https://www.pcgamer.com/paradox-interactive-says-player-toxicity-is-driving-developers-away-from-its-forums/
“If you want to have a forum where developers are willing to go and answer your questions, then it is also your responsibility to build a place where we feel welcome, and where we can disagree in a productive and professional manner,”
Discuss
Wholeheartedly agree. Developers are precisely THE LAST people you want to be yelling at. They are the ones putting in the hours for you to keep playing and experiencing new sets.
I’m sure this thread will totally not have any Karens who feel like it’s their god given right to unleash their most justified anger towards the devs or anyone else who dares to stop them from voicing their very very real complaint.
My popcorn is ready.
Professionals asking amateurs to be professional is like asking a house cat to be a lion. They can try, and maybe convince you for a second, but it won’t happen. No matter how hard anyone tries.
People suck. Always have. Always will.
If I was a dev I wouldn’t come here. Why pay attention to countless posts that say nothing more than “devs are stupid for reasons I won’t even articulate”
This is a question posted in it’s own answer. Ironic.
I’d say not only tocixity, but stupidity also. I still remember the last: “We are not rigging the game, guys” post.
As a counterpoint, the Hearthstone devs (particularly Iksar and Celestalon) are pretty active on Twitter, and nobody who’s spent five minutes on that hellsite would think its users are particularly nice.
But you can make Twitter work for you if you’re willing to liberally use its block and mute functions. These forums have similar functions, so I don’t know if the devs are really discouraged from the forums just because of some random users’ hostility. Sure, some might be, but those would be unlikely to engage with users across multiple platforms, I think, not just the forums.
Maybe people just prefer Twitter? Not my thing, personally, but it seems to work for them. Plus, even though I hate Reddit’s threaded comment structure, it and Twitter’s reply system make it easier to follow Q&A-type interactions, compared to the forums, where you’re either scrolling up to see the posts being replied to, or have to read quoted posts multiple times.
They only come around when it’s expansion time, disappear after that.
The block and mute funtions on this forum don’t work nearly as well as those on twitter
Funny I remember a not so old post from Iksar over at twitter showing how he has been insulted and wished the worst by random community players on twitter and to be honest I assume the same would happen here.
At the end of the day it is their work to be on comunication with the player base of the game they develop and perhaps I’m too much of an old school educated moron but I think that if you have the means to perform such tasks “inhouse” the better.
There is too much dross on the forums to wade through. Toxicity AND stupidity as others are aptly pointing out. There are occasionally voices of reason here- but they’re a rarity in these lands.
Ya’ll realize they would have to PAY somebody to go through these forums, right? You really think they’re going to pay someone to come here and read a bajillion “nerf ticky” and “omg i lost cuz game R riggered” threads?
…Maybe an intern? Guarantee you don’t want anyone with actual TALENT wasting their time here instead of focusing on the game, lol
It’s Blizzard’s responsibility to pay people to moderate the forums. I can’t ban people for being toxic. And that’s probably not a power I should have.
If I am being honest, I think the treatment that designers endure on twitter and elsewhere would be magnified a hundred fold here.
Having admitted that, I would also point out that the players who come here are almost all players who feel they have a great deal invested in the game.
We know this is fallacy, but it is also exactly what the designers intended players to feel when they designed the game.
So, I cannot feel too sorry for those designers if they do not have the necessary skin for this forum.
It is a creature of their own making…
It’s just a microcosm of the Internet in general. People tend to be much more polite or reserved in person. I guess that’s obvious. It’s also imprudent, generally, to have weird outbursts around people who may end up punching you. Anyway, it’s too bad really.
Amen to this. Talk is cheap, particularly on the internet, but when you have to face actual consequences for your words then it’s incredible how polite people can become.
It’s been like this since the beginning of Hearthstone, where a subsection of a third party website might get breaking news/updates ahead of the official forum. Different era, I suppose.
It would be one thing if forum users were insulting individual developers personally, but taking offense to being told the game is bad? There’s always room to improve any game and it pays to be receptive, not only to social media people who happen to be players but all players! However if developers are not genuinely interested in this place, it’s probably best that they continue to avoid it. I do see them being routinely insulted collectively (eg. “devs must be clueless”), and I suppose I would take offense to that on behalf of the team…especially if the post does not identify any problems whatsoever, let alone offer possible solutions.
I have done my fair share of this.
But the devs never really spent any time here from jump.
Even on the old forums they only rarely made personal appearances.
Another thought where we as posters are also receiving the same treatment from other posters, and are still able to cope, and continue with the forum community… are dev much different from posters?
It’s more like twitter stole their hearts.
Twitter pulled out the black dress like flat out and the devs are like omg twitter can i get ur number. They went to egypt and then like well that’s how it happened.
Now we are single and like desperately seeking attention and so what we have to do is collectively save up for a big diamond necklace. It has to be obnoxious and beat out all the other ladies at the luncheon or else the devs wont be able to have the biggest diamond for social status. Then we book caribbean, puerto vallarta, after the diamond. The goal is to get devs to think of us, not twitter.
Does that make sense?
Honestly? Yes.
One constant theme any time I see the dev team described is that they are deeply passionate about the game. They really do care a lot about trying to make as good a game as they can. And of course, a lot of them (like most people) care about seeing themselves as good at their jobs.
Forum posters, I think, aren’t in the same position. This isn’t a passion of mine. Random people insulting me here means little and less, because at the end of the day they’re not insulting me, they’re insulting an (often wildly inaccurate) idea of who they think I am.
Devs don’t have the benefit of that kind of disconnect.