I've been pretty vocal about two things. One, my love for Blizzard games. Two, my distaste for the way Blizzard manages their community and PR. Though in some cases people act really spoiled, there's a simple credo I follow in my work when dealing with customers:
If they are always complaining, you're either setting the right expectations and not meeting them, or you're not setting the right expectations.
I just saw this post on the dota site. I was blown away not only by how responsive they are to their fan base, but how excellent their wording is.. just makes you feel good, like they are making this game to please YOU, and not themselves.
If you find any examples of great PR, post them here!
We’ve been a bit quiet lately. As always, we learn a lot whenever we put something out and get feedback from you all. Showing Dota 2 to the world at The International gave us a lot of feedback to chew through, and the many recent forum threads talking about the information leaking out of the beta has added to the pile. After a bunch of thinking, we’ve decided to change our plans a little.
Our original plan was to spend the next year or so in beta, adding new features and slowly growing the number of heroes until we reached a level of parity with Dota 1, at which point we’d release Dota 2 to the world. But the feedback we’re seeing everywhere is that people just want to play it, even though there’s still a ton of heroes yet to be implemented. We’ve also seen that the folks who are already in the beta are chomping at the bit to show everyone else some of the fun games they’ve had. So we decided our original plan was dumb.
Welcome to the new plan: We’re going to take the current version of Dota 2, which has The International set of heroes, and get it out there as fast as we can. We’ve still got some work to do in a couple of areas, so we’ll be keeping it invite-only for a (hopefully short) period of time. But there’ll be no restrictions on what players can do with it – they can release screenshots, make movies, shoutcast matches, write guides, publicly make fun of our HUD, or anything else their hearts desire. While they do that, we’ll be shipping regular updates with more heroes, new features we’ve been working on, and improvements on the existing content as we get more and more feedback.
What does this mean for you? It means it’s even more important that you get on the list that we’ll be inviting from. If you’re talented, you could take a shot at winning an invite in the GosuGamers competition or the Playdota contest. Once you’ve got your hands on the game, feel free to talk about it however you’d like – we’re excited to see what you’ll produce.
In the meantime, we’re going to be ratcheting this blog up a little too, so you can expect some more regular posting from us.
Are you positive you wanna bring up Valve to a PR debate? Like, really? It's one of the companies with the most amount of delays and problems in PRs to date.
The whole Half Life 2 issue - "we're gonna split it into 3 episodes, and release one each year", fail number 1. The whole Left 4 Dead issue - "we're gonna update it as much as possible", bzzz, fail number 2, L4D2 was released less than a year after the first and L4D had almost 0 updates/patches.
DotA 2 had a ton of months without a single piece of news (except "changelog" leaks from the people invited to the International), and the only reason it had some news now is because Icefrog knows how damaging it can be to not talk to fans (since he was a gamer himself) and because everyone was expecting the beta to begin a month ago, and yet it's going to take another 6 months for them to even release the unfinished version used in the tournament.
BF 3 only wants that much beta attention because of the whole MW3 vs BF3 battle. They want to recover as many people lost in the past games to other shooter franchises (GoW, Halo) due to crappy PR. And they're only doing that because they know what most mainstream gamers think -> "beta = early access to the game, so I can tell my friends. lulz!".
I'm not saying Blizzard is doing everything perfectly. They delay games too (all of them?). They almost fail at delivering patches (hi, 1.13) and the way they're handling this specific beta is bad imho, giving away a lot of keys to press sites like gamespot and kind of ignoring fansites who kept the hype alive for all these years.
But I wouldn't at all put those other companies in a pedestal and pretend they're much better. Those a far from good examples of great PR to me.
Sweet. Definitely playing that on Thursday, thanks. =D
I think blizz could have maybe handled the PR a bit better, at least make it clear that because the beta was starting that didn't necessarily imply anyone would be invited immediately.
Edit: Damn those are some hefty recommended requirements.
Are you positive you wanna bring up Valve to a PR debate? Like, really? It's one of the companies with the most amount of delays and problems in PRs to date.
[...]
But I wouldn't at all put those other companies in a pedestal and pretend they're much better. Those a far from good examples of great PR to me.
Although I agree with everything you said in your post, I think you're misunderstanding the point of this thread.
All I'd like to do is provide shining examples of good communication and PR. I'm actually trying to remove the particular quotes from their context, because as you fairly point out, no company is perfect. But if we compile a big list of "wins" and use our imagination to interpolate, we can get a really clear picture of ideal PR and fan communication.
