Letting the work speak for itself is a reasonable one on the surface. The problem is that the large portions of the community have lost their trust in Blizzard over the past few years and their enthusiasm for the games. We hear sporadic bits and fragments about future development and promises for future communication, mingled with ever more common news about delays, setbacks, and confusing and awful managerial decisions.
As a player, it’s very hard to feel confident in the future of the game. I recognize that from an insider perspective optimism and confidence may feel much more justified. I appreciate that the dev team is hard at work and feels passionate about the product they’re making. I don’t fault them, and I don’t fault the community managers. None of you are in enviable positions right now, and I think you’re all doing your best with what you have.
However, something needs to be done to address the lost trust and evaporating enthusiasm. The new content will eventually come out, but it may be too late for many people. Waiting is not a good enough solution.
Caring is great, it really is. But it also doesn’t mean much if it isn’t provided the community with satisfactory results. If giving the choice I’d take more quality content at the expense of less caring.
Lots of caring and no results gets you a participation trophy in youth sports. Results is what wins the championship trophy though.
I think it is time the team focused on results because all the caring in the world is not getting us any content, even simple cosmetics at this point.
I started my journey with Blizzard back in 2007 with WoW:TBC, and I fell in love with the tech industry. Since then, I’ve got to say that the Overwatch dev team is the only team left that seems to have any passion in what they’re doing, and they’re the only ones that actually listen to the community.
HOWEVER.
The lack of communication and empty promises from the Overwatch team has taken its tole on its community. It’s hard to believe anything said from Blizzard in regards to Overwatch. Why are they only showing content creator’s things that should be some kind of announcement to the Overwatch community as a whole? This is where the problem is stemming from. They’re not including the whole and making it seem like only a select few matter.
I don’t expect anyone who is frustrated with their current experience to tone police themselves, within reason. What I would implore anyone to do is to lead with empathy and not assume that we as a team are apathetic to the player experience.
They better. Communication right now is unacceptable. Especially when streamers got large amounts of hopium and insider info that the public is still scrambling and asking for. 2 months ago
Then why were the creator’s hyping it up about “They’ve got some great stuff in place!” instead of being critical as it makes more content. Why have we not seen this roadmap? They can even put a disclaimer saying “This is NOT final.”
I hear you, Andy. Can we get confirmation on if the Archives event or the remaining events for this year will only feature 2 legendaries at most? Would save everyone tons of time if we could hear this information today.
This is fair, it’s not reasonable to think that the devs are bad people or hate the game/playerbase, but things definitely need to change and I can’t blame people for becoming angry. We have heard nothing about Overwatch 2 since the OWL Hawaii stream. Why are we being kept in the dark after being promised better communication?
That has to be the worst communication strategy I’ve ever heard of. “Our communication strategy is to not communicate”. Uhm?
I hate to sound too critical but surly Blizzard can’t be this dethatched from what’s going on in the fanbase?
Exhibit A: the reception they’re currently getting after announcing their newest IP.
If this was Blizzard, people would be scrambling and uploading speculation videos an hour after the announcement; current Activision-blizzard has people calling it “DoA” and only one video has been made on it in the past four hours of its announcement (as of writing this).
I think that his boils down to a mismatch of perceptions. Showing some of the content to streamers in hopes that their enthusiasm, even if vague, would excite the general audience was a strange decision. It wasn’t clear what everyone else was supposed to do with the information that streamers were excited. It didn’t have to be a bad decision though.
If the player base was excited, and was ready to give Blizzard some credit, then it could have generated at least some hype. The problem is that Blizzard’s credit is all but spent. People are not willing to believe blindly in the product, and the whole thing ended up being more iof a debacle than a hype generator.