Everything any dev say publicly about stuff they believe will be coming soon in the forums gets interpreted as a promise and a guaranteed thing. You can see the reaction from Jeff saying that we could be getting a dev update this week, and people has been using the last 4 hours asking “where is my dev update, Blizzard?”, and getting increasingly more and more sarcastic/angry about they “lying about the dev update”.
That’s why the devs only come forward nowadays when they have 100% certainty about something. We only get talk about reworks when they already know what the “rework” will be. We only get info about updates when it’s already deep into drying concrete. Because otherwise, someone will turn their words into a PR nightmare.
For instance, let’s say a random dev come in and say “Mercy is being discussed, and we are experimenting with giving her Resurrection back as an ultimate, but it’s still being analyzed”. I’m 100% sure a bunch of people would interpret that as “Devs are reverting Mercy!” and when the actual patch come in, and it’s a very different thing (how different don’t matter), everyone that was expecting a full revert would be in pitchforks and torches all over the forums.
Just learn how to interpret text, and recognize that “A Dev Update will be ready next week” is very different from
Always thought it was their job to communicate with us, because, you know, we paid our money for a game that has now gone to dogs.
And updates that were very common have now became a rarity because they stopped caring about us, players, and now are focused on OWL. When the are supposed to focus on us, main playerbase. You know, the 99.9% of all players?
And they also should do balancing, but every character or rework they spit out is either terribly broken or terribly underpowered, despite it being on PTR. So I guess they aren’t looking at the numbers either. Despite it being their job.
But hey thanks for explaining! I am now not hating the developers and their company in general!
Guys, let’s give a multi-billion company a break after they did nothing at all!
/s
It is, but my point is that we as a community also have to understand what they are saying, and not mix solid promises (eg, “Torbjorn will receive a rework”) with casual information (“we might have a dev update next week”). If we don’t, then the casual information will just stop coming because it’s more problematic to deal with a bunch of people interpreting stuff wrongly than people complaining about no communication outside patch notes.
So the developers should not talk to the community because people got excited because the developers haven’t spoken with the community for the last few months?
I agree, community reacting like this over a maybe not coming in time is why most companies are guarded with what they say (and end up saying a lot less to the community to avoid mistakes like this happening).
But on the other hand, so far it’s not been THAT bad right? Seems like it’s all in good fun for now, but it is getting close.
Why do people constantly feel the need to defend Blizzard? For what? This only enforces the same behavior they are exhibiting now and gets us nowhere. It is their job to communicate with us. It’s an obligation of theirs. It’s also to let us know that they do care about the people who play their game and they are passionate about their involvement and acting as a bridge between us, and the game.
This has been non existent lately. A couple of responses to some minuscule threads every two weeks isn’t sufficient. It gives us nothing. Their lack of response to the embarrassment that was the Summer Games is telling as is. Why do they insist on constantly having us play guessing games? Is it really that hard to be straightforward about their future plans with the game and keep us in the loop?
Have you found any proofs that what they made was because of community asking for it? I have plenty of proofs regarding community not asking for private profiles, roadhog nerfs, reworks, tweaks, other nerfs which Blizzard still pushed through, sometimes even without PTR.
What do you have?
For this specific topic, about the dev update, yeah. It’s been very minor, but it’s still filling the frontpage with threads “where is my dev update”, and it was the straw that break the camel’s back for me, which led to me creating a thread to complain about the complaints.
Life is strange, right?
It’s less defending Blizzard, and more talking to my fellow forumites to be reasonable human beings instead of an angry mob.
Once we stop treating every blue/orange post as promises slated in stone, we can go back together into complaining about the devs not talking to us.
The community doesn’t have to specifically ask for everything for them to make changes…they can decide to do things based off data or even their own personal experience with the game
It’s very convenient for you focus on the stuff they don’t do whilst never pointing out when they do the contrary…blankets statements of devs ignoring community are utterly BS and you know it…nothing would EVER change in game if that was the case
This is mostly because they rarely do anything community asks them, and if they do - they almost never tell. And thus you have no proof. So stop defending them.
To prove myself no biased, I will mention a couple of things they added because community asked for it: Mercy’s bunny hop mechanic and FMA.
Blizzard has a choice to disregard the vocal minority who’s threads root in emotion and have no factual information to back themselves up. There are always people who are going to be angry, you can’t control how people act a certain way. There have been several instances where there have been productive threads with a myriad of different feedback. These threads usually end up front and center on the forums for the developers to see - for an extended period of time, too. They, however, choose to ignore it. That’s where I’m getting at.
First of all, there really is no reason for people to get upset because the week isn’t over and clearly that means that the update will be coming out tomorrow. If it doesn’t come out tomorrow, then everyone has the right to lose their minds.
HOWEVER, with that being said, they did say that the video should be out this week. I can understand people getting worked up about it because normally videos come out on Tuesdays or Thursdays, and there are a lot of concerns that the community would like to see addressed.
But you can’t sit there and tell me that even right now, there isn’t one person in that office that has no idea when the video will be coming out. SOMEONE at Blizz knows that today isn’t the day they are going to push that video live. SOMEONE knows that tomorrow or maybe next Monday will be the day. SOMEONE can take 5mins out of their busy, oh so busy day to jump on the forums to give people a quick update and say “Hey guys, video should be up tomorrow/Monday, sorry for the delay”.
They KNOW how demanding/passionate the community can be. There is NO reason to just ignore people. Why even bother saying anything at all. If they had months of dev silence, why even bother to ignite the community like that and then not bother to continue to talk to us.
If they can’t be on the forums all the time, that is totally fine. I get it, but they NEED TO HIRE someone to be the go-between person with the devs and the forums/community. A PR person of sorts.
I don’t know why this isn’t a thing. Ive already suggested it many many times.
Hire me. I would gladly put in 168 hours a week being this person. I would love that job. Someone who can relay questions/comments between community and devs to keep an open and HEALTHY discussion flowing. Every Friday I would post a thread about the most asked questions that week and dev responses to all of them.
I would walk around the office and while the devs do the work they need to do, I would ask them the important things and write it down so I could communicate it with the community.
…but I get it. I probably wont be that person. BUT WE NEEEEEED THAT PERSON TO EXIST!
EDIT:
See. Just what I thought and what I was talking about. Thanks for giving people the answer. However, I still stand by what I said and I think there should be a full time position for a community manager.
This is the same thing with the LGBT issue. They said there were LGBT heroes so some people think they are justified in demanding they announce another once since Tracer is technically just one hero.
![:slight_smile:](https://d74zh8edaijub.cloudfront.net/en/overwatch/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=5" ":slight_smile:")