Although there may be no company that does a satisfactory job in the eyes of the hungry gamer, if we set our own expectations as a community based on evidence, everyone wins.
Gaming companies deserve respect for the daunting task of not only developing complex products, but managing a particularly bitchy customer base. The way we can best help gaming companies help us is to communicate our expectations clearly, with more evidence and less emotion.
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"Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions."
-Thomas Jefferson
All I'd like to do is provide shining examples of good communication and PR. There may be no company that does a satisfactory job in the eyes of the hungry gamer, but if we set our own expectations as a community based on evidence, everyone wins.
I guess I'm one of those imagine Blizzard being sincere as EA is being with the BF3 beta, would make things a lot less stressful for us - but I guess they would need to lose some of their playerbase to value that nowadays
Gaming companies deserve respect for the daunting task of not only developing complex products, but managing a particularly bitchy customer base. The way we can best help gaming companies help us is to communicate our expectations clearly, with more evidence and less emotion.
110% true, +1. If most of the playerbase gave as much thought to that as you do, I'm sure we'd have a much cleaner environment to interact and the official forums wouldn't be full of trolls/wouldn't suck
The development team of Grinding Gear Games, the makers of Path of Exile, do an outstanding job of communicating with the player base. In particular, their lead game designer and producer Chris Wilson responds to beta feedback on the forums on a daily basis, and occasionally even logs into the game to chat with players and give updates. Here's some samples of how he communicates:
I completely hear what you guys are saying and it's being addressed in the upcoming balance patch.
The goal of 0.9.2 was not to fix the skill balance. To do that properly requires stripping stuff back to bare bones and actually addressing underlying issues that have been in the system for too many years. That's what we're doing right now, because it is the most important problem with the game. We did include some skill changes in 0.9.2 as you know, for things that could be easily changed and tested. I am happy to make more changes in the coming days if needed. We're not going to try to stick you with the same patch for several weeks. There's another patch today, for example.
We're working hard on resolving the balance, but trying to do it in a long term way, rather than reactively reading a post about fireball being overpowered and turning it back down, which results in a rant from someone else about how it's now underpowered. It's better to know that we set Fireball correctly, and then get feedback on that, rather than solicit feedback on how loud other people's feedback was.
He understands the importance of giving players specific details about game mechanics, and is willing to answer questions regarding these mechanics:
We didn't change the monster difficulty (other than making bosses harder). Can you help work out what is causing it to feel like monsters are easier to kill? Are you using one of the skills that was boosted in damage?
The purpose of 0.9.3 is to fix the monster difficulty curve forever, so that we have a good point to balance around in the future.
Aside from the currency increase, the change regarding drops was a reduction from 18% to 17% drop rate. That means there should be 5% less items dropping (including 5% less rares/magics), which does appear to be the case. Are you seeing more than 5% less?
He gives accurate time frames and what content to expect in patches:
Three of our NZ developers went to PAX. The guys that went are all leads, so their respective departments worked without much supervision while we were gone. Two of us are back now, and hard at work reading feedback and checking the work that was done while we were away.
There were a lot of changes made while we were gone. A lot of new art has to be checked/improved by Erik (who should be back approximately Tuesday NZ time I hope). There are new skills that must be finished, tested and balanced. We haven't even started making any balance changes from 0.9.1 yet.
We have a choice between rushing out a small patch, or doing a proper job of actually making some meaningful balance changes. At this stage I'm more interested in doing it properly, and not just patching urgently because it has been a couple of weeks.
Once the patch is ready, it has to go through internal quality assurance for a few days, and then some external alpha testing. My best guess is that we will be able to deploy it around Monday 12 September.
It's important to note, however, that Grind Gear Games is an extremely small indie developer (and by extremely small I mean less than 20 people). They don't have any "community managers" like Blizzard does, so the developers interact directly with the players. This creates a much stronger bond between the game makers and game players, as there is no third party filter for communication.
Even though GGG is such a small company, they do have a pretty substantial community. There are around 500-1000 players in the beta, and hundreds more active users on the forum waiting for invites.
I don't think its quite fair to say compare D3's beta to Battlefield 3's beta. One is open and one is closed.
To say "Blizzard's PR should be like this!" and point to a Beta that is structred tottally differently (a competitive, online shooted as aposed to a coopertive RPG) just doesn't work IMHO.
Do I wish they would tell me when waves of invites are going to REALLY start going out? Yes. But if they do tell us "this Friday at 4pm" and then nothing happened they would have to explain what went wrong.
