How To Tell Your Favorite Company Something Sucks

Community Management In Games

A no-nonsense guide to ensuring your feedback about something that sucks something awful gets heard.

I wish people were better at telling me things suck.

Does that seem strange to you? Maybe it does, but when part of your job is to listen to how things suck, it’s not that odd.

I do work in communities in the games industry, and have for over a decade or so. My job when I do this work is to figure out what players or customers or people who otherwise want to make their lives not suck for a while think about the service or game that I’m working with.

There’s a lot of stuff that is consistent with my part of the industry. I can expect to be up inexplicably at 3am to figure out why there’s a ton of notifications on my phone. I can count on meeting some cool people, both inside the company and in the player community who’ll make memories with me. I can count on trying and failing to kick my caffeine habit when trying to respond to seven or eight different communications fires at once.

But the thing that I find wholly consistent and which directly affects my ability to do work on behalf of the games companies I’ve worked for is that people really have a hard time telling me the right ways that things suck.

Why is this important? Because as good as it is for us community people to be told that things are the very opposite of suck (and trust me, I will always take a sugary, happy post of non-suck any day), being told how badly something sucks is a key part of ensuring things don’t suck so bad in the future.

Unfortunately, lots of people tend to think telling me how something sucks isn’t hard, and that it should be a simple process of me reading that there’s a huge amount of sucktitude somewhere, gasp in horror that this is occurring, and bring a one-page report to whoever I need to talk to that says “SOMETHING SUCKS, EVERYONE” and have it magically be fixed. It’s just not that simple, and if you really want someone like me to help fix something sucky, you’ve got to do it right. So without further ado, here are a few tips for telling a company or the poor sap like me who front-faces them for feedback about how something sucks. I’ll even construct an example as we go.

Tell Them What Sucks, Not Who Sucks

I feel like a bunch of times when I’ve been reading feedback it feels like some people who have to say something sucks, always have to throw in who sucks at the same time, whether it’s the company, or a certain individual who they see is the problem or an entire team of folks who’re just trying to get the job done like you or I do every day.

And you know, I get why someone who says someone sucks does it. They’re frustrated at their experience, they don’t want to have to deal with it anymore, they feel like their effort and investment has been wasted. But pointing at who sucks doesn’t really do much for us folks who have to figure out why you’re having a sucky time. We don’t really have the power to remove anyone who sucks (even if it’s ourselves) easily, and even if someone did actually suck they’re not going to have consequences applied to them unless there are other, suckier things that you as players or customers aren’t aware of.

So stick to what sucks instead.

“I’m really having trouble sorting through my inventory, and it sucks. It’s totally overwhelming as a system and exhausting to work with.”

We need to know what the problem is. We need to understand where your specific frustration lies. We need to take what you tell us sucks and go deep with it when we take it back inside the company for further investigation — which leads me to my next tip.

Tell Them How Something Sucks, In Every Sucky Detail

Oftentimes if people avoid saying who sucks when they are telling a company about what sucks, they fall into a second pitfall — not telling the company how something sucks. There are vague, angry posts delivered in one or two lines — about how something is “full of bugs” or that the company “massively failed” on some level, but without any of the detail that is actually helpful to track down exactly how those things happened. If someone like me can’t see how to reproduce what sucked by you telling me how absolutely sucktastic it is, it’s really hard to get on a road to having it not suck.

“I’m really having trouble sorting through my inventory, and it sucks. It’s totally overwhelming as a system and exhausting to work with. I can’t easily stack items that are duplicates, and sometimes I can’t even find what I’m looking for when I need it — and that sucks when I need to complete a quest that has a time limit.”

You don’t have to write a dissertation (though detail is always welcome). All you have to do is tell who’s listening one or two examples of how something sucked, how it made you have a not-so-ideal experience, and what kinds of things contributed to the suckfest. These are the kinds of specifics that allow people like me to look at other reports of similar suckiness, try to figure out how they affect the overall experience, and then actually take something back to the appropriate team that is more than just “Things That Suck, From Customers” and a list of gripes.

