I donât think itâs an issue with them not reading the forums. Iâm sure they read the forums just as much as any of us do, they just donât respond.
In a hostile environment, you donât stick your neck out. You donât pop your head out of the trenches, for fear of it being shot off.
With the current amount of fully automatic fire being tossed their way these days, I donât blame them for not popping their head up to speak up much.
Yes they do. You are being obtuse by trying to refer to the people here as âpeopleâ like they are something else and you are also ignoring the threads that offer a good number of solutions to different problems in the game.
Also seeing as one of the mission statements for Blizzard, along with this same phrase being on an orc statue at their HQ, is every voice matters they should most definitely be looking to forum feedback as well and not just completely ignored with reasonable solutions are offered. This does not mean they have to be used but at the very least acknowledgement of these good suggestions would be nice.
Do you have any clue how much spam and chatter there is on these forums, not to mention the toxic behavior. It would take a full time person to keep up with half of the posts on the forum. Not to mention the asinine comments people leave after a dev responds. If you want to look at why there isnât more communication or more frequent communication look no further than this community.
While there are a few good topics each week most people use this place as a toilet. They crap all over the place and then get up and leave. They arenât interested in a real and interesting conversation. If a dev is going to take time to respond and engage in a conversation it should be expected that all of the comments after would be on topic discussing the issue at hand. Not somebody asking for Bastion changes on an explanation of mercy changes, etc. etc. etc.
Long story short if you want the devs to respond more, those who are ridiculous need to learn when it is appropriate to be an idiot and when it isnât. AND for those who have one viewpoint to learn to see an opposing viewpoint and be able to discuss the pros and cons of each. IF we (the community) can learn to do this a bit better, maybe we will see some more developer engagement.
Hereâs an example of how devs should interact with their consumers if they care about what they want to say: Twitch
I donât think this would happen if the Devs responded more in the forums. As it stands now, someone sees a blizz icon on a post, and they think that the blizz responder is actively reading past their response.
From what I can tell, once theyâve responded to a post, they forget about it afterwards.
If there were more back and forth, I think weâd see less âBlizzâ sniping happen.
Warframe PR peeps are a good example too. They do I think 2 devstreams a month.
Gee, I wonder why that is.
My point, exactly.
The forums are not a good place for feedback, most of the people on them donât know that much about balance
The reason why itâs like this is because the devs have just seemingly stopped responding to important topics.
Instead we get them to restate that Torb has different prosthetics to use, and they go silent for weeks to months unless theyâre posting patch notes or announcements.
If you have a community forum meant for dev/community interaction, and you donât use it for that purpose, the community is going to become angry, resulting in backlash.
If you ask me, the devs brought it upon themselves for not communicating or using this outlet like they promised.
A majority of my frustration and anger and straight up hatred towards the dev team is the feeling that theyâre not listening to us nor care.
I love this game. MANY love this game. I need the devs of this game to reciprocate that feeling. Nothing hurts me more than the makers of a game I love not showing the same level, if not more, affection towards their creation.
While the devs do need to communicate more the forums arenât the place I would say. The devs should talk in a place where people actually care about the game and want it to improve. The forums are not that place.
cant open twitch right now, but if that is WF⌠I agree they are nice, but you seriously cant compare the size of both communities, go into their forums and come back an hour later, you will barely see any new post, here lots of threads with a really good number of posts are buried in the 5th page by then.
I do want more interaction with us, like they used to, but i understand the circumstances that lead to this point⌠irrational fury, whinning, complains and overall toxicity with a touch of entitlement that followed any comment that is taken out of context and completely butchered in an attempt to make the devs look bad, despite later being proved they were right all along, i would have long since stopped any form of interaction or reading the forums.
Theyâre listening.
Weâre just collectively so awful to them theyâre afraid to respond.
Baishok, a ex WoW community manager (ex because he went to work on League of Legends. He wasnât fired and left on good terms from what I read) said on his Twitter that the WoW devs are under strict orders by higher ups to not even read the forums.
The reasoning? He said the forum goers are so horrifically toxic it just completely destroys their morale. He said it kills them when people completely rip into them on the forums.
This is why almost all feedback is HEAVILY filtered, consolidated, and chopped up into bite sized piece by the âCommunity Managersâ and given to the developers over on the WoW forums.
You will rarely ever see a WoW dev there posting, almost all feedback to and from the devs is done through community managers there.
Here on the Overwatch forums you can actually see Jeff and other devs posting. On the WoW forums youâre lucky to see one dev posting every 3-4 months. Theyâre as rare as bigfoot.
And thatâs because we were so toxic to them we completely drove them off the forums.
If we continue being horrible to the devs here on the Overwatch forums we will suffer the same fate; the devs jump ship, we will see little to no more dev posts and all feedback will be filtered through Community Managers.
They are not paid to browse forums and reply.
While I agree the devs need more communication, this sentiment is just inaccurate. For any type of positive reaction on the forums, devs need to be extremely careful about their responses right now. Most are met with cynicism and negativity.
When devs speak on matters unrelated to bugs/lore/balance, they get slack for not doing so.
Contrarily, when they make comments on lore/bugs/balance, the forum community is very specific about what theyâre receptive too. 9 out of 10 times, itâs just meant with more slack.
I think if the devs created a culture of regularly posting on these boards, then it could get to a point of not needing to âbe important issues.â But right now, the relationship between the devs and this forum community is so strained that most dev replies are met with hostility.
For source, go look up pretty much any dev reply in last three months and look at replies.
I would believe that if that was truly the case, but when you go to other forums such as WoW, LoL, and Hots. They have the same toxicity as this forum, but the difference is that they keep tweaking classes, champions, heroes at a moderate pace. Overwatch does not do that and itâs yearly.
That they take your feedback into account, and that they personally make you aware of when they are specifically taking your feedback into account. Those are two separate unrelated things.
We can post here all day long, and they can come read it all they want and mine ideas from it that they use. All without taking time to bother pointing it out to anyone. If it goes on then it is going on regardless of if you peosnally have any direct awareness of it or not.
If however what you want is to be informed when a dev is reading what we say. That is its own thing that really has no relation or bearing on if blizz are leveraging our feedback.
Maybe they find we have some good ideas but are just totally bring down bummer jack rags to have to directly interact with.
If that was the case , as an internal manager iâd want them to read the posts, but not force them to have to interact with us too much. Cause if too much direct interaction with us is a unwanted job. Then blizz could have a harder time retaining quality talent that didnât want a PR job, and were looking for an engineering/designer job, that didnât have to involve with the general public too directly too often.
Every game and every community has complains and âtoxicâ people, so this is just an excuse, moreover youâre making as if is impossible to make a moderated dev stream. There is also the cult of personality problem with OW, when there are too many issues itâs just enough for Jeff Kaplan to descend to earth and say few words (doesnât really matter what he says) that his comment gets hundreds of likes and everyone forgets what they were arguing about. They develop an online FPS game and act as if they are making a single player RPG, thatâs the issue and them hiding from community will make the situation worse in time.
Yea and remember how people were against it and knew it wasnât the way to go 
now we have had this mess for a year.