Runic Games also has quite a nice interaction with the fans and do offer information on the game they are working on (Torchlight 2). They are very small company.
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On Strike and supporting Fallout 4 Mod Makers
Some fallout 4 mod makers have had their mods stolen and uploaded and downloaded on Bethesda's site for the Xbox One.
Yes, Blizzard just doesn't know how to treat their fans or announce a simple beta.
That's so sad.
its sad when their fans are so bad, that any time they ever tried to release a date to be nice, they got nothing but trolling and hate when they had to push it back. Its the communities fault that blizzard has to hide dates.
To say "Blizzard's PR should be like this!" and point to a Beta that is structred tottally differently (a competitive, online shooted as aposed to a coopertive RPG) just doesn't work IMHO.
Another good point. I'm not really saying Blizzard should be any particular way, and especially not specifically like any one company. I just think some elements of Blizzard PR are not working, and I wanted to find out what they can do better by comparing them to specific communications by other companies.
Do I wish they would tell me when waves of invites are going to REALLY start going out? Yes. But if they do tell us "this Friday at 4pm" and then nothing happened they would have to explain what went wrong.
Exactly, they purposefully avoid accountability to their own customers.. which in itself is ok.. but they way they portray that idea to the community (in my opinion) comes off as arrogant and obtuse.
This is where Blizzard sets themselves ahead in quality, but behind in PR. Let's think it though, though. Is their philosophy working?
The idea is, "Hey, if we don't tell them a release date for X, they won't get disappointed and grill us!" Thing is, it doesn't work like that! The community at large still gets really angry when Blizzard takes a long time, and they get super-pissed when *perceived* delays happen (such as DH resource re-write, rune re-writes, etc). They don't tell us it's a delay, but we assume it is.. Because SOMETHING is making this take a long time, and we don't have any useful info as to why that is.
Blizzard LETS US ASSUME THE WORST.. and often, we humans tend to do that.
The negative response is almost exacerbated by the fact that we have NO idea what time impact anything is going to have, because Blizzard, in trying to "save us from the disappointment of a missed deadline" is, in fact, letting us assume the worst.
It's not that we can't handle delays. What we can't handle is being manipulated and mis-directed, which is the only tool to use when hiding things like dates from your customers.
I can't question their game quality, it's obviously top-rate. But since they refuse to talk straight with their loyal customers, I can't have much good to say about their PR.
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"Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions."
-Thomas Jefferson
Oh just thank you, thank you! Finally one person that understands the REAL problem some people have with Blizzard, rather than just "blabla blizz doesn't owe us anything, blabla be thankful blabla."
You Sir, made up for all the ignorant blizz buttlicking that never cease to anger me. Honestly though, you put it very well and that's really what's it about, not how much we hate Blizzard. I'd call it, customer relations. Did you mention that or ? In any case that's what it is. Your customer is the key to your success, don't just act indifferent towards them, and expect them to just "be patient" or thankful or whatever.
Even though they know "we'll all buy it" that's no excuse, in any case that's even worse, exploiting their fans loyalty by going "ah its okay if we delay, they'll still buy it." I put it on the edge there, but you see where I'm going ?
Exactly, they purposefully avoid accountability to their own customers.. which in itself is ok.. but they way they portray that idea to the community (in my opinion) comes off as arrogant and obtuse.
I would say that you are partially correct in that they don't seem to ever want to committ to anything. Which can be very frustrating as a fan, eagerly awaiting a game.
But at the same time, I have seen ALOT of stuff recently that was very pleasent and some what un-expected. The release of the Skill calulators and Item databases seemed like somthing they wouldn't want to do this early. Yet they did it. And, despite the giant disclaimer at the bottom of each page, the official forums are flooded with "OMG The items are horrible" threads. I can see why Blizzard usually doesn't show stuff that early. (even though I love it personally!)
The idea is, "Hey, if we don't tell them a release date for X, they won't get disappointed and grill us!" Thing is, it doesn't work like that! The community at large still gets really angry when Blizzard takes a long time, and they get super-pissed when *perceived* delays happen (such as DH resource re-write, rune re-writes, etc). They don't tell us it's a delay, but we assume it is.. Because SOMETHING is making this take a long time, and we don't have any useful info as to why that is..
I agree with this. But Blizzard has done exactly what you are asking for with Diablo 3.
"Hey Guys, no promisses, but we plan to release DIablo 3 in 2011."
