They probably want to shut down their forums so they don’t have to maintain them.
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General discussion here is a good place for D4 topics since it’s very little populated. Also, most of the stuff has already been commented.
The other places mentioned are full mainly of noobs. Here you can see some dedicated players at least.
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We have known they collect feedback from a wide variety of sources since forever. It is part of the CM job description. The Blizzard forums are just one venue for feedback out of many.
You know that answer - the number of people who use the Blizzard forums is way lower than the number that use other media. They also don’t stand up forums here until there is a game license to link access to.
I don’t know. A lot of companies have done away with them in favor of just using reddit or even Discord. I would prefer if they don’t get rid of the forums, but if engagement on them is not high enough to justify cost Management may make the call regardless of what the individual game teams want.
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Nothing surprising here, as it’s been stated well before now that they used other sites when it comes to gathering information and such. My only complaint is that they don’t sometime make a post here pertaining to certain infos, like delays and such.
Guys,
This is the Diablo 3 forum. If the CMs don’t want to use it as the gateway for Diablo 4 information that’s okay. It would be like them posting D4 news on the D2R boards, which are 100x more active…
They post update blogs in the Diablo 3 forums and told users that they can discuss Diablo 4 feedback here as well. Also, there were times that when a blog was approaching, they informed us. For example here’s a post that was made to inform us that last year’s Diablo 4 June quarterly update blog was nearing:
I don’t mind if they post news / announcements to other sites.
My issue is that they don’t bother to replicate it here.
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We’re Not Worthy!
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Well, OP doesn’t bother to use ` for quotes. When they see such posters they probably think “why should we bother then”. So, yeah…
Yeah, exactly.
I know. I just found it was sad that they don’t tell you about this in the D3 forum. We learned about this from Reddit instead.
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If they move over to other platforms, I will miss some of you. As for the know-it-alls not so much.
Indeed.
Also, as far as more people using other sites… well, more people use Reddit of course. The only relevant question is, how many use Reddit to talk about Diablo 4?
The Diablo4 reddit channel does not see much activity for sure. Last topics about the game are 3 and 6 days old.
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Forums are somewhat of an outdated medium. Most people who still post on them (me included) are people who used forums for decades now. A lot of forums are dead, even in our D3 forums we basically only use this and the technical support board most of the time. The ammount of people who play games and use Reddit and Discord, on the other hand, is a lot bigger. I feel like it’s almost a necessity to browse the game’s relevant subreddit these days if you wanna keep up with it’s developments.
You also have some useful tools you don’t have in forums, like the ability to sort responses and only look at the more relevant or more controversial ones, for example.
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The frustrating part for me with that is the forums have a baked in feature where you can easily view recent blue posts. I check this periodically to keep up on any blue posts that might contain useful information.
Reddit doesn’t have this, so if the info they provide is buried in a comment in some thread somewhere, I’ll probably never see it, despite being active on the diablo subreddits. I suppose I could stalk their reddit accounts to see when they post Diablo news, but… when the forums already have a baked in way to enable that functionality, stalking a CMs reddit profile to get news seems weird to me.
Yeah I’d be totally fine with it as long as they posted anything they share on the official forums as well. Then there’s an easier way to find said info instead of just endlessly scrolling reddit.
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Reddit has always been a regression in forum software. The irony of saying that forums themselves are dead/dying isn’t lost on me when considering this. Discord, on the other hand, is basically a glorified live chat. From the organization perspective, it’s a messy system that mandates a lot of administrative upkeep if you want to sort fact from opinion, keeping people from derailing conversations, and so on.
While I would subjectively call Discord better than Reddit when in the right hands, I still prefer Forums that are intelligently broken down into sub-forums. For example, if I hopped onto some D3 Discord and searched “Marauder build”, while the feature may give me every hit of those terms, what I don’t know is if surrounding conversation is pertinent or if it might be a bunch of other people asking what’s good. Alternatively, a properly named forum thread would make it abundantly clear that the topic within should contain talk about said builds as a focus.
