LOL same here! 
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Good riddance,happy trails.
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Best wishes on his new adventure. Thank you for encouraging and helping women have a voice during the controversy. Any establishment would be lucky to have this person working for them. As he promoted a safe and healthy environment. Sad to see he is leaving Blizzard headquarters, but looks like he will still be playing WoW. Which is good for the community.
He seemed kind of nasty and set a poor behaviour example IMO. Hopefully his replacement has better people skills. I wish him the best on his future endeavours though.
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I have been posting here for two years and have no idea who this person is so I am thinking he wasn’t much of a community engagement manager.
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He’s working on Call of Duty.
Aw man, that sucks to hear!
He is a very decent guy. I had a chance to have an extended convo in person with him in 2018, about lots of things, but in particular the lack of communications between Blizz and the player base. He was very down to earth, friendly, and had a lot of good insight into a situation all us players are frustrated with.
His behavior, overall, was quite good compared to the abuse he took from players. Venting on his personal account on occasion was probably not the best idea, but is not outside the realm of understanding. Calling jerks out on being jerks rational.
The internet has this idea that they should be able to heap abuse, insults, threats, death wishes/threats, wishes for their life to be ruined and if the person reacts at all, then it is somehow the fault of the person who reacted - even if they do it in a personal capacity and not professional. Despite the current story line, people are not robots.
His role was more senior. He used to be a well known guide/strat streamer and guide person before Blizzard. His initial work was as a CM who engaged frequently. His role in later years was behind the scenes except some of the Q&A sessions.
He has not announced where he is going yet, that I know of. Do you have a link to that info?
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Yeah, didn’t have a great interaction on twitter with him back in Legion when Blizzard kept trying to nerf leveling methods. He would talk about work stuff on his ‘personal twitter’ then get upset at anyone conversing to him about work on there despite never posting on his ‘official’ twitter or anywhere else. Would frequently insult the playerbase then wonder why they became more aggro at him.
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Tankspot videos coming back?
By Legion Blizzard policy had removed their individual work Twitter accounts. It went to WarcraftDevs and the official Blizz accounts. They deactivated their CM name accounts and had to label their personal accounts as personal. While many would talk about whatever was going on in their life, including work, it was not a means to reach out and have a professional conversation with them about the game.
I think that caused some confusion - in that people did not really understand the policy change. These days I wonder how much they enforce it, as I see some accounts using their personal Twitter to convey news about upcoming announcements or answer questions - which seems to go against the policy as last I knew it.
My personal solution is to have no public social media at all. It removes the avenue for abuse. Sadly it also removes the avenue to share joy, frustrations, introspection, etc. It is what it is.
My whole thing is they’re talking about a subject and people disagree they should expect push back. I was never one of the ones that was rude or just trying to mock them but likely because of previous interaction on twitter they might have assumed so.
Best place would be to converse on the forums, IMO, as they control it and abuse can get taken care of when it’s actually bad by their own forum policies. They should also send more surveys out to ALL players when they’re looking for feedback and not selectively choosing who to send surveys to
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If I work for a company, say Apple, and talk about work a bit on my personal account that might be reasonable. After all we talk about what we do the most in life - and work is a big part. You would not try to message me on my personal account about things that Apple does though - and expect me to answer for Apple. That is what people do to Game staff though - they want them to personally be accountable for decisions a Company makes - that often have nothing to do with that individual.
I agree. That is why I use the forums, and for any other convos, the Bnet chat or voice programs. Those are all under rules Blizz can control and logged. Saves me a lot of drama that I don’t want.
This is a great topic. Survey design and selection is a science and they have a whole team dedicated to doing user research!
Sending out a survey to EVERYONE is not really reasonable or how things are done. First they determine which group they want to sample then how many are needed to create a valid sample size. From there the computer does the picking within the set parameters.
Can you imagine if every survey for every company for every topic went to EVERYONE. Our email and phones would never stop going off.
You can sign up to participate in some of the user research studies if you want.
I signed up quite some time ago but have not gotten anything yet. Only the usual surveys that come after Alpha or Beta stages. My last ones were for Diablo 2 Resurrected.
Nah, this was him talking about the Legion prepatch invasions and when there was issues with lower levels no longer gaining much XP from it, because Blizzard nerfed/broke stuff he was on twitter going “I just did one, seems fine to me” and fought with people in the comments until Blizzard actually went and found some issues.
If the ONLY way for regular players to contact you publically is a ‘personal twitter’ and you’re a CM, then that’s where it’s going to happen. Pretty simple, though.
Well, clearly they probably need a new team for that because whatever feedback they’re getting form it (Including Classic stuff, like adding boosts) isn’t the route they should be going.
It sort of is, they send out ads to everyone. They can send our surveys to everyone.
Which they don’t publish, or tell people, and they control those parameters. Much like beta invites, they can also choose to send them at content creators.
Most companies are not asking for player feedback because their company isn’t doing so hot, either.
Whatever parameter they have is clearly really faulty or bad if I’ve never gotten one, even once.
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Content Creators have had private feedback paths to Blizzard for years. They don’t need surveys so are not a priority for them.
Alpha, Beta, etc though are indeed controlled for a small portion of the invites.
Less than 10%
- Internal staff
- Influencers/Streamers/Media/Guide websites
- Friends and Family
- Targeted Raid or PvP teams
90%
Randomly selected from folks who opt in.
They also sometimes open up give aways that, while they don’t give a “key”, will enable access on your account. These are done as part of marketing/hype building.
As a Beta phase goes on, the QA and Dev team monitor the population of the test servers and send out more invite waves as needed to maintain levels they want. A LOT of the data they get is from the logging tools they have on the test servers and the in-game bug reports and feedback we file.
As I said, yet we got the expansion we have here, and all the QA issues going on consistently so it’s clear they’re either not getting the right sort of feedback or are not getting enough of it.
Further, I think some of the ‘parameters’ they use to ‘randomize’ as you try to put it (Making it not actually random) are pretty bad. I remember Preach being upset they might not get a beta/alpha invite as a result of the ‘xp pot’ bug stuff they did in Legion so stuff tied to your account can get you ‘removed’ from the listing. Not to mention I suspect using a Token, or game time instead of full subscription puts you on a lower priority queue if you get chosen at all.
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That has nothing at all to do with Alpha or Beta selection. You don’t even need active game time at all. That leads to people complaining that some who have never played WoW, or have not played in years, get in over “loyal vets”. The computer does not care and Blizz wants a huge variety of feedback types, not just currently playing vets on subs.
I don’t know anything about that incident, but yes, if someone is on the Influencer or Friends and Family list and gets an account violation that can remove them. Part of getting into Alpha and Beta is usually having an account in good standing. Staying on the Influener or F&F lists also involves not getting penalized as far as I know.
It seems to play a part, among many other parameters as previously mentioned. Further, I think Blizzard should focus on a good game and QA rather then ‘hyping’ expansions through streamers and do more full beta and alpha invites.
They’re vague on that, because even squelches can count for that as well as forum stuff. It’s also interesting what can get you actioned is also using the exact words devs had said before. It’s weird to me how special Blizzard treats content creators and ‘top players’ enough to make one their LEAD game dev.
I mean I would rather have a high end player running the game over someone that collects pets lol.