"We still think we can make it!"
"Hey guys, the D3 Beta will start in quarter 3"
"Hey guys, sorry but D3 is gona slip to early 2012, but we are still pushing hard"
What more do you want here? Want them to give an exact release date? They obviously don't have one yet.
And on the Beta front, they have said they plan to invite ALOT of people and will as soon as the structure is there. I think if they said: "Hey guys, we hope to get the first big wave of beta invites out with in 2 weeks" that would be good, however.
I think you and think mostly the same, but, honestly, I think Diablo 3 has been pretty great so far from a PR stand. It almost feels like they are trying to go against their own usually bizare rigid standards with some of the stuff.
Another way to look at this is, say Blizz and their customers are playing a chess game. Now, in a chess game, the best defense position is the opening position, where all the pieces are standing at their initial positions.
Here comes the questions for Blizz:
Can you win a chess game without a move?
Very unlikely.
Will a player win every game?
Most unlikely.
I would rather had Blizz put a NDA on the F & F, and closed beta. And draw all attentions when they are about or not far from releasing the game.
Well that being said, it is up for Blizz to decide their strategy, since they play the first move.
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If they are always complaining, you're either setting the right expectations and not meeting them, or you're not setting the right expectations.
I just saw this post on the dota site. I was blown away not only by how responsive they are to their fan base, but how excellent their wording is.. just makes you feel good, like they are making this game to please YOU, and not themselves.
If you find any examples of great PR, post them here!
Source: http://blog.dota2.com/
Edit 1: Here's how you explicitly and clearly communicate about a beta:
http://www.battlefield.com/battlefield3/1/beta
-Thomas Jefferson
The whole Half Life 2 issue - "we're gonna split it into 3 episodes, and release one each year", fail number 1. The whole Left 4 Dead issue - "we're gonna update it as much as possible", bzzz, fail number 2, L4D2 was released less than a year after the first and L4D had almost 0 updates/patches.
DotA 2 had a ton of months without a single piece of news (except "changelog" leaks from the people invited to the International), and the only reason it had some news now is because Icefrog knows how damaging it can be to not talk to fans (since he was a gamer himself) and because everyone was expecting the beta to begin a month ago, and yet it's going to take another 6 months for them to even release the unfinished version used in the tournament.
BF 3 only wants that much beta attention because of the whole MW3 vs BF3 battle. They want to recover as many people lost in the past games to other shooter franchises (GoW, Halo) due to crappy PR. And they're only doing that because they know what most mainstream gamers think -> "beta = early access to the game, so I can tell my friends. lulz!".
I'm not saying Blizzard is doing everything perfectly. They delay games too (all of them?). They almost fail at delivering patches (hi, 1.13) and the way they're handling this specific beta is bad imho, giving away a lot of keys to press sites like gamespot and kind of ignoring fansites who kept the hype alive for all these years.
But I wouldn't at all put those other companies in a pedestal and pretend they're much better. Those a far from good examples of great PR to me.
Sweet. Definitely playing that on Thursday, thanks. =D
I think blizz could have maybe handled the PR a bit better, at least make it clear that because the beta was starting that didn't necessarily imply anyone would be invited immediately.
Edit: Damn those are some hefty recommended requirements.
Although I agree with everything you said in your post, I think you're misunderstanding the point of this thread.
All I'd like to do is provide shining examples of good communication and PR. I'm actually trying to remove the particular quotes from their context, because as you fairly point out, no company is perfect. But if we compile a big list of "wins" and use our imagination to interpolate, we can get a really clear picture of ideal PR and fan communication.
Although there may be no company that does a satisfactory job in the eyes of the hungry gamer, if we set our own expectations as a community based on evidence, everyone wins.
Gaming companies deserve respect for the daunting task of not only developing complex products, but managing a particularly bitchy customer base. The way we can best help gaming companies help us is to communicate our expectations clearly, with more evidence and less emotion.
-Thomas Jefferson
110% true, +1. If most of the playerbase gave as much thought to that as you do, I'm sure we'd have a much cleaner environment to interact
and the official forums wouldn't be full of trolls/wouldn't suckHe understands the importance of giving players specific details about game mechanics, and is willing to answer questions regarding these mechanics:
He gives accurate time frames and what content to expect in patches:
It's important to note, however, that Grind Gear Games is an extremely small indie developer (and by extremely small I mean less than 20 people). They don't have any "community managers" like Blizzard does, so the developers interact directly with the players. This creates a much stronger bond between the game makers and game players, as there is no third party filter for communication.