Either way, what Gilthas implied earlier in this thread is quite likely the reality. They want to take advantage of the “free labor” of independent moderators, while also divorcing themselves of the effort required to keep the community sanitary. It is 100% shirking responsibility by management and a disservice to customers who don’t want to wade through whatever social media cesspit du jour.
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They’ve gone the way of the Bioware lol. They’re stupid enough to think that if they shut down their official forums, they won’t get any negative feedback/reactions anymore.
Bioware were wrong too.
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I am not even sure why people would care enough to post feedback about Blizzard games at all. I have done it for years, and I’ve reached the conclusion, that Blizzard are like the Wishmaster.
You ask for something, and they twist it though their moronic “what does the player really means” and they come up with something, that was not what the player was asking for at all “because we’re smart enough and we understand game design and players and stuff”… if they bother to do anything, that is.
While the reality is, that they are totally disconnected. No need for further proof, that the terrible state of games such as WoW during Legion and BfA on launch.
My personal impression is, that reddit is a cesspool. Might be bad luck on my part, but most of the things I’ve read there, regardless of whether ir comes to gaming subjects or not, seem to have been written from people, that I would describe to be of subhuman intelligence.
I’ve grown to hate forums. I love the medium itself, it allows for coherent discussion and all that… but I’ve reached the conclusion, that if a game causes you to frequent a forum for you to constantly give suggestions and feedback, and complain, that it seems like the devs are disconnected and they don’t understand fundamental things about their own game, or why a franchise was popular in the first place, or how players typically play…
That means, that the game is not good, it’s not going to get better and you should just get out.
Devs either get it or they don’t… there are very few instances, in which you can change someone’s mind… in most cases, if they understand you and they agree with you, they’ve already reached understanding themselves, so it’s not you changing their mind, it’s you being of the same mind.
The same is true for people in general.
And, while I’m still on this pessimistic train of though, I’d also like to mention, that regardless of the platform, most people lack reading comprehension, can’t put two sentences together in a coherent context to save their lives, so does it really matter if people post on a dedicated forum or on some other platform?..
Gaming has become some sort of realm of terror of it’s own. I used to love to play video games. Now I spend a lot of time wondering how people have even managed to install the game, that they are supposedly playing… do I have somehting in common with them and… should I be worried if I do…
Just the other day I read, that in this other game, that I play called Warframe, it took people about a month to beat a freaking boss, that requires you to kite a bit with a bow and use 2 abilities… that have cooldowns, so you don’t even have to spam them all the time…
I couldn’t help, but wonder whether those poor souls have ever played an MMO, where you juggle 30 abilities and coordinate with 24 other people…
I used to say Discord is an extension of Reddit.
But I was wrong.
Discord is an even bigger sewer than Reddit. So of course Blizzard would be attracted to them both…
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This was my first instinct.
Ultimately, having official forums means you have a dedicated path to communicate directly with your customers. This lets you control the messaging going out and gives you a place to centralize feedback coming in about your games. Given that all games go through a long series of patch cycles, balance updates, expansions, and the like, having an official forum in long forum where you can get good, well-articulated thoughts both incoming and outgoing seems like a huge asset to a game developer. It lets the customer know your team actually listens, cares, and responds which builds trust and customer loyalty.
Instead, they’re opting for what? A platform they don’t moderate and over which they don’t have control? A highly politicized platform that basically alienates half of your potential customer base with their censorship regime (Reddit)? A glorified chat channel on Discord where the format encourages short, trite responses and discourages the kind of well formed thoughts and arguments you could actually use to justify game design choices? And it’d all be decentralized so your customers would have to search through a wide range of websites to compile all of the official Blizzard feedback because it’s not in one place?
That seems like an absolutely terrible trade-off to me.
But I’m a customer, not a boss looking at all the salaries I was just forced to raise in the name of equality (and keeping my talent from being poached, and keeping the state of California bloodhounds off my back, and trying to swat discrimination lawsuits before they happen which is why I really paid it), and my lack of latest blockbuster release revenue coming in, etc. That boss is looking to cut costs and cutting the entire team that has to maintain and moderate the forums and outsourcing the entire function to a free service someone else has to manage starts to sound like “low hanging fruit.”
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