i decided to do a little recap on last two years of beeing blizzard (OW in this case) customer/player/fan, because i was just about to buy twitch season pass for OWL, but in the back of my head i had recent investors call and i was thinking about how blizzard is behaving towards us…
so:
no posts no likes no answers no dev updates no threads no polls no info no announcements no transparency no explanations no communication no discussion no activity no way to contact anyone no way to get info no posts red no threads checked no lore no events no modes no tools no updates no content (map and a hero sometimes) no road map no signalized direction of game no informed customer service (its not their fault!!)
what we have instead?
hidden dev profiles activity ignoring emails terrible gear shop censorship politics shoved in NOT using their OWN PLATFORM, disconnected from community very slow balancing a lot of bugs
honestly?
i feel we are disrespected… if their silence has to be telling, then it is… it really is
i will not buy season pass, and i feel really, really dumb for the hours i have spent on forums trying to build community, defend blizz if needed - i was called fanboy for it a lot, just because when i felt it was necessary to defend blizz, devs, etc.
will not bother anymore
now, drown in tons and tons of negative posts of people who simply are frustrated and have no understanding of what and why is going on
you blizz destroy your own community, its your falut
EDIT:
yea i got irritated, today got linked Jeff post from 2017, thats very interresting read and most of it i was alredy suspecting/expecting.... but my post STILL stands - because we need communication
ofc. devs care about OW and community, never said they didnt… but pointing out problems and issues is also important !
devs might agree with some, might disagree, might think they are irrelevant… but at least they should make their presence seen, not hide behing hidden profiles or commenting on EFFFING twitter, we are here! on forums!
microtransaction model of milking their dwindling cows deposit is short seightened… they aim at china that can ban their whole company in 5 minutes if political party will want it
i forgot to add that they alredy are complying with chinese censorship, extending it to us - we are alredy victims of chinese censorship
so yea, you go blizz for this sweet sweet chinese mobile market
They’ve been quite clear why this is: it’s a discussion forum not mob rule.
If 51% thinks it should be one way and 49% the other way, that isn’t very helpful.
I certainly wouldn’t appreciate every thread was “hey should we just delete X hero” and 60% vote yes to that then all discussion is shut down from that with “well people have spoken, discussion over, the majority say delete so why talk about anything else?”
I actually first got interested in Overwatch because it had the most transparent development. I don’t know any other developer that is as open as Overwatch dev team. Jeff Kaplan has gone out there and talked into the camera in depth about continued development of this game.
If you’re giving up on a product because of lack of transparency… I don’t know what else you would go for instead. Not just to any other game but even to any other work of entertainment.
What? How do you think the game has had no updates?
No politics have been shoved in. People have existed in Overwatch and others have then flocked to the forums shoving politics in about certain people should even exist in this work of fiction.
When we are talking about incredibly large playerbases for a video game which by its very nature is incredibly subjective, polls are a very good tool for getting a feel for the community’s views on something. Heck… Oldschool Runescape has basically done exactly that for quite a while now and it is way healthier than Runescape 3 is.
We aren’t talking player run polls here… I’m talking about staff run polls, so you wouldn’t have dumb ones like “Should Hero X be deleted”. Now I happen to know that they CAN run staff polls. In fact the only one I’ve seen ever was about “What’s your favorite arcade mode?”.
May I point you in the direction of Digital Extremes? Blizzard is about as transparent as a brick compared to DE.
Seriously… for Warframe, we pretty much know what the next character will be capable of. We’ve seen the character after that. We know there’s an overhaul of the melee system coming. We know in broad strokes what the next big game mode is going to be. We know there’s going to be 2 more big bosses showing up in the Venus open world. It’s honestly amazing.
I don’t care who makes the poll, it’s not a “discussion” just to hear which side of 51-49% people fall on any given issue. You talk for insight, to discuss. You talk about how the game really is, not the fleeting whim of those who happen to take part in the poll that day.
And it’s a damn good thing that developers aren’t putting their thumb on the scales coming into the forums making a big show by liking only some comments and not others and supporting one side of the discussion but not another.
yea, so tell me - where they are taking “feedback” from then?
they always talk how ‘important it is’
meanwhile it turns out to be lie
they dont take feedback in
Those are done… but they are obviously not done here. As in within these forums.