Even though GGG is such a small company, they do have a pretty substantial community. There are around 500-1000 players in the beta, and hundreds more active users on the forum waiting for invites.
To say "Blizzard's PR should be like this!" and point to a Beta that is structred tottally differently (a competitive, online shooted as aposed to a coopertive RPG) just doesn't work IMHO.
Do I wish they would tell me when waves of invites are going to REALLY start going out? Yes. But if they do tell us "this Friday at 4pm" and then nothing happened they would have to explain what went wrong.
Yeah I agree that wouldn't be fair.. That's not exactly what I was trying to do, but a point-to-point comparison is kind of inevitable I suppose.
Another good point. I'm not really saying Blizzard should be any particular way, and especially not specifically like any one company. I just think some elements of Blizzard PR are not working, and I wanted to find out what they can do better by comparing them to specific communications by other companies.
Exactly, they purposefully avoid accountability to their own customers.. which in itself is ok.. but they way they portray that idea to the community (in my opinion) comes off as arrogant and obtuse.
This is where Blizzard sets themselves ahead in quality, but behind in PR. Let's think it though, though. Is their philosophy working?
The idea is, "Hey, if we don't tell them a release date for X, they won't get disappointed and grill us!" Thing is, it doesn't work like that! The community at large still gets really angry when Blizzard takes a long time, and they get super-pissed when *perceived* delays happen (such as DH resource re-write, rune re-writes, etc). They don't tell us it's a delay, but we assume it is.. Because SOMETHING is making this take a long time, and we don't have any useful info as to why that is.
Blizzard LETS US ASSUME THE WORST.. and often, we humans tend to do that.
The negative response is almost exacerbated by the fact that we have NO idea what time impact anything is going to have, because Blizzard, in trying to "save us from the disappointment of a missed deadline" is, in fact, letting us assume the worst.
It's not that we can't handle delays. What we can't handle is being manipulated and mis-directed, which is the only tool to use when hiding things like dates from your customers.
I can't question their game quality, it's obviously top-rate. But since they refuse to talk straight with their loyal customers, I can't have much good to say about their PR.
-Thomas Jefferson
almost as sad as taking the time to insult those people.
-Thomas Jefferson
You Sir, made up for all the ignorant blizz buttlicking that never cease to anger me. Honestly though, you put it very well and that's really what's it about, not how much we hate Blizzard. I'd call it, customer relations. Did you mention that or ? In any case that's what it is. Your customer is the key to your success, don't just act indifferent towards them, and expect them to just "be patient" or thankful or whatever.
Even though they know "we'll all buy it" that's no excuse, in any case that's even worse, exploiting their fans loyalty by going "ah its okay if we delay, they'll still buy it." I put it on the edge there, but you see where I'm going ?
But at the same time, I have seen ALOT of stuff recently that was very pleasent and some what un-expected. The release of the Skill calulators and Item databases seemed like somthing they wouldn't want to do this early. Yet they did it. And, despite the giant disclaimer at the bottom of each page, the official forums are flooded with "OMG The items are horrible" threads. I can see why Blizzard usually doesn't show stuff that early. (even though I love it personally!)
I agree with this. But Blizzard has done exactly what you are asking for with Diablo 3.
"Hey Guys, no promisses, but we plan to release DIablo 3 in 2011."
"We still think we can make it!"
"Hey guys, the D3 Beta will start in quarter 3"
"Hey guys, sorry but D3 is gona slip to early 2012, but we are still pushing hard"
What more do you want here? Want them to give an exact release date? They obviously don't have one yet.
And on the Beta front, they have said they plan to invite ALOT of people and will as soon as the structure is there. I think if they said: "Hey guys, we hope to get the first big wave of beta invites out with in 2 weeks" that would be good, however.
I think you and think mostly the same, but, honestly, I think Diablo 3 has been pretty great so far from a PR stand. It almost feels like they are trying to go against their own usually bizare rigid standards with some of the stuff.
Another way to look at this is, say Blizz and their customers are playing a chess game. Now, in a chess game, the best defense position is the opening position, where all the pieces are standing at their initial positions.
Here comes the questions for Blizz:
Can you win a chess game without a move?
Very unlikely.
Will a player win every game?
Most unlikely.
I would rather had Blizz put a NDA on the F & F, and closed beta. And draw all attentions when they are about or not far from releasing the game.
Well that being said, it is up for Blizz to decide their strategy, since they play the first move.