There are many examples of game companies engaging with their players that backfired tremendously. Often the greatest controversies have come as a response to something the devs said (“Do you guys not have phones?”, “pride and accomplishment”…)
I would love to see more communication, but we shouldn’t play dumb and pretend that “any communication is better than none”. We are asking them to take on a risk.
It’s not really a big risk to acknowledge stuff has been said tbh. What people are asking for and the fiascos you mentioned which are in many ways the result of terrible communication are entirely separate things.
I gave extreme examples, but you said it yourself earlier that more communication from the devs would shine light on other issues such as resources allotted for development.
I hope for more communication, but I’m also realistic than anything substantive runs a risk of a negative community response.
I keep seeing “listening” here. That’s only one side of the communication equation though. I’m sorry, but if you are “listening” then prove it by responding. No one is THAT busy that they can’t type a line or two in the official forums. That excuse is worn out. If someone is talking to me I don’t just stare at them, turn around and walk away. Dev’s should be held to a higher standard than what they are currently demonstrating.
Blizzard, like many companies, does not like to go into detail about their internal structure, staff allocation, and staffing levels. You can’t even figure it out by going there in person. That sort of thing is often used by competitors to speculate about what a company might be working on/focusing on.
This is not really uncommon. The most you get from Blizzard are general ideas that teams exist and an estimate of “small” or “large”.
True that as a company blizzard have many departments and many employees and being a Gaming company communication is key , we know the inner workings of a company but for customers to have raise issues only for the end product to still be shipped means tone deaf on the company’s part . It falls on the company to address its issue .
Take square enix FFXIV , as a gaming company when the developers speaks everyone listens ( Obvious when the audience cheers for the developers and NOT the game ) but when blizzard speaks its "do i not have phones " ?
The constant communication gaming company have with their fans is paramount , the respect they have for each other is clearly present regardless of investors blah blah blah going behind the scenes . Other gaming company can make each and every one of their fans feel important .
Both are companies of similar caliber and yet being both their customers can yet feel so different , if other gaming companies can do it I don’t see why blizzard cannot . Other gaming companies have similar structures to blizzard and yet they are going above and beyond to exceed their fans expectations .
We get that it might not be CM fault or whoever but at the end of the day when the product is shipped with defects despite it being feedbacked multiple times during testing then who is to blame ?
This is a meme, that later becomes an actual parody board game, waiting to happen 
I’m actually afraid of that seeing the randomness in their doings.
Nobody asked for Rathma to be turned into useless garbage. So do not insult our feedback in such a way.
Yeah, like lengthy boring art panels instead of any info about D3.
And all of it is crammed into this forum, so they are failing the whole franchise at once with their inactivity.
For what exactly?
Then they should be called something else than “community managers”. And they should not have lied in their intro posts about how they would like to improve communication and such.
Kinda weird you’d assume they lied when they said they wanted to do something despite knowing
Kinda just seems like you’re trying to maintain them as a villain because they’re the only point of contact you have with the company. Stubbornly refusing a point to their existence doesn’t actually refute it, it’s just noise.
Again, you’re having this fit because a CM allowed it, in direct response to feedback from the community.
There’s a big difference between
The CMs are useless and don’t do anything, why do they even exist, all they do is lie to us
and
Blizzard needs to re-examine P&P to better-meet the needs of their community, improve internal communication, and expose more of that to the players.
Absolutely. In fact, my posts were pretty harsh. They were also specifically targeted at certain behaviors and shared my (unfavorable) impression of the tone of communication alternating between talking down to the players and deceptive PR spins.
You can absolutely communicate without these things. Communication typically backfires when you don’t. I gave my thoughts on the phone thing when it happened but the tl;dr there was that presentation was doomed to fail from the moment some brain donor decided to pitch a mobile game to a predominantly PC audience. It had nothing to do with communication happening - quite the opposite, Blizzard helped create that ugly environment by failing to communicate what it was or even (until the 11th hour) what it wasn’t.
EA attempted to spin harsh game balancing designed to drive microtransactions.
Neither is really a good example not because they’re extreme, but because they simply aren’t examples of communication being discussed here and are in many ways directly contradict what’s being asked for and even highlight the importance of it.
FFXIV was brought up as a positive example. They absolutely bury their players in information, even make a regular event of it. People happily pay a monthly sub and then bury them in microtransaction money while more-or-less worshiping the ground the developers walk on.
Is it an anomaly? Sure, but not because it’s a certain type of game. it’s anomalous because they’ve maintained a very careful relationship and clear, open communication with their playerbase that presents the image of a team that’s genuinely interested in their feedback and strives to address their needs and concerns. Every update is practically made, in part, by the playerbase.