Tell Them Your Suggestions On How It Can Stop Sucking

People in my profession listen to customers, players, end-users, etc. because they provide a unique viewpoint to the product or service that I’m trying to gather feedback on. My co-workers, bleary-eyed from long hours of development and design work and who have sat internally with a project or service for years, might not see what a customer sees when they use it. They’ve been nose-up-against-the-wall with what they’ve been making, so when one of you finds something that is the absolute suckiest, it’s because you don’t have all that baggage with you. You’re the one experiencing it from a user perspective.

So don’t sell your power short on that — think about it and tell us how it can stop sucking. Sure, there’s a certain sense of realism to the whole process — you shouldn’t expect someone to flip a switch, change a setting, recalculate some math, or whatever, and expect something sucky to not be so sucky. Whether it’s a game, a service, or some other product, there’s a lot of gears to the machine.

“I’m really having trouble sorting through my inventory, and it sucks. It’s totally overwhelming as a system and exhausting to work with. I can’t easily stack items that are duplicates, and sometimes I can’t even find what I’m looking for when I need it — and that sucks when I need to complete a quest that has a time limit.

It would really make it suck a lot less if I had an auto-sorting button by item type, and if items of the same type stacked as I looted them. Quest items should be in a separate tab and highlighted when I am turning them in so I don’t end up sucking at the time limit and starting over.”

Making suggestions to lessen or remove what sucks is never a bad thing — it puts forth another, fresher set of eyes that catch something sucky and shows a company how what wasn’t supposed to suck, now does. Suggestions carry a lot of power with companies because it means you’re displaying that you want to actually fix what sucks instead of being invested in just saying it does. Trust me, people like me see that a mile away, and it’s quickly seen that you don’t want to work with us, you just want to tell us we suck. I get that — but it’s not the best way to change things if you won’t work with people in my position. And that brings us to the last point.

Try To Understand The Company Doesn’t Want It To Suck, Either

Look, I get it. It’s real easy to assume the intent to make things suck as much as possible on the part of a company — whether for business reasons, for morally grey profit, for perceived incompetence — any number of wild assumptions borne out of frustration from people giving feedback. Do I think every company is perfect and never sucks? Absolutely not — companies are made of people, and people make mistakes and bad decisions.

But that’s the key thing — people work at companies, and most people don’t want what they worked hard on and released to the public to suck. If they read what I take back to them, they’re probably just as upset, or perhaps even more so, that something is sucking. They’re gonna want to fix it as soon as possible. And they want to work with you to do so — especially if it’s something they didn’t realize was going to suck this bad when they were making it. So while it isn’t absolutely necessary, a little understanding goes a long way.

“I’m really having trouble sorting through my inventory, and it sucks. It’s totally overwhelming as a system and exhausting to work with. I can’t easily stack items that are duplicates, and sometimes I can’t even find what I’m looking for when I need it — and that sucks when I need to complete a quest that has a time limit.

It would really make it suck a lot less if I had an auto-sorting button by item type, and if items of the same type stacked as I looted them. Quest items should be in a separate tab and highlighted when I am turning them in so I don’t end up sucking at the time limit and starting over.

I understand fixing the system this way isn’t going to be done overnight, but I really hope the developers invest time in making this important. Players who can’t use items easily are players who play the game less, and because of that, I would hope the company understands not making inventory management suck should be a priority.”

See that? Here we have a complete way of telling a company something sucks. It gets your point across, it provides detail, it stays away from the absolutely sucky blame game, and it tries to see it from the company’s point of view. This post is worth 1000 “review bomb” one or two-line comments about how the company failed its job and everyone should be fired because it didn’t keep its promises on something basic like inventory management. Posts like these, not harassment, bullying, or mob tactics, are what elicit change.

Will things sometimes turn out to still suck despite the effort? Sure. But an investment in telling a company what sucks in the right way positions you and your fellow customers/players in the best place to get it to not suck. You’d be surprised how effective they are, and how much they get valued when they get sent back to the right people. So consider these tips on telling a company how something sucks the next time you have to do so. My sleep schedule, my mental health, and my caffeine habit, as well as those of my peers, will thank you for it.