Blizzard tweeted out welcome news: Diablo 3 Community Q&A: September 1st in Reddit’s Diablo forum. Fielding questions will be John Yang, Travis Day, Wyatt Cheng, and Matthew Berger, software engineer Roger Hughston, artist Richie Marella, and writer Brian Kindregan, on Tuesday, September 1 from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. PDT.
That’s the good news. The bad news, at least to some, is the venue they chose for it.
Can’t you devs, just for once, take advice from your own forums ? It’s full of meaningful data, insight and feedback. Why do you always have to crawl to the worst places of the Internet and expect us to follow you like little puppies?
I don’t want to create an account in whatever random places just so we can communicate.
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I’m OK with the devs posting/sharing information via social media venues but post it in the official site and forum first/simultaneously. I come to the D3 main page and official forums for D3 related information.
Tyvalir: We hear you on the need to better balance our information sharing and other activities across social channels. Finding the right balance is an ongoing process for us, and there’s always room for improvement. If you have constructive suggestions on how we might do so, please share them here or send them on over to [email protected]
On a similar note, I should mention that even though we can’t always respond, we always make sure to pass on your feedback. If you have suggestions for special events you’d like to see, better ways to share game information, or other general feedback, we would love to hear it – these things help us improve. Thanks!
The ironic thing is that often the most dedicated posters on Battle.net forums are the least informed about larger game issues. So you see people on B.net forums with hundreds of hours played and thousands of posts, who don’t know what’s new on the PTR, what’s coming up at Blizzcon, what the devs are going to change next patch, etc. All that info is out there, and collecting and presenting it is a lot of what we do here, since lately Blizzard releases news mostly via twitter (often straight from the devs instead of @Diablo), or through their FB, or in some streamer’s chat, or through non-Diablo third party sites. And since the B.net forums are very spammy and there’s no one there to organize and polish and present the important info in a way that stays atop the main forum page, fans who only use the forums can miss much of the new stuff.
Obviously that sort of info collection is the niche a fansite like this one fills, but since Blizzard hardly ever (these days) promotes their fansites or resources like DiabloWiki.net, how are their forum customers supposed to know? Back in the day Blizzard North preferred to interact directly with fans via fansites, but Bliz Irvine PR has always preferred to try and spread the news as widely as possible, while assuming the loyal fans and fansites will just repost it. This has paradoxical effect of often leaving their most loyal game players uninformed, as you can see every day in the B.net forums.
Click through for full chat details and some more Blue replies in this “why you no post in your own forums?!” debate.
A while after we made this post, Blizzard posted the full chat details:
We’ll do our best to respond to as many questions as possible based on the information we can provide, with a focus on answering those related to Patch 2.3.0. You can increase your odds of getting a response by keeping your question as concise as possible. In order to make it easy for everyone to follow along, we also ask that you post a single question per comment. Even if you can’t make it for some reason, don’t worry — we’ll post a recap of the event with a transcript of the questions and answers. Have fun thinking up questions, and we’ll see you soon at r/Diablo!
More from the OP, objecting to the Reddit chat in principle.
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There was more info being posted in reddit and on other places that people weren’t aware of because they aren’t advertised through official means.
Tyvalir: Ah, I get what you’re saying. Sounds like the concern is less about where it gets shared per se, and more about being able to easily find the info in one place.
I’ve seen others post similar thoughts (i.e. “having to follow multiple channels to get all the news is frustrating,” etc.). That’s definitely valuable feedback. Thank you for this!
Many people put in a lot of time to write their feedback, test stuff, calculate stuff. And often the community agrees with them because mostly these threads concern glaring issues which should be adressed.
Mostly, sentences like ‘We are passing this on!’ /// ‘We think that this X should be designed Y because of Z’ /// ‘What would you like to see?’ would already help.
It does happen but not often enough. I know all of you have a lot of work to do, especially when a Patch is going to go live. But PTRs simply need more communication.
Tyvalir: That’s absolutely fair feedback! And thank you for taking the time to pass it on to us.
We strive to provide info where we can, though we may not always have updates to share on issues the community is discussing. Additionally, with the volume of discussions taking place, we also can’t always respond to each thread.
