“How to defend yourself against a man armed with a Banana?” … Ok, so what about a Passion Fruit?
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I still don’t understand why would D3 team chose to be silent instead of telling us what is their mind. It is not like we are asking them to reveal anything juicy about D2R, Immortal, and D4 information and development.
All we want to know what they think of the D3 PTR discussion and their philosophy about D3 balance.
For example:
Is there any reason why they want to make followers a utility instead of a competent ally that helps us to fight the horde of demons.?
Why are they to refuse to give Double EXP as a seasonal theme?
Why are they didn’t think of buffing underutilized legendary and weak items and unpopular gems?
Why are they chose to do nothing about Primal tier and Ramaladni’s Gift?
Why they don’t want to introduce more gold sink options to the game?
Why they don’t want to increase more torment level or rescaling it?
Why they don’t want to make Uber bosses as another endgame content for D3?
and etc…
Even if they don’t want to do anything to what we suggested, but at least tell us the reason and their philosophy behind the action.
It is possible that their employment contract states that they are under a NDA (non-disclosure agreement), except in specific circumstances, such as Update Devlogs.
A community manager could shed light on whether they are under a NDA or not.
I can see it now: Season 23, Fear the Banana.
You’ll be in a greater rift and run into a huge mob of minions from Despicable Me all chanting banana and throwing bananas, banana peels and trying to whack you over the head with a bunch of bananas. Of course, Dave would have to be a boss and they would have to add dialogue saying, “Not cool Dave, Not cool” right after he accidentally kills part of his pack. The more I think about it, the more fun it sounds.
My thoughts exactly the same. Why should i work for free for one of the biggest gaming company? If they want me to test something, then pay me, right?
I can give feedback after the official release too. I don’t need to do their job of testing. This is not alpha, beta release of the game. Honestly i don’t know another game where the players test every update.
What is exciting for me is the new update. I don’t give a f if they screw the update badly. 
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I dont think they have ever given back their information on patches unfortunately. we are just going to have to exist in the disappoint…live.
It is important at all times to remember to separate the people and individual roles that may or may not have any say in how things are, from the company and how you feel about what’s happening.
I know that gets difficult with how super duper frustrating screaming at a wall for a decade can be. There’s a reason I’ve never participated in these things very often. Whatever 
an alleged engineer comes into these threads with to defend them, as an actual industry professional I can say with confidence that sometimes it really do be that simple and the problems lie in things like
- Company policy to just not give a @#%$ what you think or want, because that’s not what drives decisions
- Inadequate development or other human resources assigned to a project
- Back-asswards internal policy and priorities
But that’s not necessarily the fault of the CMs or even the developers. It’s not uncommon for a studio to move on and leave a project without the resources it needs to meet user expectations. Sometimes you’re stuck on a project where you need senior approval to do anything but the senior point of contact is tired of hearing about the project.
Sure, this patch was incredibly stupid and handling of all things community is getting increasingly poor, but it’s not like they just hired really bad people randomly for the last decade to work at Blizzard.
You can’t start singling out people like Richie as they appear and throwing around stuff like “clueless CMs” like it’s some personal failing.
You may not have noticed but the PTR forums magically unlocked themselves
after direct feedback about it being locked too soon after the PTR ended for everyone to provide their thoughts.
Literally the only reason this thread has continued is because we asked for something they could actually do, and they did it almost immediately. Blizzard’s silence only occasionally being broken as a company for patronizing "insights’ and your corporate-issued opinions for the quarter are not the same thing as silence on the part of the CMs or even the devs.
It’s extremely likely we’re fighting policy, not people, here.
Rathma dude needs to be flogged though. No excuses, that was just …I mean what the @#%$ man. You had one job. 
Because all the above notwithstanding, they basically failed even within the confines of what’s allowed, according to a long-standing pattern with this specific franchise.
You can say it was doomed to fail as soon as it launched and it wasn’t D2R, but really, it’s been almost a decade now and no one still playing really cares about salty D2 fanboys who didn’t get a “real” Diablo game. What people are asking for rn is specific to D3 and really just general stuff like “hey let’s not have builds be 20x as powerful as other builds” which is a weekend project, really, properly utilizing the PTR and community feedback.
You absolutely have to do better. Even if the company itself doesn’t care about the franchise, you should care about your work. Otherwise it really shows.
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Because they shall use their limited time to work on the patch and not “waste” time discussing with us. For me that’s the job of the community managers. They are the interface between the developers and the community. And sorry to say that but they aren’t doing their job very well atm.
I mean commenting a misspelled Blackthorne’s but silence when it comes to a completely destroyed build or a game braking bug like taking damage while having a shield pylon active. A bug that was reproduced many times and also shown in some YouTube videos.
I don’t expect them to reply to every thread but a short “We are aware of this bug and working on a fix” is not too much to aks for concerning such an important topic.
On the other hand there is also potential for improvement from OUR side. Why do we always need “100” similar threads for the same topic? Why not having one single thread? That would also make it easier for the CMs to reply to a topic as they don’t have to handle multiple threads and decide which one they answer to or which one contains really valuable suggestions they could forward to the developers.
I really hope D2R and D4 aren’t sabotaged by bad devs/mods/HR/etc.
These games will be fun. D3 is fun. Yet, it seems like the people running the show are trying to ruin their own game.
People only want the dev feedback because CM feedback is incredibly restricted and they think the devs are going to address all their specific concerns, which isn’t realistic even for the CMs even if you think that’s “their job”.
The truth is they are exactly doing their jobs.
The reason you don’t get a “we are aware of this and working on a fix” for everything is that they can’t make that statement, because they aren’t allowed, they don’t know that, or it simply isn’t true. Blackthorne typo just happened to be something trivial that wasn’t in any of those categories.
