I’m glad SOMEONE at Blizzard understands why 5v5 is a horrible decision and will destroy the game!
Observe: DPS queue times bad (don’t think or ask why DPS queue times are bad)
Solution: increase DPS ratio on the team (5v5), make DPS even more impactful
Result: More people flock to DPS, DPS queue times WORSE
DPS were already the most fun to play, relatively. The fix was not making them MORE fun to play and neutering other roles. The fix was to give more variety and enjoyment to the other roles.
with rare exception, I don’t believe that any community is wholesale more or less toxic than any other community. People are people, and people have complicated personal experiences. Everyone has bad days.
Even communities as amazing as the Overwatch community go through difficult times. It’s 100% understandable that extended gaps in communication and engagement would manifest itself in ways that, on the surface, make it look like it’s a “toxic” space.
As the team for whom the forums is a valuable community resource, it’s on us to help foster the kind of environment that’s a value add for both players and developers alike
The difference is, you are ending up having to deal with patients you and your colleges have made mad and right now you are asking your receptionist to go deal with them for you.
The community manager is supposed to find ways to positively interact with the community, thats it, not send people off to interact with people angy about what some other section of the establishment has done.
You don’t say? That’s mighty fascinating. Because there’s a 622-post megathread rejecting the region lock update, complete with hundreds of different people going into detail about their personal experiences with that and how it completely messed up their ability to play the game.
Here, I don’t want you to miss it.
Right there. I rarely see a thread with that sort of longevity or quantity of participation. And it’s right there, ripe with the exact feedback you said is most helpful and wanted. Over six-hundred posts detailing the anxiety and frustration that update caused. That update that nobody, but nobody asked for.
So when will we see movement on that subject? The veritable cornucopia of negative feedback and outright begging for a reversal of that update should far and away exceed any threshold you could imagine you need to justify work to be done to remedy it.
But here’s the thing, if we didn’t like the game, we would keep our mouths shut, and watch it crumble. Just because we’re vocal about our dislikes, doesn’t mean we don’t like it.
I’m a self-diagnosed forums lurker, and my personal experience is that I’ve considered just quitting these forums because I feel there is nothing constructive going on. It’s all negativity, all day. Now I see a chance for that to change, so here’s a few points that I think that everybody could benefit from keeping in mind:
The forums are a company’s property, but the people are the ones who post in it.
You can dislike your perceived notions of being heard or not all you want, but ultimately, the people are the ones posting the mean and negative things. Blizzard isn’t the one posting personal attacks against game developers over changes that aren’t even in the game yet, the people are. And I’m not saying Blizzard is perfect or the forumgoers are terrible, just that the forums regulars and irregulars should know when something crosses the line, report it, and maybe drop something like “Hey, these devs are people too, please keep that in mind when posting. I’m sure your ideas would reach them better if you explained why you feel the way you do.”
Mild moderation should increase
I see on other forums that when a user oversteps the fine line between passionate discussion and personal attacks, the mods step in, edit posts, and usually leave a little note like “Please refrain from personal attacks”, “Let’s keep the discussion on track”, or, if needed, “This thread thread has devolved into petty arguments, let’s fix that or we’re shutting down the thread”. I’m not saying that the moderation is bad, per se, just that I’d like to see some of these practices used more.
The improved communication and presence can do wonders.
Not to understate the impacts of the staff/MVPs who have been very active on the forums for as long as I’ve been around, but even just the presence of a blue text user who is deeply interested with interacting with the community inspired me to post, which is something I very rarely do.
The community needs more optimism.
Whenever any change is announced, half of the forums explode to denounce the changes as ruining the game while the other half say they’re no-skill noobs. Meanwhile, I’m sure there is a large but silent majority who want to see and play the changes before making a decision. Patience is a virtue.
Don’t ruin somebody’s fun
I’ve seen so many OWL score/match discussion threads where there’s good discussion, then someone pops in and says something to the effect of “OWL is dead, it ruins the game, you’re all Blizzard shills”. Like, you’re entitled to your own opinion, but come on, do you have to be a killjoy jerk? Let people enjoy their pro gaming/fanart/event hype/homebrew heroes.
And I’ll try not to name names or be toxic, but replying to a community manager’s informative post about how community input =/= game development with a post insulting the game developers, proposing their own “right” changes, and trying to state opinions as fact only proves my point that:
If the community wants Blizzard to change their goals, we need to be able to meet them in the middle and improve ourselves.
I wish all of you good luck, have fun, and let’s make the forums a better place.
Do you know why the blue posts get jumped on for off-topic things every time? Because they are so rare, it is the absolute only iota of a chance that a Blizzard employee will ever see a pressing topic. We have threads with thousands of replies they ignore for months on end. The fact of the matter is this:
BLIZZARD
DOES
NOT
CARE
They don’t care about our opinions. It is in their culture. They think they are always right, and will take that mentality to the grave. They don’t reply to controversial topics saying “we tested that internally for 2 months and it didn’t work out even though we also considered it as an option.” They don’t post facts refuting obvious mathematical truths like how the MMR system actively works against properly placing people (I mean since they can’t). They want to maximize profits and move on to the next project.
I’ve been telling people to give more detailed feedback, that they should try to understand the bigger picture and all the implications of changes being made, what I got instead were people being extremely defensive and refusing to understand their feedback saying “this is bad” without anything else of value added is pointless.
Some of the forums think they are all-knowing eventho they actually know very little or do very little research to back their claims.
Did I say EVERY ONE of them? I said A SINGLE EXAMPLE. And you can’t even produce that.
Scroll through the forum’s last five days and count the number of replies by Blizzard posts. There’s a handful, and most of them are their own threads (not looking for community feedback, as I said). They can’t employ a single person to work 1 hour a day addressing their community. My company has dozens of full time employees that do that. Blizzard addresses under 1% of threads, including well thought out ones.
I never said you did and like I said, they don’t need to reply to read and take notice of forum posts, nobody replied in my topic when my suggestions were added.
Even if they did reply to a bunch of posts with detailed feedback people would still complain on the basis of “They are not looking at my topic, devs are biased, blablabla”, there’s no winning with some people on the forums.
They were not your suggestions that were implemented. It was something Blizzard came up with on their own, independent of your idea and your post. That used to be the game Jeff would play. He’d come to the forum before a change was made, look for a post that suggested the same thing, then reply saying “hey we’re introducing something like this in the next patch” to make people think they had something to do with it. It was kind of sad. Something that takes months to develop, and you want us to think it was due to the post I made an hour ago.
I know this is going to get ignored entirely, but please understand reddit is a deeply misogynistic place and while you may not perceive it as any less or more bad than the forums, people can get away with saying a lot worse on reddit than they can on here. If you really are concerned about marginalized groups please keep this sort of thing in mind.