Unanswered Questions....

Unknown

aaronschmiz wrote:

And a few pop-ups in app... It's a start. But I wouldn't consider it an improvement. It's barely a baby step. And if we allow/consider that tiny change to be considered improvement, then we will never get anywhere.

I think you're very wrong about that. It's very, incredibly far from being enough of a change, but it's hardly the nothing you're trying to make it out to be. Especially popups directing people to the forums about major character changes is very much a full step in the right direction. It'll hopefully lead to more than 5k members joining and voicing opinions and the more people on the forums, the more reason for them to hire a community manager and all those other changes we want.

My hope is that rather than you having to bump your own post until the devs talk to you, enough of the rest of the community will chime in to continue to press these issues we care about. Like I said, I don't care if they never talk to you, but I definitely care that they don't talk to us (the customers) enough

Unknown

AethD wrote:

My hope is that rather than you having to bump your own post until the devs talk to you, enough of the rest of the community will chime in to continue to press these issues we care about. Like I said, I don't care if they never talk to you, but I definitely care that they don't talk to us (the customers) enough.

Honestly, if Ice or any of the other D3 people post a thread stating that were implementing a new communication policy to interact with us more, and actually follow through with better communication, I could care less if he responds directly to me as well.

If you read all of my responses in this thread, it is all about D3 communicating with US, the community, the consumer. Not just me.

Unknown

ZenBrillig wrote:

aaronschmiz wrote:

I'm more so trying to call attention to the lack of effort that D3 puts in with communicating with us. They set up this forum, they used to respond, then they didn't, then they promised to do it better, all the while it has only gotten worse. Ice is the only person that I have ever seen on a regular basis (using that term loosely) post to the threads. And as previously stated, if they assigned him to the task, then keep him so busy that he can't perform that task, then they either need to get him some help so he can, or assign the task to a dedicated person.

I'm pretty sure that IceIX is a dev, and so communicating with the forum is something he does on his own time. If he's been officially assigned to it, I would guess it's only to the extent of posting patch notes and the like. I looked earlier in the day and there were 11 registered users on and 10 guests. Just now, 6 registered users and 12 guests. To me, that doesn't really sound like enough to justify formally allocating someone, even part-time, to interact with the community here.

IceIX's profile says "Site Admin," so being D3's official "face" to the forums is at least one of his hats. He's said that he has several other hats--I don't know what they are, but I believe him--that also take up a considerable amount of his time. From that, I gather that IceIX is probably reporting to someone else--a boss--that sets the relative priority of his multiple hats and limits the amount of time he can spend communicating with the part of the playerbase that frequents the forums.

I believe his boss is screwing up. IceIX either needs to be scheduled more time to communicate on the forums, or D3 needs to hire someone else to more heavily emphasize PR/CS/communications.

The relationship between a constantly-updated online game and its playerbase isn't some new thing that sprang into being with the creation of MPQ. Except for maybe a few of the youngest kids of some of the players, MPQ isn't their first online game, and the definition and parameters of "good business practices in consumer relations" have been long set by the broad marketplace of developers and users. Compared to other online games of various subtypes, MPQ is quite good in some areas and very, very poor in the specific area of communications. How much or how little IceIX posts on the forums is only part of the overall communications issues, but it's a reasonably large part.

Also, the proportion of the playerbase that visits the forums might be small, but it's not miniscule, and it probably contains a still-larger percentage of the local whale population, as well as a high percentage of the top-scoring players in PvE and PvP. This is an important part of the playerbase--not the only important part, but probably the most concentrated important part. Ignoring the most-engaged part of your playerbase does not lead to long-term fiscal health.

Unknown

aaronschmiz wrote:

AethD wrote:

My hope is that rather than you having to bump your own post until the devs talk to you, enough of the rest of the community will chime in to continue to press these issues we care about. Like I said, I don't care if they never talk to you, but I definitely care that they don't talk to us (the customers) enough.

Honestly, if Ice or any of the other D3 people post a thread stating that were implementing a new communication policy to interact with us more, and actually follow through with better communication, I could care less if he responds directly to me as well.