It’s not the outcome (communication not leading to disaster) that’s significant here, but the process leading up to it (candid communication with the community).
Communication is only as disaster-prone as the communication itself. Going months without a word only to actively work against your community when you do appear is never going to be received well. Dishonesty or spin are almost always immediately apparent to the playerbase and a great way to insult them. Trying to push things on them that they don’t want or care about will cause them to push back.
None of these things are communication, though.
I know Matthew isn’t a CM but he was relatively a chatterbox for a brief month or so. Then he just dropped off the forums. I wonder if got his keyboard taken away by management…
Shouldn’t need to be pointed out here but this long silence after significant and poorly-received changes on the PTR while we wait on a blog post that is coming soon™ that will only serve to tell us how things are going to be, without even the benefit of further testing, is exactly the problem.
Waiting to see if we’ve been heard or are just going to get an undemonstrated “We hear you!” is an unhealthy tradition.
Dual wield with a Hamburger?
Nope, OP, will be NERFED
You do know he has been commenting on D2R recently. I suspect that Blizzard modified his job duties to be more D2R-focused. This is speculation but makes logical sense to me.
So maybe really what needs to happen is have the community pounding on streams from Rhykker and Bludd et al and have THEM provide the feedback? One could assume that those streamers that show up in interviews in the launcher would be in that group of influencers?
Yes, those people are in that group of influencers. I am not sure aggressively brigading them would get the results you want though.
Feedback from all sources is considered, but ultimately the Devs and the Mgt above them, make the final calls and those are not always what you might want - or it might not be when you want it.
Streamers don’t really have an advantage over people on the forums - except that some of them are pretty good at putting together well thought out communications. For example, an composed video with examples illustrating a point may have more impact than an angry rant (which some people do), on the forums.
I suspect that much of the community’s ire stems from a lack of acknowledgment. In most cases, a simple “Thanks for the feedback, we’ll take it under consideration” goes a long way in making people feel heard. But there’s too little of that, and likely too few CMs and Blizzard staff to distribute enough of them.
Regardless, if Blizzard could find a way to stop Blizzarding so hard, they might consider that more open and inclusive lines of communication with their consumer communities will result in a happier, more satisfied consumer community.
And folks, I just want to remind you: Don’t direct your anger toward the CMs. Their hands are tied by corporate red tape. CMs are not the bad guys.
I agree that better communication from Blizzard would be appreciated.
I will caveat that with the simple observation that most players do not visit Blizzard’s forum. For example, I think that the new D3 forum + now D2 + D2R forum total less than 50,000 at last check. This is a rather small percent of the diablo playerbase.
100% This
It was disheartening to see everyone piling on Nev before she left when it should have been obvious to all that a CM is not a Developer and has no power to make said Developers change anything at all.
Yeah, not “aggressively brigading” per sec, but these folks read their comments and are well aware of the issues and they put forth suggestions for fixes in many cases. I guess it’s more of figuring out a way for those voices to be taken seriously when glaring problems erupt.
But on another point, it does seem odd that there seem to be a lot of pre-PTR issues that should have been uncovered before testing by players began - like the massive nerf to GoD DH allegedly due to the interaction with a single affix…or that FB/Tals would be one massively OP…or the immortal Necro…etc). I get that PTR is to test/break things, but some of these should have been so obvious from internal testing that they should have never made it to the PTR stage…
I think most players would be happy if they understood the direction the Devs were going with things via blue posts, even if they disagree with that direction.
(Oh wait, this community can get pretty toxic so who really knows)
In the previous two PTRs, players expressed concerns about the patches before they even hit the PTR server, e.g. Clones having projectile attacks + dune dervishes = unavoidably dead hardcore heroes. We reported it as soon as the patch notes went up, they went with it to PTR like that, we reported it in the PTR Feedback forum, they went with it to live like that, we reported it on live. It’s still like that.
If players can see issues just from the design documentation, why can’t they see it from their own testing? Heck, I reported during the last PTR that two of the Crusader clone types use an ability that causes the clone to immediately de-spawn. I reported it on live. Neither was acknowledged and it remains broken to this day. I even suggested that if they couldn’t fix the de-spawning issue, they could limit the Crusader’s clones to being the type that didn’t use the ability.
The disengagement of the players is entirely due to us showing them design flaws, bugs or just straight-up mistakes and them going to PTR and/or live with them regardless.
For me it’s proof that the community understands the game far better then Devs do and/or that the Devs don’t play the game themselves.
QFT. It either shows that feedback isn’t read after all, or it is read, but they lack the ability, either technical or budget-wise, to remedy them. Whatever it might be it’s hardly testament for what used to be Blizzards moto, ‘polish until it shines’.