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Team 5, how about a "Dev Stream" ?
So, context:
The developers of Dead By Daylight (a 1v4 assymetrical multiplayer game) have a tradition of doing the so called "dev stream" every week. It´s an hour long stream and roughly consists of:
1)Hello´s and introductions (there are always some new people to meet and talk to from the dev team)
2)News and Announcements (if there are any)
3)Comments on balance and how they feel about it
4) QnA from Twitch chat (obviously not all questions and mostly the serious one are talked about)
5) Around the web (cool fan arts and photos from meetings like Pax etc.)
During this stream, devs talk about what they are doing, how they feel about the current state of the game and the whole stream has a laid-down attitude with a lot of jokes and fun. A lot of times, devs answer questions with "we are working on it", but also give their opinion on how they feel about certain aspects of the game and it reasurres the community of their involvement and work, while also being a fun way to get in touch with the devs.
Now I really enjoyed the "Designer Insights" with Ben Brode and hoped that it would be a regular thing, but it stopped pretty abruptly. I wanted to ask if it´s possible to do something like the said "dev stream" or even just videos regularly to give us an interaction between the devs and the community. It doesn´t have to be every week, it won´t take up a lot of your time and even if you don´t announce something all the time, just talking to people even about bugs and reassuring the community that you are working on stuff, while joking around will IMO have a huge impact on how the community feels about the interaction and engagement of Team 5 with us.
In the last month, Blizzard has been doing a very good job IMO-even if the nerfs have been unsuccesful in shaking up the meta, it´s still a good thing Blizzard did this, because it´s doing SOMETHING. Even though I disagree with Team 5 on some aspects of the game, I appreciate their involvement and the will to fix a lot of things or introduce new stuff into the game, like recent quests or even Heroic Tavern Brawl. And I´d like the devs to continue to talk to us, which is why I´m proposing said interaction.
What do you think?
Zeriyah
This is something we've actually been talking about doing, and overall we think it's a good idea to give the Hearthstone developers more opportunities to interact more often with the community.
However, we don't want to approach it as a stream where we talk about card balance all the time -- there's a lot of talented people on the team, and the stream could be used as a place where we can talk about UI design, art, engineering, and many other aspects of Hearthstone aside from just card balance. Also, we would want to make it clear that it isn't a place to go for clues on what is in the pipeline. Ideally, our initial thought was to have it feel pretty casual.
So with that in mind, would you still be interested in watching? Whether it's a doodle session with an artist or just chatting with someone that works on squashing bugs in QA while playing a couple casual games of Hearthstone, we're open to hearing what you would like to see.