If you read all of my responses in this thread, it is all about D3 communicating with US, the community, the consumer. Not just me.

That's why I said this post sounded more whiney and self-centered than the original post you're talking about, which brought up a lot about how we, as a community, feel about their lack of communication.

Vairelome wrote:

IceIX's profile says "Site Admin," so being D3's official "face" to the forums is at least one of his hats. He's said that he has several other hats--I don't know what they are, but I believe him--that also take up a considerable amount of his time. From that, I gather that IceIX is probably reporting to someone else--a boss--that sets the relative priority of his multiple hats and limits the amount of time he can spend communicating with the part of the playerbase that frequents the forums.

I believe his boss is screwing up. IceIX either needs to be scheduled more time to communicate on the forums, or D3 needs to hire someone else to more heavily emphasize PR/CS/communications.

The relationship between a constantly-updated online game and its playerbase isn't some new thing that sprang into being with the creation of MPQ. Except for maybe a few of the youngest kids of some of the players, MPQ isn't their first online game, and the definition and parameters of "good business practices in consumer relations" have been long set by the broad marketplace of developers and users. Compared to other online games of various subtypes, MPQ is quite good in some areas and very, very poor in the specific area of communications. How much or how little IceIX posts on the forums is only part of the overall communications issues, but it's a reasonably large part.

Also, the proportion of the playerbase that visits the forums might be small, but it's not miniscule, and it probably contains a still-larger percentage of the local whale population, as well as a high percentage of the top-scoring players in PvE and PvP. This is an important part of the playerbase--not the only important part, but probably the most concentrated important part. Ignoring the most-engaged part of your playerbase does not lead to long-term fiscal health.

I think you're right that it's poor management of whoever is above IceX, and you're right about the playerbase proportions on the forums. This is why I'm more positive on the in-game popups because they'll hopefully drive forum growth above small to something they'd have to hire someone full time to respond to.

Unknown

AethD wrote:

I think you're right that it's poor management of whoever is above IceX, and you're right about the playerbase proportions on the forums. This is why I'm more positive on the in-game popups because they'll hopefully drive forum growth above small to something they'd have to hire someone full time to respond to.

I may have missed it due to compulsively closing popups too quickly to read them, but do the in-game popups have a reference to these forums? I have had the general impression that D3 wasn't making much effort to drive traffic here; I think I originally found the forums either from a link on the Steam MPQ page or from googling.

Unknown

Vairelome wrote:

AethD wrote:

I think you're right that it's poor management of whoever is above IceX, and you're right about the playerbase proportions on the forums. This is why I'm more positive on the in-game popups because they'll hopefully drive forum growth above small to something they'd have to hire someone full time to respond to.

I may have missed it due to compulsively closing popups too quickly to read them, but do the in-game popups have a reference to these forums? I have had the general impression that D3 wasn't making much effort to drive traffic here; I think I originally found the forums either from a link on the Steam MPQ page or from googling.

They did for a very brief moment. But that didn't last long. I actually found the forums by google searching MPQ.

Unknown

Vairelome wrote:

IceIX's profile says "Site Admin," so being D3's official "face" to the forums is at least one of his hats.

Actually, that's what his Title is according to the board software - and I believe that's what the board software calls the person who initially sets it up. And there's a world of difference between being the administrator of a forum and being responsible for corporate communications.

The relationship between a constantly-updated online game and its playerbase isn't some new thing that sprang into being with the creation of MPQ. Except for maybe a few of the youngest kids of some of the players, MPQ isn't their first online game, and the definition and parameters of "good business practices in consumer relations" have been long set by the broad marketplace of developers and users. Compared to other online games of various subtypes, MPQ is quite good in some areas and very, very poor in the specific area of communications. How much or how little IceIX posts on the forums is only part of the overall communications issues, but it's a reasonably large part.

