I can’t really speak to that as it was before my time.

If that’s what you took away from that statement, I apologize. I clearly miscommunicated it.

It’s more of an emphasis of having something concrete to discuss with our major announcements, so players actually have something to be excited about.

This was a conscious choice on my part, so please feel free to direct any ire towards myself specifically. There was a zero sum chance that this topic wouldn’t be addressed in the community, and we knew there would be an opportunity to respond directly to player conversation.

Keep in mind that we have many channels of communication we manage, and we’ll activate them in different ways, depending on how we want to communicate something. Sometimes we want for information to be announced through media. Sometimes we’ll want to partner with content creators.

Major beats and information will always be from us first, on our “owned channels” (whenever possible)

Just as player feelings are incredibly important, so are the feelings of the people who work on the team. We are a team of humans, not machines who mindlessly produce product.

If the last year has taught me anything, focusing on the human side of the industry is something that we could all use a bit more of.

I’m going to assume you’re talking about the collective “you”, and not myself specifically.

There are people who have been working on this game since before we were even Overwatch. I’ve worked in this industry for over 15 years now, and I can tell you that developers do not work on a game they don’t care about for more than 5 years.

Not to be overly effusive, but Team 4 is hands down the best development team I’ve had the privilege of working alongside. I have regular 1:1s with Aaron, Gersh, and several leaders on the team. We have full access to the dev team, and they have always been excited to answer our questions and to listen to player feedback.

When you conflate a lack of content with the team’s dedication and desire to do the right thing by the community, it pays disservice to how much those individual people actually care about both this game, the community, and Blizzar...

I’m not prepared to address that topic today. Apologies.

I don’t expect anyone who is frustrated with their current experience to tone police themselves, within reason. What I would implore anyone to do is to lead with empathy and not assume that we as a team are apathetic to the player experience.

I promise you that this isn’t unique to Blizzard XD

I hear what you’re saying here.

In another post, I made mention that we want to focus on letting our work speak for itself this year. Not much more I can say aside from this feedback has been communicated to the team, and I personally feel it was well received.

To manage expectations, you should never be looking at blue posts (from CMs) on these forums for major announcements. The community team is here to facilitate conversation and provide additional granularity whenever possible

Should go without saying, but no leaks from us either. I have a family to support.

I get this feeling. It’s understandable that folks want information right now.

To provide some insight as to our processes; any announcement or news that we share is heavily coordinated, highly scrutinized, and meticulously planned before it ever sees the light of day. There are several stakeholders at every step of the process that need alignment and to have their feedback both listened too and considered. Major announcements are even more complicated, sometimes needing approval from all the way up the chain.

By the time we’re ready to announce something to the broader community (let alone preview it with our trusted content creators), months of work and the efforts of many teams are represented in the final product.

When we use phrases like “throughout the year” it’s intentionally ambiguous as we’re not at a place where we’re ready to communicate firm schedules. I ...

I don’t know the specific breakdown of the numbers offhand, but I can tell you I am not talking about only OWL skins.

This year’s skins were a deeply personal, labor of love for the art team. We’re so happy with how they turned out, and plan on sharing more details about their development later this week in a deep dive blog by Jodie.

While we know that we’re offering fewer Legendary skins with this year’s event, the Skins team is hard at work on new content, with more Legendary skins planned for retail than any year prior. We’ll be sharing more information on this throughout the year.

Completely fair criticism. We don’t do enough currently to support small to medium sized creators, and that’s something I’m tasked with improving. Not much more I can say right now, aside from “I hear you”

yes.

Creator relations means supporting the entire OW creator community, to work to retain existing creators, to maintain relationships with folks who may have churned out, and to foster up and coming creators who are just starting on their journey.

BTW. we’re hiring dedicated support for this responsibility as we speak: Community Manager, Creator Support job in Irvine, California, United States of America | Community Development jobs at Blizzard Entertainment

Your feelings here are all valid, and I want you to know that the team is aware and frankly, feels similarly. To a T, every perso...

I can ask, however to set expectations - we don’t generally share data publicly unless it’s something that really moves the needle.

I will say this: the April Fool’s card was the bar against which we measured the first Creator ExCard’s performance and it hit or exceeded all of our expectations

Not speaking to any specific meeting or otherwise, but there’s a lot of behind the scenes relationship management that the community team is responsible for. Making sure that creators are prepared for our “big beats” and are able to make the best possible content is to everyone’s benefit, player and dev alike.

For sure. This was a factor that was specifically pointed out during our initial analysis of the ExCards performance. Even with that knowledge, the overall impact was positive.

Sure:

• Specifically for Damage, there was an overwhelming number of Heroes for one person to handle, which lead to not every Damage Hero initially receiving the attention they deserved. to address this, we’ve divided the category among 2 creators for the next card
• There’s a perception among some players that personal biases play too heavily into the proposed changes. This is something that all of the creators we’ve been working with for the second card are very self-aware about, and they’re paying close attention with their notes
• Some players don’t understand why we’re working with creators and not the broader community. Our goals for this project (engaging with Creators in a unique and interesting way, instigating more competitive events in the community, and increasing CCV on Twitch) weren’t clearly stated ahead of time, so I’ll own that
• there’s a perception that this somehow takes away from developing other...

Friend, I am a Community Manager, not a designer.

This is a small way that the community team can drive towards a creative solution for keeping the game fresh (through the ExCard), all while not having an adverse affect on T4’s other development priorities. The halo effect of content creators feeling excited, higher engagement with the feature in game, and increased CCV category wide on Twitch during the tournament, are all welcome additional benefits.