The current state is worse than normal because there have been policy and staff changes increasing the distance between players and decision-makers in the company.
The primary (day-to-day) job of the CM team is basically frontline customer service and babysitting on multiple platforms. They can’t say they’re working on things when they aren’t on the team doing the work, and they can’t pass along every point of feedback since half of it is garbage and most of it will never be worked on.
They’re basically going to have to assign someone to filter all the rants, threats, whining, and other shenanigans who has a better point of developer contact than taping coded messages under a bench, which is less “personal effort” and more “sweeping policy change” - something that would be above their paygrade to decide.
Then we can start addressing little gems like completely ignoring even overwhelmingly supported suggestions and requests, unacceptable lack of human resources, etc that communication changes would shine an even bigger light on.
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That’s what YOU think the job of a CM is. I wrote what I think is their job. We will only know the truth if a CM will tell us because either you nor me are CMs.
Sorry, but when they would be THAT limited we don’t need them at all. I remember a comment of a CM that said that they “collect/filter” our feedback and forward it to the developers. So they are in touch. Doesn’t make sense they shouldn’t be allowed to communcate in the other direction.
And people are not upset because they don’t get an answer on EVERY topic, thye are upset because we don’t get ANY feedback.
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We absolutely do need them. The fact that they aren’t doing what you want right now doesn’t make them useless.
No need to get personal! As you can see in this thread there are many people who ask for feedback. It’s not only what I want.
They promised several times to improve the communication, answered to some irrelevant topics and then there was silence again.
It’s a selfmade problem by Blizzard that people are upset about this.
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That’s kind of the point. It’s not the CM’s fault. They don’t have unilateral authority to speak and act. I don’t have to be a CM to know that - even if it hadn’t been explained in the past, it’s pretty unrealistic. They’re basically at the mercy of company policy.
Blizzard has terrible communication and community engagement, but it’s not the CM team’s fault and they aren’t useless. That’s not getting personal, that’s a specific rebuke of your statement.
The fact that this exchange is even taking place is thanks to a CM, probably much to someone’s chagrin.
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Yes, and for years now, with various CMs, they have repeatedly told us that they’re listening, it’s something they’re committed to getting better at, and they’ll definitely be super at it in the future. That’s the problem. Players are sick of them saying they’ll do it. Players want them to actually do it. At this point, they’ve said they’ll do it so often and failed to deliver, that we no longer believe them when they say it again.
I fully understand that the CMs are the messengers taking flak for the suits above them and, to a certain extent, I understand that they’re between a rock and a hard place but also, I just don’t care which level of the company is responsible for their inability to be able to communicate effectively to us, I just want them to fix it rather than hear, yet again, that they promise they’ll fix it.
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I totally agree, I was just calling out specific criticisms of people who literally have no say in the matter and do what little they can, whenever possible.
Now I am thinking about a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book where each choice involves you getting offended FOR other people, and depending on what you choose to get offended by, changes how people get dissapointed in your generation even more.
It’s funnier in my head…I swear it is so much funnier in my head LOL
As for the general sentiment of Blizzard not listening…We all know that already.
The PTR feedback forums have essentially been 95% “PLEASE DONT LET THIS NECROMANCER CHANGE GO LIVE BECAUSE ITS COMPLETLY POINTLESS, AND HERE ARE 100 WELL THOUGHT-OUT REASONS WHY ITS BAD, AND HERE ARE 289 DIFFERENT IDEAS YOU COULD TRY TO MAKE IT BETTER”
But we all know nothing will change for the more desired effects, the set is going to come out as “Bone Spear 3.0” and you better like it, because reasons…
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They do listen across forums, reddit, twitter, streams, etc. They do pass on the feedback to the Dev team, Producers, Designers, etc. The problem is we players don’t usually get any sort of feedback on the other side showing that the Devs heard what was passed on. Of course, they are not going to do everything players demand - we don’t expect that. It would be nice to have more engagement though.
There is also something else - when they do listen players often just plain ignore that. It is not fair to say they don’t listen at all. They do. They did make changes to the PTR mid cycle in response to player feedback. They unlocked this forum. There will be other changes to the patch when we see the patch notes.
The perception that there is not enough communication is not easy to get rid of - and it crosses all the Blizz games based on their internal policies. I do know for certain that is not the CM’s fault.
I keep seeing some misunderstandings about what the CMs do. Their job is not to sit on the forums. They:
- Collect feedback across multiple platforms. Forums, reddit, fan sites, streams, etc. Some is general feedback and some is targeted feedback the devs ask for - such as a class on the PTR. This involves weekly reports, meetings, etc.
- Write all the News Blogs, Patch notes, updates, etc. Those are a pain because they require lots of approvals and also localization to other languages.
- Create and implement player engagement plans across multiple platforms.
- Work with PR and Marketing on campaigns and planning.
- Contests, give aways, etc.
- Manage and interact with the extended Influencer community of aprox 30-50 people.
- Write and manage and set up Q&A sessions, live interviews, media engagements, etc.
- Coordinate with the Events team to create interesting activities and interactions for events like Blizzcon. Handle selection, scheduling, and logistics of getting live people to places like Blizzcon or PaxEast for events. Then handling all the on-ground work for all those activities.
- Deal with MissCheetah on occasion.
My point is that posting on the forums is a small fraction of what our CMs do. We currently have PezRadar - Community Lead (management role). FilthieRich - Community Manager. TomPowers - Community Manager. They cover all the Diablo Franchise, not just Diablo 3.
This goes for all the CMs for all the games. However, despite all that they do, the one failing tends to be timely reactions to feedback - that policy does not seem to let them provide.
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Finally, the root of the problem. I’m not getting replies to every one of my threads because you’re taking up all their time.
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.