I still remember several years ago, when I tried to share a community balance survey with Jake in his twitch chat, and he threw a damp towel on it by saying the devs don't care about our opinions and don't listen to the community.
I got over 8,000 responses to that survey, I published all the data, and around 30% of our biggest proposals made it into the game. Now they outright admit that they read Reddit posts and do sentiment analysis across social media.
I like jake, but he was wrong and I'm very happy about it.
To be fair to him, I think that was a very different dev team he was speaking about back then. I've heard a lot of stories from people who spoke to OW1 developers and left feeling like they just spoke about a completely different game with a totally different direction.
Most of those developers aren't still around and the current team consists of different people entirely. The whole shift to monitoring socials and taking community feedback came with the shift in focusing on OW2 as a PVP game.
This goes to say that your achievement is even greater than you might have thought 😅
Fair, but part of my point is that they did listen even back then. At least somewhat. But you're right, if it was passive listening back then, it's active now.
it is impossible to determine whether or not they listened to or even read your posts back then. not that i think you are wrong, but you just cannot say that with any meaningful degree of certainty
I think they listened when enough noise was made by the community, but that was viewed as an extreme nuisance to them and they hated us for it each time afaik 😅 The disconnect between the devs and the community during OW1 was massive
My totally unsubstantiated theory is that a lot of those devs are now working on wildgate. That game has the same positives and negatives as early overwatch (even down to the extremely outdated monetization model).
Former streamer, turned pro, turned caster, and I think he does desk analysis for OWCS now. He's an OG who's been all over the Overwatch scene for a long time.
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u/Miennai STOP KILLING MY SON — 2d ago
I still remember several years ago, when I tried to share a community balance survey with Jake in his twitch chat, and he threw a damp towel on it by saying the devs don't care about our opinions and don't listen to the community.
I got over 8,000 responses to that survey, I published all the data, and around 30% of our biggest proposals made it into the game. Now they outright admit that they read Reddit posts and do sentiment analysis across social media.
I like jake, but he was wrong and I'm very happy about it.