I'd be interested to know what games you think do a better job, because in essentially all of the online games I play, the forums share the same frustration at lack of communication, and pretty much for the same reason - incorrect expectations on the part of the players. The main reasons players are frustrated is because of two things: that they believe they have expertise they lack, and because they fundamentally misunderstand the role that the forums play.

We are not game designers, and frankly, it shows when you look at the general quality of suggestions offered. I can easily find a half-dozen "suggestions", for example, which boil down to "remove scaling." This completely ignores that scaling wasn't an easy system to implement, and causes them continuous headaches as they try to tune it - which means that the objective of scaling is critically important. Yet these suggestions throw out the system without even a hint of comprehension that scaling was implemented to try to achieve a goal, rather than as an arbitrary system of player punishment.

We are not network/server engineers, but somehow we're qualified to tell D3 that they're doing it wrong by sharding? (If you actually are a network/server engineer, and you saw the performance late in S1, then you know better.)

The forums don't exist to support a conversation between developers and players, but rather to channel solicited and unsolicited feedback. Almost all the communication is one-way. It's not a profitable use of the developers' time to engage in debate with players, or to try to defend their decisions. No matter what D3 does, some people will be upset about it. Some of those people will be on the forum and want to go round and round with a dev until they can (they think) change his mind. That is an incredible waste of time, and it will happen with every single change.

Spoit

Like was mentioned in another thread, marvel heroes. Even ignoring the AMA, they probably had more communication today than D3 has had all month. And they're also constantly doing balance patches to characters every patch, which comes more often than every 4 months. Moreover, those balance patches don't necessarily get them more money with respecing, since you only need to buy a hero once (for about the same price as a single cover).

Or talking about F2P mobile games, how about Puzzles & Dragons? They also had a big server meltdown during a major event. They were on top of it, acknowledging that it was a problem ahead of time, posting updates on the progress, and letting everyone know well ahead of time when they were going to take the server down to do maintenance. (They also actually offered about $5 worth of compensation for the disruption caused by the server errors). They also seem to respond to a fair deal of comments on facebook. And that's with them being a port of a japanese game to boot! (Though they did have some dungeons that actually debuted in the american version first before making it over to the japanese one, IIRC)

Unknown

ZenBrillig wrote:

We are not game designers, and frankly, it shows when you look at the general quality of suggestions offered. I can easily find a half-dozen "suggestions", for example, which boil down to "remove scaling." This completely ignores that scaling wasn't an easy system to implement, and causes them continuous headaches as they try to tune it - which means that the objective of scaling is critically important. Yet these suggestions throw out the system without even a hint of comprehension that scaling was implemented to try to achieve a goal, rather than as an arbitrary system of player punishment.

We are not network/server engineers, but somehow we're qualified to tell D3 that they're doing it wrong by sharding? (If you actually are a network/server engineer, and you saw the performance late in S1, then you know better.)

The forums don't exist to support a conversation between developers and players, but rather to channel solicited and unsolicited feedback. Almost all the communication is one-way. It's not a profitable use of the developers' time to engage in debate with players, or to try to defend their decisions. No matter what D3 does, some people will be upset about it. Some of those people will be on the forum and want to go round and round with a dev until they can (they think) change his mind. That is an incredible waste of time, and it will happen with every single change.

I'm surprised things were barely shifting to a sharded environment in the first place, but it's absolutely something that needed to be done. I wasn't aware that people complained about the sharding, just that it took so long to acknowledge the issues that occurred. A lot of the communication we're calling for is to actually get a post saying our servers are tinykittied right now, or we tinykittied the start of this event but we're working on it. The last few issues they finally got around to acknowledging, but quite awhile after the fact. I definitely think they've been taking some steps in the right direction.

Unknown

AethD wrote:

I'm surprised things were barely shifting to a sharded environment in the first place, but it's absolutely something that needed to be done. I wasn't aware that people complained about the sharding, just that it took so long to acknowledge the issues that occurred. A lot of the communication we're calling for is to actually get a post saying our servers are tinykittied right now, or we tinykittied the start of this event but we're working on it. The last few issues they finally got around to acknowledging, but quite awhile after the fact. I definitely think they've been taking some steps in the right direction.

