I did.

Spent all weekend at CommandFest Vegas, spent way too much money on Magic cards, and jammed a lot of games

Yes, there is a cinematic for Sojourn in the works.

It’ll be coming later™

Sojourn has a very cute doggo. No word on snuggleability

National Fudge Day

Send Mackinac Island fudge please

considering that we’ve been growing the team with the express goal of supporting both PVE and PVP, I would be tremendously surprised if it was scrapped

Not a data scientist, but forum polls are rarely useful data. They’re easily socially engineered and influenced by a small number of adamant voices

We have a User Research group whose job it is to perform blind and scalable measuring of sentiment and feedback, and present that information with as much personal bias stripped out as possible.

Forum, reddit, social media feedback is most useful as anecdotal evidence, and in some cases provides context in the form of volume of conversation. That’s not to say it isn’t useful; it’s simply more qualitative than quantitative

that’s the plan

20chars

thanks

Jodie has been doing a wonderful job with our editorial strategy. The fact that she was a fan and player of the game before joining the team is really shining through in how we’re structuring our blogs, the language we’re employing, and the information we’re including

Super proud of my team

Probably because there are dozens of people who are working their butts off in preparation for the announcement

Me leaking or giving any sort of indicator on what to expect is incredibly disrespectful of their time, efforts, and energy

Then what have I been playtesting?

Not yet. My understanding is they’re still investigating the issue.

The dev blogs from beta (which we’ll be continuing), the recent stats blog, the Moira blog, are all examples of us moving towards more transparency and involving the community in our development process. Shifting our philosophy and comms strategy to a new approach takes time, and iteration, to get right.

I know that Jodie and I haven’t been as active on the forums for the last few months. TBF, we’re heads down on planning for the next phase of beta and beyond at the moment. Hopefully I can carve out some more time soon to jump in here (I had 2 meetings cancelled today, which allowed me time for posting and responding)

communication =/= being a hype machine on the forums

Please don’t try to conflate the two

If I’m here talking about it, it’s highly unlikely

Symm has some balance changes in the upcoming beta.

To manage expectations, we’re not talking about a full rework (that would require new vfx, anim, etc), however they are some rather meaty adjustments that will both require some adjustments in playstyle and some time to acclimate

As always, we’ll be closely monitoring feedback and performance data

As I’ve said on multiple occasions here, we’re far less interested in hyping and promising, and more inclined to show the work. For the forum community, it doesn’t add a lot of value for us to be out there talking about how excited we are for next week (even though we are very excited™)

We’ll be sharing more data and information from this beta phase in a separate post that’s currently being worked on. This blog was meant as a “thanks for testing”, and to set expectations on when you can expect to hear from the team about our future plans.

TLDR: it’s coming, just not today

With the significant amount of changes to both Doom and Orisa, the Hero team wanted to take a bit more time to monitor and consider any tuning.

we’re glad to see so many of you getting into game

I’ll be around a bit longer checking on this thread periodically (gotta get my games in too). Hope to see you in game

We’re still here running through the full list. Thanks for hanging in there.