While I’m inclined to call the influence of reddit or twitter overstated, I’d say there’s also a self-fulfilling prophecy in the marginalization of forums when you neither adequately maintain nor interact with them.
I can think back to the removal of dislikes here and how we basically had people doom and glooming about the devs would suddenly start listening to bad ideas and the usual “real fans” would be drowned out. Reddit still technically has this. Twitter users just jump to “ratio” when it comes to bad takes blowing up. Otherwise, the only real differences are input length and control of topics.
In a sane world, the official or home source would be where info comes from first. Somewhere along the way, this concept got muddled, and suddenly devs were interacting more or “leaking” things elsewhere. Some may cite user toxicity as why this happens, but this takes me back to adequately maintaining your space. The problem posters who blow up on a dev post are unlikely to be first-time offenders, as it’s likely they’ve blown up on other players who don’t share their views. Time like the D:I reveal was a particularly unique circumstance, though, and also one of the rare occasions everyone was pretty much on the same page. Unironically, maintaining that certain awareness of their own space could’ve told them showcasing a mobile game as the highlight of their show would’ve been A Bad Idea™.
Welcome to humanity, we’re out of complementary anything. Please have a seat.
Sure, the goal of any gamer is probably to have fun, but “Fun” is an abstract and basically has as many meanings for a game as there are people playing it.
That’s true to an extent, you have a right to have any opinion you want, sure, you don’t have a right to express it anywhere you want though. Like this forum for example, you have the privilege to use it, but certainly not a right.
All of that was circular. Remember when I said people don’t read, and now you run in a circle with…
I’m not sure you are defending an indefensible defense against the defense or just pretending to being oppositional. Its like walking backwards toward your destination while maintaining that you aren’t going that way. I-C-U.
I did say there needs to be balance between competing view points. More circles.
I’m not even going to bother to quote the last part that is circle obviousness. Instead I’m going to link to you that circle song… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUzqXwxtzVo
The lesson here is don’t try to snow a snowman… that clown-fu is no good.
Quite the opposite Avalon. They may have said that the next Q-update was going to be about audio. Reading through this thread should make it obvious that there a desire for way more than just an update about audio. Given all that has been going on with Blizzard and the Diablo franchise it would be smart of them to provide a fulsome update or risk more resentment and negative speculation. Don’t worry. It may look like circular clown-fu, but I’ll continue to practice build-community-fu and first-page-fu.
And if they are not ready to dive deeper on the subjects the few active posters want, Blizzard is under no obligation to do do so just appease some loud fans. In reality, only a relative few care about these updates. If it weren’t the case, there would be 10s of thousands to millions of active posters here.
We are enthusiasts. We represent a small % of total players. We are the ones interested with these details. The average player just doesn’t care enough to follow. They will pay attention when testing starts and preview articles/videos start making the rounds. That’s when the majority interest starts picking up. Case in point, Metroid Dread. If you follow it you would know about the dev blogs that give details about the upcoming game, yet I have seen tons of people all over the place asking questions that have all been answered by those blogs.
There is no need to appease to a minority group IMO. Would it be nice if we got a beefy systems and end game blog? Sure. Are they ready to discuss it? Nope. Or else we would have it. However, I’m looking forward to this one. I love sound design.
Funnily enough, most of the Diablo videos that I watch on youtube are watched via these very forums if someone linked them. There are some exceptions (like Carbot), but they’re very few.
Either way, we should be seeing the next blog within the next few days (assuming there hadn’t been another delay of course).
Indeed. Also, people shouldn’t underestimate the power of streamers with a huge following. I heard that Amazon paid a lot of money to get popular streamers to stream their game, and I have to admit that I knew about the New World existence was because I just happened to watch the said streamer streaming New World at Twitch at that time.
Again, the lack of threads generated per day, per week, per month, is not a real or accurate indicator of interest. There are plenty of folks who surf the forums and lurk while logged out. There will be plenty of folks who will read the update blogs without posting. Do not assume that those posting are a minority when no one is surveying the entirety of the player community. Just as inaction doesn’t constitute a minority, loud action doesn’t constitute a majority.
If Blizz should only ever act when there is a vocal majority then Blizz would never act because could just ignore any supposed majority. Whether or not Blizz is legally obligated was not discussed and basically is one of those captain obvious facts that has little to no relevance to the discussion. While they aren’t legally bound, it would make good business sense for them to engage the player base.
Thanks @Kilometer, but I was looking for Steve to post the source(s) of information he was referring to. However, I would gladly accept you providing access to the source(s) you reference. As of now there is no way to tell if you (or Steve) are mistaken or not.
Well, we can see how many views threads get, majority hover in the low to mid hundreds, the ones that break a thousand have been up for at least a week.
We also have to be mindful that we’re creeping up on a decade of game life where minimal attention has been given for a long time. Part of my earlier post was to basically infer that you get what you put in. If you don’t try to build a good forum community, it’s a roll of the dice if you wind up with one.
Compared to other older games whose forums I peek into from time to time, I’d say we’re actually doing pretty good here relative to traffic. There’s definitely a wave where things seem most dead between the month or two into a season, but I’d say that’s to be expected given the way Blizzard has gone about cultivating interest and their more or less “things only happen every 3-4 months” style of updates. Any in-between just tends to be our typical turf war drama or trolls being trolls.
As for whether or not Blizzard should be obligated to keep in touch, I’d say that’s part of the package deal when pushing a game that receives regular updates. One and done launch titles are one thing, but this isn’t that. Hell, D2 wasn’t even that and forums were less of a thing back then than now, let alone official ones, and I can pretty much guarantee a lot of the arguments we see now would’ve been made back then. And quite possibly addressed while D2 had actual dev focus. What’s done is done, though, and I’m compelled to say Blizz has learned little over the past couple decades. Or more accurately, how to optimize their community input.
Sure it is. As we have greater gaps of info interest wains, as we get new info interest grows. Thus is only natural. Out of sight out of mind.
But even if we take that 10k number and assume they all peek around the end of the quarter looking for info, 1, it’s much smaller than those following Blizz on Twitter/reddit, and 2, people here still relay that info.
Frankly they don’t even need to act if a vocal majority want something changed. Game development is not a democracy. Sure some good ideas can come from the community, but developing based on mob rule is not the right way to do it. Besides you were the one to bring up negative speculation or resentment. Not like that hasn’t happened on a daily basis with Blizzard games for nearly 20 years now.
