Bluetracker

Tracks Blizzard employees across various accounts.

In Defense of Blizzard's Communication

Can't imagine this will be popular because it's not what 95% of this subreddit wants to hear. They want frequent updates on the state of the game explained in intimate detail including statistics. Hey, I'm investing my time and money into this game, the least I can ask for is some communication from Blizzard when the game is clearly awful!

No. Would this be nice? Sure. Is it by any way an obligation or even expected? That idea is absurd. What similar business is required to do this for their loyal customers? Am I entitled to my favorite author giving weekly updates on the progress of his book, explaining to my satisfaction the delay in publication not only because "editing took longer than expected"? Should Apple constantly update me on how they're looking into making changes to features I don't like?

Blizzard does give casual communication. It's just never to the satisfaction of the customer base. They say they are looking into it---not good enough. They say they have internal testing going on---not good enough. They say our statistics indicate this and this, not good enough. Could they be more detailed? Sure. Would this appease the community? No.

Let me draw a parallel to my life.

I'm an ER nurse in the busiest ER in my state. Sometimes we have 40-50 people in the lobby on a weekday with 9 hour wait times. People will literally form mobs around a ringleader and harass our triage staff about the wait time, calling the nurses in the back lazy and asking what we could possibly be doing. My patients will complain about their wait times when they get back to the room, and I can explain it all. I can tell them average national ER wait times, how the triage process and the ESI scale works, how their pain is not an emergency as bad as it feels to them, we had dead babies and septic old ladies and strokes and patients screaming on stretchers in the hallway because there are no open rooms. Or I can tell them "sorry, it's been really busy today." Either way they sit there sullenly glaring at me and I have to just move along and divert their attention to the focus at hand. Even the most pleasant patient who makes an offhand comment has never gone "Oh, I didn't realize that's how it works, thank you for educating me." They just don't give a shit.

They don't want to hear the explanation, and this community does not want to hear why Blizzard took so long to nerf certain things or why some things have still not been nerfed. They want their unfounded, uneducated notion of how things should be run met with instant gratification. My patients in pain don't want to hear why they sat around, they want the entire process of how we run our hospital reorganized around what they think is important---address my complaint immediately, the way I think it should be done, right now despite the logistics.

And I have seen what Blizzard employees state and they are ridiculed for it. I've seen Iksar give a detailed breakdown of his day which includes 10 hours of playtesting, no one cared. Ben Brode makes five minute videos explaining his logic and it's ridiculed, and even as it's ridiculed people expect him to take time out of his day to for every complaint the community has.

Sorry, but it's absurd. I understand being frustrated with this game and losing to totem golem, argent squire, tuskarr into totem golem feelsbadman. But to constantly harass and belittle Blizzard for their communication strategy is so rude and entitled it grates on me, especially when they say things like "our internal testing with all possible information relayed to us states this is or is not a problem." Armchair redditors think they're justified in going "well, Mr. Developer, in my opinion you should look at it like this" just because it appeals to some emotional or mob mentality of "this is how the game should ACTUALLY be run for the appeasement of all customers" from the vocal minority of this subreddit.

edit: I italicized the point of the analogy in this post because there's a constant stream of "this analogy makes no sense". It's to show that in all aspects of life people clamor for instant gratification.

I'm glad we started a discourse here. I don't think Blizzard is perfect in their communication but I think they do well enough personally. Many people disagree, be it from the analogy or just not liking blizzard's communication at all. I know there are issues with the analogy but if you compare the specifics of any analogy it falls apart. In the end it's a story to communicate that people will be dissatisfied in a situation where they don't get what they want even if you explain it to them fully. You can link it also to the well-known phenomenon that the more facts and counterarguments you present to someone, the more staunchly they will defend their initial stance in many cases.

Some people said things like 'patients are not the same', 'it's not a hospital/life-or-death' in this case---most ER visits are not by any means life-or-death. The vast majority of complaints are minor and could be addressed at Urgent Care. The patients that complain the most are the ones with the least amount of issues---and that is why they are waiting so long to be seen. We literally have an Urgent Care across the street they could go to, and we tell them that.

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