Sorry for the double negative.
It doesn’t make sense from a gamer’s viewpoint, nor does it serve as a way to better the game.
And one thing that always bothers me when people post how many posts the devs have read is that when you aren’t sign in to battlenet or the overwatch launcher, it doesn’t count your posts read.
Plus, looking at the last couple patches: the changes to hanzo, grav-dragons not being powerboosted, Brigitte nerfs, Ana and Lucio buffs. I tend to see more evidence that they do read than don’t read.
They read it but they ignore it. When a member of the team said the LFG system needed to be a launch feature, they waited 2 years to do it, and that’s what it feels like here.
Let’s take Mercy as an example. People had suggested nerfing Rez and giving Mercy am E ability, but they instead have us a really unpopular rework, and just tried to allay the fears expressed in feedback rather than take it into account when making decisions. Then she was OP and people suggested removing Rez, or reverting to 3 sec before regen, or nerfing damage boost, but then they nerf her healing while saying something to invalidate the classic understanding of Mercy’s place in the game which didn’t even make sense as a justification for that change.
Their literal “Read” count which means that it was only ever loaded into their browser as far as I am aware is SIGNIFICANTLY DRAMATICALLY LOWER than the SINGLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE megathread post count we’ve had so far.
That isn’t even including the fact that they have observed many other threads. Their total “loaded into browser count” isn’t even close to the current max.
There is sincerely no one at blizzard I believe reads the posts in there.
And if you’re the head of the company that runs the game/forums, why wouldn’t you be signed in? Shoot, I’m perpetually signed in, even if the tab is closed.
What were the timelines on those buffs from point where people complained about it?
Sombra changes, still ignoring the countless Bastion and Sombra megathreads, Hanzo still outperforming McCree in every aspect of the game etc etc. I can bring up countless topics and threads that have picked up a large amount of community support only to be completely ignored by the developers.
Not sure how blizzard runs things, but i was a mod for a different MMO company.
A forum moderators job isn’t just to police the forums, they are required to read every post in every thread. Every week we write a report that gets submitted to the community manager, who then passes it to the GMs. GMs and Devs are often busy running the game and aren’t abreast on what’s happening in the playerbase, so we browse the forums for them. And then every month, it’s a face to face meeting between the mods and the GMs to go through all the highlights and give proper context to the reports.
Even tho the GM outranks the community manager, any posts they have using their official accounts has to be advised by them. Essentially, it goes both ways and the mods moderate the official employees as well. If there’s a lack of blue posts, it may be possible that the mods are advising them not to post.
Now, i don’t know how it works in Blizzard, but that’s basically how ours worked up to the time i left. The devs should be getting reports from the community manager whether they ask for it or not.
Tho to be honest, when i first got this game about year after launch, and saw the forums, i wondered if Blizzard had a community manager at all since forum development falls under him. But there should be one because Blizzard has been running an MMORPG, which tends to have very active communities, for years. That forum didn’t look like it could support an MMO. Do the mods even have the tools to monitor the community? Did WoW have the same forum site as Overwatch did? Did they skip the forum/community management altogether and just let WoW run off Reddit?
I am sure they have some tool to process forum feedback. Only an idiot would expect a human to do that work. Also, people in the forums tend to offer anecdotal evidence and personal opinion as fact. It makes zero sense for Blizz to pay attention to that.
To shine a thread of rationale onto this topic. (And agree with op).
It’s fairly easy for them to have such “low” numbers because 99% of the content is pure garbage. Even on the so called megathread. Why would they parse through all that. Somebody else is and they are reading the meat and potatoes of it.
Some entitled wankers on here thinking that their daily/hourly revert mercy threads are remotely meaningful to a lead developer.
On top of all of which this forum comprises probably less than 1% of the games playerbase. Opinions here aren’t made of gold.
About as much as us Sombra players know about Sombra.
And by the looks of it, that’s still a whole lot more than the Bastion mains know about Bastion, at least in Blizzard’s eyes.
Like 5 months too late after they ignored the feedback from ptr, post ptr release and subsequent months.
Same as above
Half a year late after ignoring the ptr outcry, pros and subsequent release outcry
Not really enough
Meanwhile they do that mercy change and straight up screw over sombra.
They might see it, doesn’t means they care, the balance team has always done what they wanted and then they’re forced to change it when push comes to shove months upon months later.
Doesn’t means they’re listening, means they don’t care about player input and only change things when they’re almost forced to.
This has always happened since day 1 of beta and it will keep happening until the balance team changes, this game has always been on the exact same cycle of 2-4 overpowered characters completely dominating the game while a quarter of the roster is unpickable.
It’s just gonna keep getting worse, as evidenced by these past 6 months.
“Entitled”, right. As if we asked for this garbage rework in the first place. I didn’t realize that expressing our feedback about how the rework has been a failure, and that we don’t like Mercy being in this ridiculously OP position was being ‘entitled’.
Lmao this exact same sentiment that kills games.
And this one is on its way to join them, developer not doing their job + vocal people defending it means they’re just gonna keep doing it while more and more people leave.
This past year is already the worst state OW has ever been and that’s saying something, if these mercy and sombra changes are anything to go by next half is gonna be even worse.
Probably gonna pull a sym on torb too and completely alienate torb players as they swap torb for a completely different hero.
Didn’t mean to come off as hostile or rude, sorry if I did.
I get maybe not going through the whole megavoid, but if they were to at least acknowledge some of the more well made and well written megathreads they’d understand our perspective more.
They are so out of touch that Goodman didn’t believe that the nerfs that are coming in with the Sombra changes would be received so poorly.
Keep in mind that most of these people are pretty senior people at Blizzard
Jeff is the Vice President.
Geoff is the Lead Designer.
Bill is the Lead Software Engineer.
Romain is a Senior Producer
Scott is a Principle Designer.
Aaron is Game Producer.
Michael is the Lead Writer.
Tom Powers is an Associate Community Manager.
Playing the Devils Advocate here, but the Overwatch team is more than 10 dudes sitting around a table discussing balance.
The higher up people like Jeff and Geoff definitely don’t have the time to read a megathread. That’d be the community managers job, who then relays the TLDR of it to the Devs.
And even then, what would people like Michael Chu do even if they read that entire thing? Write a comic about it?
I get being frustrated by the pit of death that’s basically the Mercy megathread, but I think people expect far too much if they expect Jeff to personally read all their posts.