He's misrepresenting the objections by omitting their substance. As far as I can tell, sharding makes a lot of sense in terms of scaling server architecture, and was going to be inevitable unless the playerbase stopped growing. The objections were strictly focused on the methods used, and especially IceIX's admission that the algorithm that sorted players into shards was weighted based on number of days played, in order to create brackets that were somewhat "clustered" with more new players in Bracket A and more senior players in Bracket B.

The PvP problem is that your standings at the end of the tournament are now going to be MUCH more affected by which bracket you end up in than previously, because similar scores between players could be top 10 in one case and not even top 100 in the other. Remember, matchmaking selects across brackets, so players that customarily get the same scores probably have similar MMRs and face similar opposition. The PvE problem is that holding multiple shards open simultaneously substantially decreases the fill rate of a given bracket, meaning that it may take multiple hours for that bracket to fill. With serial bracket creation, the fill window is much smaller, and the players within the bracket are far more similar in terms of start time, which determines maximum number of refreshes possible and other optimal scheduling concerns.

Yes, some of the above can happen in an unweighted system, strictly as a result of random variation. However, from observation of the new "death brackets" and confirmation by IceIX, it turns out that a deliberate skew was introduced by the developers to redirect some of the top placement rewards to newer players at lower point values. Naturally, there were vigorous objections both to penalizing older accounts and to introducing the change stealthily, only admitting it a week or two after the fact in the face of considerable (accurate) speculation.

Unknown

Vairelome wrote:

Yes, some of the above can happen in an unweighted system, strictly as a result of random variation. However, from observation of the new "death brackets" and confirmation by IceIX, it turns out that a deliberate skew was introduced by the developers to redirect some of the top placement rewards to newer players at lower point values. Naturally, there were vigorous objections both to penalizing older accounts and to introducing the change stealthily, only admitting it a week or two after the fact in the face of considerable (accurate) speculation.

It's this lack of "fair play" that went a long way into convincing me to quit this game. They sneak in ways to disadvantage players much too often, and at best admit to doing so once there's enough proof that it can't be ignored any longer. I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually give a "slight nudge" to the way token percentages work out, skewing pulls towards colors you've already maxed out. That's technically not against the small print, you would still have that published 6.1% chance for the featured hero, you are just less likely to get the color you still need.

Unknown

AethD wrote:

ZenBrillig wrote:

We are not game designers, and frankly, it shows when you look at the general quality of suggestions offered. I can easily find a half-dozen "suggestions", for example, which boil down to "remove scaling." This completely ignores that scaling wasn't an easy system to implement, and causes them continuous headaches as they try to tune it - which means that the objective of scaling is critically important. Yet these suggestions throw out the system without even a hint of comprehension that scaling was implemented to try to achieve a goal, rather than as an arbitrary system of player punishment.

We are not network/server engineers, but somehow we're qualified to tell D3 that they're doing it wrong by sharding? (If you actually are a network/server engineer, and you saw the performance late in S1, then you know better.)

The forums don't exist to support a conversation between developers and players, but rather to channel solicited and unsolicited feedback. Almost all the communication is one-way. It's not a profitable use of the developers' time to engage in debate with players, or to try to defend their decisions. No matter what D3 does, some people will be upset about it. Some of those people will be on the forum and want to go round and round with a dev until they can (they think) change his mind. That is an incredible waste of time, and it will happen with every single change.

I'm surprised things were barely shifting to a sharded environment in the first place, but it's absolutely something that needed to be done. I wasn't aware that people complained about the sharding, just that it took so long to acknowledge the issues that occurred. A lot of the communication we're calling for is to actually get a post saying our servers are tinykittied right now, or we tinykittied the start of this event but we're working on it. The last few issues they finally got around to acknowledging, but quite awhile after the fact. I definitely think they've been taking some steps in the right direction.

