The New Community Development Lead for Diablo

Appears to be Adam Fletcher

His comments from twitter

Excited to announce that I will be leading up Community Development for the
@Diablo franchise! Excited to be part of an amazing publishing team here!

The team here is also growing and I could use some help! Looking to hire a couple experienced Community Managers for Diablo, so if you’re interested, hit up the link!

Lastly, if you are a Diablo fan/streamer/content creator or just a player in general, feel free to hit me up. Looking forward to meeting and chatting more with all of you! See you in hell!

https://twitter.com/PezRadar

https://twitter.com/Diablo

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Is it naiv to think community development means Q&A streams with community and stuff like that? And monthly/weekly updates on everything Diablo related.?

So will he be reading and responding to players feedback on D3 forums or we gatta hit him up on twitter? Has any CM been reading our feedback the past couple of months?!?! Have we been typing and posting to a cement wall up until now?!?! Who is Cydra?!

Let’s see when the first welcome post will be made on this forums.

Cydra is a current CM for Blizzard on other games who has been filling in temporarily for Diablo since Nevalistis moved to a new opportunity.

Adam Fletcher is the new Community Lead who, as he said, is looking for two CMs. I assume Cydra will continue to fill in and help welcome Adam back to Blizzard. Once the new CMs are hired and up to speed Cydra goes back to the games they already work on.

Their personal Twitter accounts are not work accounts. Not that they don’t pay attention to Twitter, but it is not really the place most of them look for feedback or respond to it. They prefer to do that under their work accounts or the official Diablo/Blizzard accounts.

How feedback is structured is going to be up to Adam as the Community Lead. They will have the ability to help direct and craft Community interface strategies and engagement opportunities.

That is not naive, given those have happened before and as we get farther along on D4 will likely happen again. What format or how often will be up to the Community and Dev teams.

That sort of frequency of communication is not common for Blizzard, but with a new Community Lead we never know what might happen in the future. Right now the plan is Quarterly updates on Diablo 4 with whatever they are ready to talk about. our last was February so the next one should be sometime this Month if not slowed down by the pandemic situation.

Diablo 3 updates are given as needed, mostly the PTR notes and new Season updates - so roughly every 3 months. If something major is going to happen though they will tell us. For now assume things will go along as they are with new gear/sets, seasons, etc.

D:I - they don’t have any news on right now to share. I am curious why not, but it is what it is right now. Maybe some news once we get the Community team built back up again.

Oh and Welcome Adam Fletcher! I hope you find some great Community Managers for your team!

EDIT for link to his Personal Twitter thread with the announcement.

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As seen on BlizzPlanet https://twitter.com/Blizzplanetcom/status/1257554120296353797

For a bit of a intro to his past work, he was a Communications and Community Director at Microsoft from 2015-2017 for the Gears of War team, also doing some marketing and PR.

Then he had a stint at Twitch as Publisher and Developer of Strategic Partnerships from 2017-2018.

Shortly after, Adam Fletcher joined Blizzard Entertainment from 2018-2019 as Global eSports Product Lead in the Classic Games team — including StarCraft: Remastered, Warcraft III: Reforged, Heroes of the Storm and StarCraft II.

Later he joined Digital Extremes studios as senior product marketing manager of the game Warframe from Apr 2019 to May 2020.

Today he starts as the new Community Development manager for the Diablo franchise.

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That’s good news - CM with a taste for eSports.

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His position is above the CM position. He is the Community Development Lead. the CMs are the ones on the front lines who do the most interactions for the Community/Publishing team.

Keep in mind, Publishing (Community), does not have a say in game Development. They are not the Developers or Management who make the game direction decisions.

He seems like a pretty decent dude though and I have been following him on Twitter for a few years now.

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Season 20 started on March 13th. If it lasts around 13 weeks (as is usual) it should end on Sunday June 12th, which is just over 5 weeks away. As PTRs now last 2 weeks, I’m hoping we get an announcement for PTR to start very soon, otherwise it looks like Season 20 is going to be extended.

