or if more changes are on the way. Given that a properly working draft has been a
massive improvement over FM7 and has been such an integral part to the pretty great racing this game is capable of (which is basically the game's big redeeming quality among all of its other problems), I'd say it deserves a bit more specificity.
Another example is the VW nerf for the Touring Cars division, wasn't mentioned at all. Doesn't seem unreasonable to expect game balance changes to be included in patch notes, and we shouldn't have to go test drive every car in the division to see if any got a change.
Studios like UL and GGG and even many smaller PC-centric ones can include complete patch notes that specifically state what the changes were in numbers/percentages/mechanics/etc, and offer practical explanations of what the intended/expected effect will be in-game when necessary, so I don't see why T10 can't do the same.