A word on communication strategy (and damage control)

[Aotearas]

Alternative title: Why you sometimes should listen to the marketing team.

 

Now, I'm fairly sure there's few people on the forum that haven't gotten up in the latest community upheavel that I will pointedly NOT make a focal point of this thread (and I'd kindly ask other people to do the same) because ultimately the specific content of what that upheavel is about is largely irrelevant to the points I want to make here.

 

WG, you really need to work on your communication strategy. There is no use in leaking grand ambitions and then not having an outlet for community reactions ready at the time the news breaks. If you publish (or let CCs do so) upcoming changes to the game that are obviously going to get massive reactions out of the community is inevitably going to result in knee-jerk reactions (whether those be justified/appropriate or not).

 

In regards to the latest scuttlebutt, word is that there will be a Q&A soon™ ... that's not soon enough. That's in fact way too late as is evidenced in the current forum situations. The Q&A should have been ready the moment news like the current ones broke. You have ways to control when those news break so there's no excuse not having something like this ready.

 

This is a constant issue with WG over the past years and you've promised to improve. Indeed for a time it looked like you actually held that promise but lately it seems you have regressed back to the previous stage.

 

I'd like to @ the usual WG staff to read this, but apparently the forum is currently too busy filtering the rage and that function appears to not work for me as of the moment of me posting this thread. If someone else wants to tag MrConway, Crysantos and Sehales, you're welcome to it.

[thiextar]

@MrConway @Crysantos @Sehales

 

There you go ^^

[Arty_McFly]

Moved to "Off-Topic" section, since this has nothing to do with "Gameplay".

[Ubertron_X]

2 hours ago, Arty_McFly said:

Moved to "Off-Topic" section, since this has nothing to do with "Gameplay".

Yeah, nice move when you renamed "General discussion" into "Gameplay" some years ago...

[Blixies]

So this thread is pseudo-closed now too... what a joke.

[WolfGewehr]

14 minutes ago, Ubertron_X said:

Yeah, nice move when you renamed "General discussion" into "Gameplay" some years ago...

 

Indeed, the name of the section might have changed, but the tradition has not died. Our WoWs community as a tradition talks about hot topics in Gameplay section, as that's the most popular part of our forums. It's the common place for all of this.

 

Glad to see it's not just only the game that's going down the drain.

[Egoleter]

12 minutes ago, WolfGewehr said:

Indeed, the name of the section might have changed, but the tradition has not died.

There is no tradition. This is Wargamings forum, not ours. They make the rules. They define what topics fit where.

 

When you create your own forum you can allow traditions to exist and deal with the chaos. That's your choice. On the boards here you will have to bow to their rules. The volunteer moderators (always remember that they are players like the rest of us) are just enforcing what you accepted when you started posting here.

[Affeks]

2 hours ago, Arty_McFly said:

Moved to "Off-Topic" section, since this has nothing to do with "Gameplay".

Off-topic implies its not wows related though... when in fact this is the most important piece of news regarding gameplay in months or years

[Arty_McFly]

11 minutes ago, Affeks said:

Off-topic implies its not wows related though... when in fact this is the most important piece of news regarding gameplay in months or years

I agree that Off-Topic doesn't really fit, but since we don't have a sub-forum for topics like this, it is the best place we have.

However, this topic does definitely not fit into "Gameplay".

[Zemeritt]

Swept under the rug. Typical.

[WolfGewehr]

1 minute ago, Egoleter said:

There is no tradition.

 

Tradition definition:

Quote

a belief, principle, or way of acting that people in a particular society or group have continued to follow for a long time

 

Whether it's against the rules to discuss topic X in Gameplay or not is another thing, but our community has a tradition as it's so used to discuss any hot news in Gameplay that they will continue creating topics there. Every single big news has soon a thread in Gameplay. So thus such tradition/phenomena exists.

 

I can agree that either we follow the rules or get punished. What I definitely don't agree with you though, is your claim that no such tradition exists.

 

 

So, to break it down more simple: every time when a new, big news comes, sooner or later someone creates a topic/wants to discuss it in Gameplay anyways. That is the tradition we as a community have. Sure, those threads can get removed and locked, but do not claim such tradition doesn't exist, when anyone can prove you wrong by reading Gameplay section when big news are released.

 

 

If someone is new to forums and reading this, the core reason for this so called tradition/phenomena is that years ago that same section was called General Discussion. Name and rules changed, but the way people use that section didn't really change in practise. Should it have changed according to the rules? Maybe, but such are traditions, they are hard to kill.

[Crysantos]

12 hours ago, Aotearas said:

Alternative title: Why you sometimes should listen to the marketing team.

 

Now, I'm fairly sure there's few people on the forum that haven't gotten up in the latest community upheavel that I will pointedly NOT make a focal point of this thread (and I'd kindly ask other people to do the same) because ultimately the specific content of what that upheavel is about is largely irrelevant to the points I want to make here.

 

WG, you really need to work on your communication strategy. There is no use in leaking grand ambitions and then not having an outlet for community reactions ready at the time the news breaks. If you publish (or let CCs do so) upcoming changes to the game that are obviously going to get massive reactions out of the community is inevitably going to result in knee-jerk reactions (whether those be justified/appropriate or not).

 

In regards to the latest scuttlebutt, word is that there will be a Q&A soon™ ... that's not soon enough. That's in fact way too late as is evidenced in the current forum situations. The Q&A should have been ready the moment news like the current ones broke. You have ways to control when those news break so there's no excuse not having something like this ready.

 

This is a constant issue with WG over the past years and you've promised to improve. Indeed for a time it looked like you actually held that promise but lately it seems you have regressed back to the previous stage.

 

I'd like to @ the usual WG staff to read this, but apparently the forum is currently too busy filtering the rage and that function appears to not work for me as of the moment of me posting this thread. If someone else wants to tag MrConway, Crysantos and Sehales, you're welcome to it.

Hi!

 

It always depends on how you look at it - we posted the news about this at the same time as the embargo lift scheduled for our CCs from the summit. Since this is a big topic and in early stage, we wanted to use the DevBlog to share this info and give you that platform (related forum, FB, Reddit threads) to discuss this and answer questions where they pop up. I'm sure we'll talk about this in our usual stream on Thursday and you know that we're always open to talk about these things. If we didn't want to communicate, we would just implement this feature without any prior notice. But I appreciate the effort and feedback on this to improve communication and have a better interaction between us.

 

Greetings, Crysantos