I would be kind of shocked if it was not extended. Having to suddenly switch to work from home when Blizz was not set up to do that, away from some of the tools, testing, and collaboration. I can’t imagine that had a good impact on things.

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We’ve got a lot of DH and Necro players chomping at the bit to test new sets.
Maybe they could turn on the double bounties buff for a month to appease us.

Wouldn’t they have all of this month and June to respond for the next quarterly update?

Oh I know! I don’t blame them one tiny bit. It is always exciting to get new things for a favorite class, esp when you end up at having to wait so long.

Yes that would be a great buff to have. It was one of the most popular requests when we were talking about a lockdown buff. Double goblins is good and I am glad they did it. Double Bounties would be frosting on the cake though!

Three months from mid Feb would be mid May. I would not be shocked if it is a bit late due to the major world disruptions.

That said, they gave us a few early preview ones right after Blizzcon that were not on the schedule for updates. So they are kind of ahead? For now I have faith the D4 team will do all they can to get updates out if they can.

But quarterly for the year they have until the end of June is what I mean, if they intend to stick to their quarterly updates. I see a lot of people upset that they haven’t said anything, and thinking they’re not sticking to their goal, when they still have two months left to say anything.

Ah ok, you mean the Quarterly periods as the year is divided up. I am not sure if that is the plan, but yes, if they intend to do it that way they do have until the end of June. It would be good of them to clarify and help set expectations for players and media/fansites.

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This would be nice, especially if they did it for both seasons and non-seasons.

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Responsibilities

  • Contribute to content strategy and player-facing communications, including active engagement on community channels and reactive messaging
  • Create compelling product communications such as blogs, patch notes, social copy
  • Develop and execute key community initiatives including contests, live events, content partnerships, and influencer/streamer programs
  • Manage content calendars and milestones, delivering content to cross-functional and regional teams
  • Drive content creator strategy, identifying potential new creators while supporting and building long-term relationships with existing partners
  • Establishing player feedback loops with players and dev teams, providing meaningful reporting on community sentiment, concerns and suggestions
  • Analyze and report on content and program performance data to drive continuous improvement, optimization and innovation

Could you elaborate on bold text?

Job is about filtering out player feedback and interacting between developers and players? So if job is not done developers don’t know what players want? Am I right?

Welcome to you, Adam!

Strategy to communicate and publish media content - advertising, news posts, developer highlights, etc.

Again, this is media content (published written content, images, and videos). The cross region part has a lot to do with Localization and ensuring the messaging is properly translated and presented. Oh, and of course handling time of day etc.

Content Creators are streamers, bloggers, fan sites, etc.

This is not analyzing the game, it is about analyzing the effectiveness of the media presentation strategies, feedback gathering methods, contests, engagement activities, etc. They want people who can understand and reflect on the program they work on (Community Publishing) and provide feedback that can help make it even better.

That is a part of what the Community team does. YES, they do gather feedback from a variety of sources. Yes, it goes into a weekly report and there is a weekly physical meeting. Yes, hot topics like PTRs and things get more rapid reporting. But that is still a small part of what the Community team (who are part of Publishing), does.

They are not blind. They do also read and review feedback too. Just not to the same level as the CMs and they rarely directly interact, although they can write and approve messages for CMs to pass along.

My point was that despite gathering feedback, the CM is the messenger, not the one who makes the decision. I don’t understand why people think it was Nev’s fault some feature they wanted did not get in the game. Yes, she certainly DID pass it on and the Devs do read feedback on their own. The Devs and Mgt ultimately make the calls though. Then the CM has to deal with the outcome and player backlash. It kind of bites. Having to deal with the angry crowd without any power to change the outcome.

I like this one. :ok_hand: :ok_hand: :ok_hand: Let’s see how it works with the new team.