Thank you Blizzard and Devs

To Blizzard employees:
I appreciate your creativity, hard work, and dedication to this game, and all the updates and content as well.

Overwatch is my first and only PC game. I love it and think it’s marvelous. For $15-20 (a friend actually gave me this game as a gift), I have countless hours of fun and entertainment. I consider that true value; consider that people spend that same amount for a two hour experience at the movies with a snack.
Also, I appreciate this recent trend where devs and Jeff have provided more insight into the upcoming changes, balancing, etc. I hope you’ll continue to interact with the community (and I hope we show you the proper respect in our communications as well).

To my fellow gamers:
I am honestly disheartened by the volume of negative and disrespectful comments in these forums. The developers and other Blizzard employees clearly care deeply about this game. They’ve no doubt poured countless hours over many years to create and update this game for your enjoyment (yes, for profit too, but you know they love this game as much as we do). Blizzard has lots of data that we don’t have access to and we need to understand that balancing the game is perhaps not as easy as we think it is. Or that perhaps they’re doing a better job balancing than we believe based on our own personal experiences at varying levels of skill.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t voice our opinions on the meta and hero balancing; rather, I’m requesting that all of us treat the devs with the proper level of respect when we make such comments. Writing something to the effect of “the devs are stupid if they can’t see Soldier is unviable” is unproductive, and instead we can provide a more contextual argument with examples from your experience (or those of notable top players). And we should do so using respectful language. If we show the devs the respect they deserve, perhaps they will reciprocate this by respecting our opinions, considering/investigating ideas and discussions here, and responding to us more often.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you! And I welcome a productive discussion about this important community matter.

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:roll_eyes:

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Don’t you remember that since the devs have finally spoken out you have to be negative towards them and make them realize them reason they left the forums in the first place smh

I’m here for it lol

Whenever I’m bored I’m ready to debate

And I think that these “negative and disrespectful comments” as you call them are not all inherently bad

Even if some people phrase things a little harshly or come off the wrong way, the mere fact that people want to talk about the game is enough for me!

This is undeniable. I still do not think it would be nearly as bad if we were not in the dark so much though. I can’t tell if they don’t want to talk to us because of what we say, or if they simply don’t care about us. Either claim has a decent point imo.

Everyone is trashing the devs about D.Va’s 3 second cd on boosters. I personally really like it over a 15 meter defense matrix and think the buff is significant

While it doesn’t address her problems, I think, once the meta shifts a bit, it can give her some interesting advantages over other tanks.

But as things stand, running another off tank with a main that isn’t Zarya or Sigma still seems…unnecessarily risky. Trying to force value out of characters that just isn’t there.

Don’t worry. That one guy who made a mistake to post something here is clearly new at Blizz. He’ll learn soon enough not to type a single letter on forums.

I said this in the other thread, but I want to put it here too, so hopefully someone on their end will see it.

I agree it’s really annoying to see so much destructive feedback from so many people. I merely said I think he’s wrong, but many others are just vicious. This is why we can’t have nice devs.

This is what I don’t like lol

It’s rather unnecessary to say all that. I didn’t read OP’s comment to the devs but like…you really don’t need to gas up the devs (and I know you specifically didn’t do this) and act all snobby towards a community you’re apart of.

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Oh maybe because the game is in such a horrible powercreep state and the devs simply choose to look the other way and turn blind eye?

I agree but there’s no point. They devs hardly ever communicate with the community and we’re stuck wondering what their gonna do next and praying they’ll hear our voices. So much as “We’re currently playtesting x changes on this hero” can go a long way

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You don’t like positivity? What on earth are you talking about?

I’m a game developer myself, I know how ridiculous these communities can be. There are lots of opinions flying around, and a lot of them are extremely hostile. This is not appropriate. If we ever want to hear from a developer on these forums again, this is not a good way to encourage that interaction.

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While I agree that there is a certain threshold that shouldn’t be crossed when having a discussion with anyone, not just the Overwatch team, that doesn’t mean I’ll effectively fall over backwards and praise them either.

The effective silence for quite some time I’m fairly sure has contributed greatly to a growing frustration for players who are currently dissatisfied with the game’s state. On some other popular forums, for their own respective game, I’ve observed that they usually have a team or at least one community manager who on a semi-regular basis communicates in certain threads as well as act as a liaison between those discussions and the internal teams (e.g. developers). This isn’t a behaviour I’ve observed on here, sadly, which if it was I feel could go a long way to improving community relations.

The megathreads are a prime example of where a disconnect with the community was noticeable, Mercy in particular, where it was identified that posts within any of the megathreads weren’t likely being read and certainly weren’t being directly engaged with. This subsequently led to hidden forum profiles, instead of actually doing the right thing and having a two sided discussion… not the one sided discussion that it appeared to be.

There’s a number of balancing problems, and some contradictions. For example, it was said that they look at the high end in regards to balancing, but you have heroes like Hanzo (at least) who have been a domineering and somewhat oppressive jack of all trades hero who hasn’t been nerfed for a very long time.

It’s only understandable that a developer will appear to be bombarded with all sorts of comments, whether constructive or not, given the amount of ongoing silence we have had and the apparent disconnect we currently have. It leads to frustration and upset. Even some of the pros and popular streamers aren’t happy it seems. Things can change if we have more regular discussions and if overall community feedback is appearing to be considered. We should have a team here (e.g. community leaders) that’s somewhat specific to engaging in certain community discussions to take away some of the potential workload and possible stress that the internal teams shouldn’t have to directly face.

After all, eSports and the participants around that are just a minor segment of the Overwatch player base. I didn’t buy Overwatch to play a poor mans eSports simulator as I’m sure many others didn’t. Overall community feedback should be of some importance, not mainly how eSports (e.g. OWL) plays out and what the pros have to say (e.g. x support/tank is unfun to play against).