The latest interview with Stylosa, as well as some very long awaited nerfs in the latest patch notes do show that there is at least some acknowledgement of issues in the game, and I for my part would like to thank Jeff and the OW team for that. The biggest issue I think most people have is that developer silence really doesn’t give this acknowledgement any kind of weight and just makes the playerbase as a whole feel ignored.
Would it really be so hard for developers to each have an hour or so of AMA time or pencilled in topical discussion on individual heroes or meta balance at different ranks? Obviously there are things they either can’t or won’t talk about, but even a simple “we know this is an issue for many players, we intend on addressing it somehow” would be a better response than the silent treatment we are so used to.
The thing is, the forums are quite misinformed on a lot of topics, the prevalence of Dive, what makes GOATS strong, why certain mechanics can or cannot ever be changed, why certain characters cannot or will not receive certain changes. These are things that a little insight or acknowledgement would be great for. So an AMA on here, or even a curated Q&A session on Twitch would be perfect community outreach.
After all, if Jeff can sit silent for hours at a time on a Christmas twitch stream, I’m sure answering a few questions from the forums in that time isn’t a huge request.
They update the community and share info and discuss feedback regularly already.
There are literally hours of Jeff Kaplan videos (official updates, interviews, information pieces, etc.) on YouTube and writings approaching the equivalent of the Library of Alexandria, but specifically about Overwatch, exist on these forums and across Blizzard’s websites.
There is no developer silence and never has been with this game.
Even if this were true, which it isn’t, scheduling AMAs and talking frankly with players about where game direction is going in regards to specific characters instead of the vague mysterious Blizz talk surrounding intentions and game balance could only ever be a good thing.
I thought that was part of the role of a community manager though, we have more than one too, but I rarely see such interaction with the community. I do agree though. Unfortunately after the Mercy feedback threads were shown to be ignored things just got worse by many official accounts opting to have ‘hidden forum profiles’.
Powers made the Mercy megathread and pinned Overmoji if i remember correctly. But nowadays yes, community managers only say “Im locking this topic” and thats everything you see with blue tracker.
They actually don’t. Before the last two days, we hadn’t heard from a developer in about 2 weeks. We don’t have any serious conversation like we used to.
And the VAST Majority of these are from before October 2017, which was the last time a dev sat down at their computer and talked with the community about whatever came up.
Everything else are faceless comments under patch notes, brief acknowledgements of people thanking them, and some lore tidbits. Occasionally we’ll get something informative like
But we so rarely get even basic stuff like this. And the fact remains that they are more willing to go onto some stream than actually talk to their community, and they pass it off as communication.
Any forum talk they give is so sporadic, and it’s so often irrelevant, it’s really hard to call that “consistent communication”
The Mercy thread? You mean the trash can he made to make his job easier? Let’s be honest. That thread was only made because he was sick of having to deal with the mercy spam. So he tried to concentrate it into a thread as “feedback” when all it really is there for is to reduce mercy topics.
They usually address the community on different platforms, which might be the reason it seems like they’re silent to some people This month Jeff addressed the community in a developer update and the Stylosa interview, last month he spoke to the community at the Blizzard HQ “Creator’s Residency” on Twitch with Emongg and Fran interviews, November was Blizzcon with major announcements, etc. Last December Jeff actually popped into the forums and said most of their major announcements were made during Blizzcon and they all had their heads down working that month, though they still managed to put out Yule Log , here was his post:
They usually do regularly communicate to the community, just in little bursts in different places that people might not be looking.
I mean, I would like for the devs, as a fellow human being, to be able to enjoy life as happily as they could. And I feel like steering as far away from the cesspit that is this community would be a good way of achieving that.
It is LITERALLY their job to make the game for their audience though. I get that getting super involved with the playerbase would bring it’s own problems, but alienating the audience for the game isn’t exactly conducive to a great gaming experience from either side.
Going on streams and doing mini Q and A’s isn’t communication because players who don’t follow every twitch streamer miss out on info + the topics are restricted to whatever the streamer wants to talk about. I’d prefer the devs to just go back to posting YouTube updates on the official channel and detailed forum posts.
Well, usually the streamer interviews do ultimately wind up getting posted here for discussion anyways, much like Stylosa’s recent interviews with Jeff are stickied right now at the top of the forums. So often times even if the devs are talking elsewhere, people here on the forums should find out eventually.
The thing is, the Overwatch community is pretty big and scattered all over the internet, the forums are just one small pocket and not necessarily a representative one at that. There’s twitch, Youtube, twitter and reddit players to communicate with as well, which likely have much larger populations than these forums, so it makes sense to reach out wherever they can.
, here was his post: