Dev Communication & Feedback is lacking

Can we get some more communication and feedback from the dev team through the community manager. What’s being worked on? Why? How do you guys as devs feel about the launch and the direction. Feedback to a multitude of things that been brought to the forums.

More than “x has been disabled”, “x has been reenabled”. “X has been nerfed, X has been buffed”. Actual feedback.

I understand it is only nearing 2 weeks into launch. But, that’s just the thing. It’s nearing 2 weeks and we haven’t had any true feedback or communication from the blues other than fixes and a minor set of plane jane patch notes. A standard needs to be set on the level of communication we expect to receive throughout this new title, and the amount of communication we will actually receive.

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Agree. One would think a company as big as Blizzard would put some effort into actual community management and communication. Instead we get nothing substantial.

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Good luck with that
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Yeah, the WoW devs have done a complete turnaround in their communication since Dragonflight and it has been received really well by the community. You’d think Blizzard would have made that a staple across all of their titles as a whole.

My concern is the amount of communication in D3 was zero to none. I fear that will be the same for this new title. I have high hopes that is not the case, but from what i’ve seen so far it looks grim.

Well, it seems they think that their reputation isn’t bad enough and might as well go all the way ^^

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The investors tackled all devs, sat them down like kids and told them, “no, you do not speak to your community after our latest PR disasters over the years”.

The only Blizzard employees communicating with the community, give or take two twitter accounts, are heavily trained in PR and you can clearly tell by the way they talk. Every word is extremely carefully weighed.

Communicating to the players has literally 0 benefit to Blizzard. It can only hurt them because a community of millions will remember every promise broken and every hint as being a promise.

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Two expansions along with S1 and S2.

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Pretty much this,
You can count on S1 mid July.
You can expect S2 - 3/4 months after that
You can expect a battlepass with a $15? price tag attached to it.

You can expect 1, probably 2 expansions/dlc to come from this

By three they come right? right…?

Yeah that’s how cashgrabs work.

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Yes, even if they don’t want to interact with people on the forums at least post regular updates and say you’re aware of X, Y and Z (the things you see tons of people talking about on the forums and tweeting at you about etc).

X is being worked on and may see changes in a patch this week or next or within some general ETA.

Y isn’t something you want to change at this time.

Z is something you might change in a season or xpac but you have no immediate plans to change it.

Maybe we’ll have a patch tomorrow with some changes. Maybe we won’t. We don’t know because nobody at Blizzard even attempts to communicate what’s going on.

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Was about to make a similar topic. I am a software developer too, sure we’re not paying subscriptions for a service but in a regular company actions should have been taken by now. I don’t blade specific people, it might be that their CI/CD pipeline is messed up because of the bugs, still this is unprofessional.

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thats not how you spell “typical blizzard”

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100% agree. I feel that they think it is acceptable from the D3 era to post one blog during “season PTR” then a follow up with changes after PTR, then complete silence until the next season PTR blog, and that sentiment has carried forward as we are dealing with the same communication team.

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Maybe they can take a little out of the $1 billion dollar yearly marketing budget and hire a community manager.

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I honestly have no idea if there’s even anyone on the Diablo communications team besides Adam. Like it might just be him?

They spent all that on paying Megan Fox to do eulogies.

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The launch was less than a week ago, with early access 4 days before that. They have been focused on stability and game-breaking exploits/bugs, which seems pretty appropriate. There hasn’t really been enough time to even gather data and make plans for what to do to improve balance and the experience overall.

They know what people are complaining about. They have seen all the videos streamers are making with their feedback, they’ve skimmed the Reddit and discord and forums. When they have a plan for what they want to fix and how, they will announce it. Before they have that plan, it would be a bad idea for them to wade in and start promising fixes they don’t have solutions for.

A lot of the feedback you’re seeing a lot of now is actually just the same stuff people were saying in closed beta, so they’ve actually had months to think about a lot of the stuff people are talking about.

They also had months to fix the infinite damage WW barb bug which was there in closed beta and reported.

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Yeah, community engagement hasn’t been Blizzard’s strong suit.

Community enragement on the other hand…

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lol, yes! they are pros at community enragement.