You didn't know that people complained about the sharding because they were actually complaining about the changes in bracketing which was NOTHING to do with the sharding. Some people might have complained about the associated instability which lasted a while afterwards but that's a seperate thing. His entire condescending post is a complete waste of time to read, so I wouldn't bother replying to it 8)

Unknown

ZenBrillig wrote:

We are not game designers, and frankly, it shows when you look at the general quality of suggestions offered. I can easily find a half-dozen "suggestions", for example, which boil down to "remove scaling." This completely ignores that scaling wasn't an easy system to implement, and causes them continuous headaches as they try to tune it - which means that the objective of scaling is critically important. Yet these suggestions throw out the system without even a hint of comprehension that scaling was implemented to try to achieve a goal, rather than as an arbitrary system of player punishment.

We are not network/server engineers, but somehow we're qualified to tell D3 that they're doing it wrong by sharding? (If you actually are a network/server engineer, and you saw the performance late in S1, then you know better.)

The forums don't exist to support a conversation between developers and players, but rather to channel solicited and unsolicited feedback. Almost all the communication is one-way. It's not a profitable use of the developers' time to engage in debate with players, or to try to defend their decisions. No matter what D3 does, some people will be upset about it. Some of those people will be on the forum and want to go round and round with a dev until they can (they think) change his mind. That is an incredible waste of time, and it will happen with every single change.

You're Right. We are not game developers. (most of us, I am sure there might be a few among us). And most of us also are not network/server engineers. But that is not the point of this thread. We don't care WHY they do what they do (for the most part), we just want to know WHEN they make changes and how it benefits or detracts from the user end.

As far as the "level" of suggestions offered, we're not writing code and sending it off to them. We are saying: "Hey, I think this might work better." There are even threads that are offering to help balance changes with revenue so that EVERYONE is happy, the players and accountants at D3 alike.

And while you say that they don't have to "defend their decisions", I'll once again remind you and anyone else reading that has forgotten, that they do, in fact, have to defend or explain their decisions if they want their consumers (that would be us) to continue to spend money on the product that they are selling. And that is exactly what this is. They are SELLING us a product. And if we are not getting explanations for the changes that they are making to the product that we bought, then they don't deserve to keep getting our money.

But to get this thread back on topic, this is about communication on a greater scale from the company. We want them to talk to us about what is going on. Not later. But now. And with any change that is made, before it is made. The only exception to that is unforeseen issues, like the server crash. But even then, it should be a swift note explaining the situation and that they are working on it and will update us when the issues have been resolved.

Unknown

aaronschmiz wrote:

And while you say that they don't have to "defend their decisions", I'll once again remind you and anyone else reading that has forgotten, that they do, in fact, have to defend or explain their decisions if they want their consumers (that would be us) to continue to spend money on the product that they are selling. And that is exactly what this is. They are SELLING us a product. And if we are not getting explanations for the changes that they are making to the product that we bought, then they don't deserve to keep getting our money.

And I guess I'll once again remind you and the 12 other registered users and 14 guests that 27 is 0.01% of 200,000 (estimated DAU), and that communicating *here* will, at the end of the day, not make a beans worth of difference in the success or failure of the company and the game.

But to get this thread back on topic, this is about communication on a greater scale from the company. We want them to talk to us about what is going on. Not later. But now. And with any change that is made, before it is made. The only exception to that is unforeseen issues, like the server crash. But even then, it should be a swift note explaining the situation and that they are working on it and will update us when the issues have been resolved.

With regard to the server crash, it's actually highly unlikely that it was an actual crash. (Yeah, I actually am a network/server engineer.) What happens in these situations is that things go sideways in an unpredictable fashion. Clients are randomly disconnected. Database responses slow down. Points are registered in one place and not another. At a small company, it's pretty much all-hands-on-deck, everyone looking at the logs and diagnostics to try to figure out what's going on. The only person who has time to actually post something about such an outage would be someone dedicated to communications. Which is someone D3 doesn't have. Should they hire one? I don't think that it's justified, not unless/until the game grows a lot larger than it is currently.