Even so, it’s very good to hear that acknowledging we’re passing on the info helps. While we try to avoid saying “we hear you and we’re passing this on” too much, since it’s repetitious (even though it’s 100% true), this is good feedback to have. 🙂
Platitudes and “thanks for your feedback” from CMs are better than nothing, but eventually fans do want a bit of cake with all their icing, and we’ve not gotten much of that lately. Fortunately, it’s not that long until Blizzcon, and even if we don’t get D3X2 then, we’ll at least seem some Diablo panels and dev interviews with solid content.
Soon?
It sounds like they just need more hands on deck. Going through dozens of websites, organizing that information and communicating with the community in a timely manner* is 1) hard 2) time consuming 3) did I mention hard 4) did I mention time consuming. You just can't cut corners and automate that process very much, because it shows. So yeah, they need more people.
I don’t think that is incredibly difficult to handle given that blizz is earning billions annually.
Getting fancy with all the social media stuff is important, I know.
But they should really raise their game in other areas too.
I think the point about staff is a fair one – if there's three people watching the boards and are only there to jump in and either go: "Hi! Great feedback! Thanks so much for this!" or "I'm closing this thread because X/Y/Z" then there's never going to be any information put out on the forums/website. And the website is terrible – one the EU side there's still links on the homepage to Season 2 starting. There is an element of being our own worst enemy with this though. It's known that there are fansites that do post and collate information and they know people naturally will head to Twitter and/or Reddit when they're looking for information. It's easy to let that continue but hard to promote – obviously if they stick a banner up saying "Go to Diablo Inc– Diabloii.net!" Then it's great for this site but, as this is the internet, the other sites may feel aggrieved.
Bliz has become, and Bliz Irvine PR especially always was, very desirous of controlling the message. In a weird way, though. They constantly promote streamers, many of whom are basically crazy people (as most of us would become were we playing 8+ hours a day of video games and live narrating the experience), but aside from that Bliz PR hates to link to any fansite where there's any kind of narrative or editorial voice.
They're happy to link to scripts or ladder trackers or databases where it's just raw info, and they'll link to transcripts or interview video/audio. But they just refuse to link to analysis or comprehensive articles. Many times they've told us straight out that they can't link to our transcript or summary of something like a panel, since it's not just the raw text, but contains added info with links and analysis and maybe some opinion, which we put in to make the material more interesting and useful to our readers.
And yet they love to promote Reddit, which is a forum-like creature that's in direct competition to their own Battle.net forums, and has a very homogeneous demographic composition. And Reddit is, of course, entirely about opinions and flame wars and such. But not really curated or directed by anyone.
So Blizzard is fine linking to opinions of their product, as long as those opinions stem from the anarchy of the crowd, rather than from any central figure of potential authority and accountability. But somehow Streamers don't count. The lack of consistency driving the whole thing puzzles me, really.
I think promoting steamers is about keeping a certain amount of visibility of the game on Twitch. Twitch obviously caters for all kinds of games and there's not a great deal of ways that Blizzard can push non-WoW games onto gamers in general – I've noticed that although within the D3 community there's lots of excitement for 2.3 that's not really being reflected on more mainstream sites that much. Eurogamer did an article which boiled down to "new stuff, new patch, new cube-thing-we-dont-understand" and that was about it. But to get the game visibility on Twitch the streams have to have a certain number of viewers which means Blizzard need to drive traffic to those streams. I'd also agree completely that if you're playing for 18+ hours a day that although there might be some kind of running commentary it's not going to be Shakespeare…Reddit is completely bat-crazy and as likely to see cat pictures upvoted as anything relevant but again I think it's about it being a big shiny platform that doesn't require a great deal of effort. And the crazy bits probably make it feel a lot more like being at home on the BNet forums for them!
What other sites? ;o)
Gotta agree that this is very hard/time consuming. However, it may very well be mentally tasking too.
Blizzard are pros at what they do, I’m sure they have something in the pipe (or bowl if you prefer).
Can someone print out the questions and answers? Reddit is a bad format for q&a's, it is difficult to get the flow of what is being said and also there are all the unanswered questions mixed in.Question, answer. Question, answer. That's all I want and need.
Blizzard said they'll post a recap……………………….."Even if you can’t make it for some reason, don’t worry — we’ll post a recap of the event with a transcript of the questions and answers."