The Overwatch community manager: what's going on?

General Discussion
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I found something, and now I have questions:

For those who aren’t interested in watching, the short version is that the Activision layoffs at Blizzard a while back included community managers (who act as a liason between the community and the devs) for Blizzard’s games. This is a big deal, because without community managers blizzard has no official way to know what their players want.

About a year later, job openings for “community manager” showed up on Blizzard’s “now hiring” site, but with a lot more responsibilities than before and significantly lower pay.

Has this happened with Overwatch, too?

Is there anyone filling the position of Overwatch Community manager position at the moment?

If there is, are they the same person that Overwatch started with?

Has there been a period of time where Overwatch didn’t have a community manager at all, like what happened at WoW and Hearthstone?

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The last ptr announcement was posted by a name I didn’t recognize, Josh Nash. It says he’s the community manager (I’m assuming there’s only one)

Checked the account and it said he joined late last year.

Maybe the extra communication we are getting as a late plays into that?

edit: there’s actually 4, Community manager - Overwatch Forums

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The last post from Tom Powers was quite some time ago.

His icon does not appear to have blue status anymore, despite a hidden profile and blue status when people quote him in the posts a bit down.

Hope he’s doing well, he was one of the most level headed among the forum staff.

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Yeah he either quit or was let go sometime in 2019, I don’t know the circumstances around it. He was the only community manager I ever saw posting anything that resembed communication.

I saw a thread once that made a joke that Wyoming is the only thing we have resembling a community manager. I can’t help but agree :laughing:

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Just like to say, I’m glad j-specs is the VP of ESports business development. Seems like a really solid choice.

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They really should hire WyomingMyst.

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I can tell you for a fact that back when they fired those 800 workers, one of the people let go was a gal running their community management on twitter for OW I believe ~ they relisted her position a few months later at lower salary and less benefits, she tweeted about it and there was a whole article written up about it somewhere I believe. So yeah I wouldn’t be surprised if it had for quite a few important positions.

And for all you young guys going “This is just smart business. This is just trimming the fat!”

Y’all have no idea what you’re talking about. The experience and time it takes to train people to do these jobs well is like, idk at least a solid year of effort. People don’t just show up to these positions and Be Good, especially if you want things done a ~certain way~ with a certain style or finesse as one would expect a stalwart company like Blizzard to do. When you start just letting any Joe Shmoe show up and be community manager you end up with bigger problems because you’re having this guy learn his job, and you probably hired a less talented guy to begin with because your job offer was for less salary and benefits so you gotta assume the fish you’re snagging are not as great to begin with, then on top of ALL OF THAT, you’ve got to deal with the natural hold up that occurs when replacing part of your workforce for a job like this. There is always a learning curve, and frankly the time and money squandered on firing people is a shortsighted business choice that only bottom line CEO’s do - it’s not smart business, it’s ‘let’s make the shareholders as much money as possible!’ business. It won’t make better games, and it won’t make for a better Blizzard, that’s for DAMN sure.

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