Now, you may say that it's not a big delay for someone to post two sentences on the forums before going off to troubleshoot, and you'd be absolutely right. And if they'd done that, we'd be having a conversation about why people feel it was unprofessional of them to not update after the initial note for three hours. I think you see what I'm getting at.

As for other changes, like bracketing, MMR and scaling - these are all under-the-hood changes that D3 explicitly doesn't want the players to know too much about, because if we know exactly how they work, we'll just game the system. And for changes like character/power changes, they've been pretty good about letting us know up front.

Frailezim

Either Zenbrillig is campaigning hardcore for a mod position or he's Ice's alt...

Unknown

Moghwyn wrote:

Vairelome wrote:

Yes, some of the above can happen in an unweighted system, strictly as a result of random variation. However, from observation of the new "death brackets" and confirmation by IceIX, it turns out that a deliberate skew was introduced by the developers to redirect some of the top placement rewards to newer players at lower point values. Naturally, there were vigorous objections both to penalizing older accounts and to introducing the change stealthily, only admitting it a week or two after the fact in the face of considerable (accurate) speculation.

It's this lack of "fair play" that went a long way into convincing me to quit this game. They sneak in ways to disadvantage players much too often, and at best admit to doing so once there's enough proof that it can't be ignored any longer. I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually give a "slight nudge" to the way token percentages work out, skewing pulls towards colors you've already maxed out. That's technically not against the small print, you would still have that published 6.1% chance for the featured hero, you are just less likely to get the color you still need.

Well they are essentially selling pulls on a slot machine. I guess it wouldn't be too surprising if they found creative ways to fix the odds.

Frailezim wrote:

Either Zenbrillig is campaigning hardcore for a mod position or he's Ice's alt...

Pretty sure he just disagrees with whatever the last thing said was, that's what he does on every thread. He's the only poster I've ever seen downvoted into hidden.

Unknown

ZenBrillig wrote:

And I guess I'll once again remind you and the 12 other registered users and 14 guests that 27 is 0.01% of 200,000 (estimated DAU), and that communicating *here* will, at the end of the day, not make a beans worth of difference in the success or failure of the company and the game.

There's over 5k registered players on the forums, so about 2.5% or so. Which'd also likely be greater than 2.5% of the players who actually spend money on this game. Still small, but not the negligible amount you're insisting. Not to mention the more pop-ups etc that send DAU to the forums, the more important they become.

ZenBrillig wrote:

With regard to the server crash, it's actually highly unlikely that it was an actual crash. (Yeah, I actually am a network/server engineer.) What happens in these situations is that things go sideways in an unpredictable fashion. Clients are randomly disconnected. Database responses slow down. Points are registered in one place and not another. At a small company, it's pretty much all-hands-on-deck, everyone looking at the logs and diagnostics to try to figure out what's going on. The only person who has time to actually post something about such an outage would be someone dedicated to communications. Which is someone D3 doesn't have. Should they hire one? I don't think that it's justified, not unless/until the game grows a lot larger than it is currently.

You're just playing with semantics about what is/ isn't a server crash. I'm sure they had to bring some of the systems down / patch them which would look just like a crash from the end user's point of view when it can't connect.
A lot of your other assumptions might be correct, but it totally depends on the size of the shop. That guy who works on character design probably isn't doing **** when there's network connection issues. But you are right that it isn't anyone's job currently to let people know when things are screwed up.

ZenBrillig wrote:

Now, you may say that it's not a big delay for someone to post two sentences on the forums before going off to troubleshoot, and you'd be absolutely right. And if they'd done that, we'd be having a conversation about why people feel it was unprofessional of them to not update after the initial note for three hours. I think you see what I'm getting at.

Yes some people will complain about anything, you're a prime example of that in a lot of threads. If we'd had that notification earlier you'd have fewer people complaining about lack of communication.

ZenBrillig wrote:

As for other changes, like bracketing, MMR and scaling - these are all under-the-hood changes that D3 explicitly doesn't want the players to know too much about, because if we know exactly how they work, we'll just game the system. And for changes like character/power changes, they've been pretty good about letting us know up front.

