Profile of van Voort

Okay, finished reading it. None of that (fantastic) write-up supports the idea that Blizzard alienated players. The reason SC2 died, according to Destiny, was because Blizzard didn't develop any systems to give players reasons to stay. That's completely different than pissing off a community.

For example, Reddit has been in a pretty much constant state of pissed-off. They've been like this since at least the Diretide incident, over various topics with various degrees of hysteria. Yet Dota's numbers recently peaked at over 1.2M concurrent players. This is evidence of how little it matters to piss off a community. What matters is to make correct business decisions: to make sure that what you're doing is keeping people happy and engaged, not what you're saying.

Another example: Nobody would care if Valve made weekly statements that they were working hard to fix the servers. What matters is that the servers get fixed, not whether they say anything about it. (And say what you want about the servers, but supporting 1.2M concurrent players is a massive feat of engineering.)

The point here is that communication from a company is not a huge factor in whether a game wins or not. Communication can be a strong negative factor which is why Valve choose to rarely communicate, a decision I wholeheartedly agree with. But it's rarely a positive except in crisis situations.

Thanks again for the fantastic link.

Jump back to quoted post20 Feb 2015, 15:13 PMIpKaiFung

All they had to do is say sorry; sorry for saying that the game won't have any game play elements behind a pay wall and going back on their word; sorry for that dumb ass post noun made which came off that it was content creators fault the community was toxic; sorry for calling alpha testers unprofessional, people who volunteer to find bugs and provide solutions and seemingly do a better job than their QA department does; sorry to the tournament organisers who they are trying to kill off with their ESL programme.

A simple sorry is all it takes but they are too proud to EVER say that. Instead of repairing bridges they'll just bribe some new guy with cake and coffee but they WILL do something stupid and piss that person off and they will just have another angry person.

Jump back to quoted post19 Feb 2015, 20:41 PMVon Kluge

Pretty funny that you mention this. I remember you posting constant crap about Relic until a certain point in time. Even tough James Hale is the worst mod in the history of the internet, I'd say he's less irrelevant than you are.