This would be a terrible selection bias to go by the forums, you’d conduct the polls from a far more representative sample of the players. And you know the most important part of that? The poll results should be SECRET and only told to developers. Otherwise you jsut get snowballing of hatred, people think “wow, If I can whip up enough hate I can tick it over from 49% to 51% support to undermine that hero… because that hero counters the hero I play”
They already know how many people play each arcade mode already. That’s not a personal opinion of what’s they think is most popular, that’s a fact of what is most popular.
Overwatch has a PTR.
And before things even go to PTR they are announced, I learned of the plans of Bastion’s inverse spread before it even went to PTR from a developer announcement.
“OH MY GOD!?!? WHAT ARE YOU DOING!?!? YOU NEVER LISTEN!”
I can see as clear as day what is going on, people on the forums ask for thing, they get it, then in a totally insane post-truth moment everyone denies anyone ever wanted that and they aren’t being listened to.
the funny thing is that i have simmilar opinnion to your, the difference is that they leet this happen because they dont explain their position AT ALL
this community is left alone to argue among themselves
they should come in, say that their stats are this and their opinion is this so they are working on solution… meanwhile they say nothing, game has problems for over half of year, people lose their minds because of that, there is world war on forum about brig… and they are silent
they should at least communicate
but no…their opinion is somehow freaking nuclear top secret info, and if they will answer then thay will be put in to military trial for speaking up or asking question
Damn right I don’t want polls to be public, that’ll just lead to justifying hatred and dog-piling hatred on heroes.
Okay, if you’re going to just disparage something that is absolutely unequivocally objectively superior in every way as “dumping changes” then you’re just showing your hand on this. It is absolutely better to be able to play and try out changes for yourself rather than hear snippets of this.
I’ve noticed a steady trend in the western world where people think they can get away with lying. They’re just playing the numbers game, they don’t care that their lies are obvious, they’re clearly hoping that eventually someone will be dumb enough to believe them.
That I’ll somehow forget about all the times that the developers did explain their position and continue to do so.
“It’s like it’s some sort of community discussion forum or something?!?”
That’s unacceptable, you are not acting like an adult. You aren’t even acting like an older child. It is completely unacceptable to lose your mind over a game simply because it has any “problems”.
Welcome to the real adult world, everything has problems! Having any problems only half the time is better than any other game with such a large roster of different characters with radically different abilities. Maybe less ambitious games with far more samey playable characters have less problems… that’s because they attempt less. That’s no comparison.
Of course they are silent, why would they pick a side?!?
But they gave into the booing crowd over Brig and now here people are selling fantasies that nothing is done.
They do communicate, they just don’t pick a side.
I’m so sick of this childish behaviour. Every time someone can’t get their own way they talk total nonsense, don’t give motherly excuses like it’s “exaggeration” or “hyperbole” it’s insulting in fantasy. It is nothing like how you mischaracterise it just because every single thing isn’t revealed to you.
You can make the poll itself public but keep the results private. Put it inside Battle Net client or in the game itself to make it so people can’t just dog pile it through vpns or whatever… there you go.
I guess the PTR is better than just “SURPRISE!” This new thing you had no idea could be a thing is now in the game!
The PTR doesn’t hold a candle to the community manager hosting hour long twitch live streams where they show off, talk about, and answer questions about what they are working on. Sometimes with appearances with devs.
Seriously… just LOOK at their twitch channel.
They’ve got videos from yesterday… 2 days ago, 3 days ago, 6 days, 7, 8, 9, 10… you get the picture where EVERY SINGLE ONE IS AN HOUR LONG. That is insane. May I also remind you that these are twitch streams which are live and have chat and I’ve seen enough to know that they do in fact answer questions from chat.
When was the last time the Overwatch devs posted anything?
Well… let’s go look. Twitch is at 2 months ago. Youtube is at 2 days… then 6 days, then 3 weeks, 3 that are 1 month… and none of them are even over 10 minutes.
You cannot tell me that Overwatch’s devs do a better job of communicating and being transparent with their playerbase than Warframe’s devs do. Because they straight up don’t.
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hidden dev profiles activity![:wink:](https://d74zh8edaijub.cloudfront.net/en/overwatch/images/emoji/twitter/wink.png?v=6" ":wink:")