You're right we shouldn't know the under the hood stuff, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't let us know when there's a major overhaul to those systems. And they've gotten better about letting us know about character stuff, but they haven't always been great in the past.

Unknown

AethD wrote:

ZenBrillig wrote:

And I guess I'll once again remind you and the 12 other registered users and 14 guests that 27 is 0.01% of 200,000 (estimated DAU), and that communicating *here* will, at the end of the day, not make a beans worth of difference in the success or failure of the company and the game.

There's over 5k registered players on the forums, so about 2.5% or so. Which'd also likely be greater than 2.5% of the players who actually spend money on this game. Still small, but not the negligible amount you're insisting. Not to mention the more pop-ups etc that send DAU to the forums, the more important they become.

ZenBrillig wrote:

With regard to the server crash, it's actually highly unlikely that it was an actual crash. (Yeah, I actually am a network/server engineer.) What happens in these situations is that things go sideways in an unpredictable fashion. Clients are randomly disconnected. Database responses slow down. Points are registered in one place and not another. At a small company, it's pretty much all-hands-on-deck, everyone looking at the logs and diagnostics to try to figure out what's going on. The only person who has time to actually post something about such an outage would be someone dedicated to communications. Which is someone D3 doesn't have. Should they hire one? I don't think that it's justified, not unless/until the game grows a lot larger than it is currently.

You're just playing with semantics about what is/ isn't a server crash. I'm sure they had to bring some of the systems down / patch them which would look just like a crash from the end user's point of view when it can't connect.
A lot of your other assumptions might be correct, but it totally depends on the size of the shop. That guy who works on character design probably isn't doing **** when there's network connection issues. But you are right that it isn't anyone's job currently to let people know when things are screwed up.

ZenBrillig wrote:

Now, you may say that it's not a big delay for someone to post two sentences on the forums before going off to troubleshoot, and you'd be absolutely right. And if they'd done that, we'd be having a conversation about why people feel it was unprofessional of them to not update after the initial note for three hours. I think you see what I'm getting at.

Yes some people will complain about anything, you're a prime example of that in a lot of threads. If we'd had that notification earlier you'd have fewer people complaining about lack of communication.

ZenBrillig wrote:

As for other changes, like bracketing, MMR and scaling - these are all under-the-hood changes that D3 explicitly doesn't want the players to know too much about, because if we know exactly how they work, we'll just game the system. And for changes like character/power changes, they've been pretty good about letting us know up front.

You're right we shouldn't know the under the hood stuff, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't let us know when there's a major overhaul to those systems. And they've gotten better about letting us know about character stuff, but they haven't always been great in the past.

It won't let me give you a thumbs up

So I'll just do it in writing. THUMBS UP +1

Seasick Pirate

Riggy wrote:

Ice has said that the only threads they are guaranteed never to comment in are the ones that say "devs, read this" or something along those lines. So at the very least, change the title of this thread.

While I'm not a fan of the tone or the offhand nature of the original post, I do find this comment worrisome.
This is a forum where we're encouraged to come together as a community and interact with each other. And while there are representatives from the development team among here, and they may speak with us, we must not address them if we want to be heard?

Maybe this is why so many of our customer support emails and tickets go unanswered?
Instead of ending your issues to the staff, simply write it down on a piece of paper and place it under your pillow for the CS Fairy to find.

Unknown

Seasick Pirate wrote:

Riggy wrote:

Ice has said that the only threads they are guaranteed never to comment in are the ones that say "devs, read this" or something along those lines. So at the very least, change the title of this thread.

While I'm not a fan of the tone or the offhand nature of the original post, I do find this comment worrisome.
This is a forum where we're encouraged to come together as a community and interact with each other. And while there are representatives from the development team among here, and they may speak with us, we must not address them if we want to be heard?

Maybe this is why so many of our customer support emails and tickets go unanswered?
Instead of ending your issues to the staff, simply write it down on a piece of paper and place it under your pillow for the CS Fairy to find.

Agreed. And I edited your quote to properly show who made that quote. You may want to do the same in your own post.