After nearly 9 years with Blizzard, Josh Allen has announced his departure from Blizzard.
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Good. Glad that he is gone
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Amazing news. Ion and Holinka next. That’s about the last of them clowns who ruined WoW after MoP.
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Do you guys even know who he is?
He had nothing to do with development, or lore.
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Unfortunate, I think.
The Q&As he managed to arrange over the years have been a personal highlight to me, as far as his community management is concerned. Different CMs have tried different approaches over the years (Blizzcast!?), but the Q&As were by far the best. Heroes of the Storm had a similar Q&A setup with CM Cloaken, but I think Josh and Ion made for an specially entertaining duo. So it’s unfortunate that it comes to an end now, I think.
But best wishes to him whereever he goes. It’ll be curious to see if he’s lured by some of those new ex-Blizzard studios that have sprung up recently, or if he’s not.
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Cool, can’t wait for the day Ion, Danuser and Holinka step down.
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seems like he didnt prevent it either so he just left the sinking ship
i think we reach a point if the next wow xpac is gonna fail as shadowlands wow actually might truly die private servers have better feeling than this thing here
When you’re flipping burgers at the grill, do you then feel you’re in a position where you can change the corporate business strategy of McDonald’s?
Think before you write stupid.
Blizzard have close to 5.000 employees. He’s a Community Manager. What on earth is it that you imagine he can singly-handedly prevent?!
The off-handed comments from the playerbase - always jaded and spiteful in their desire to project frustration onto any Blizzard employee for everything imaginable - are beyond senseless.
You get the impression that people here would want their mothers fired if they worked for Blizzard, because they would hold them personally responsible for everything bad about the game.
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The community team is literally just random people writing friendly messages. Why does it matter if this guy left or not? He is just customer service…
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The guy plays a huge part in the communication between the customer and Blizzard, no? That’s a big deal if you ask me and is a very key thing when it comes to an MMO, Correct me if I’m wrong.
If you think Communication sucks between customer and Blizzard then maybe it will change some how, I have no idea. It’s not something I pay much attention to. So I’m willing to be wrong. Just passing on news when I read it, I know who he is.
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Well it matters a little bit, because the CMs do inevitably create the official forms by which Blizzard communicates with us.
Early on Blizzard mostly did written Q&As - Ask the Devs they were called. To say that it made for dry reading would be an understatement.
They also dabbled a bit in audio interviews, but again, not a huge success despite valiant effort.
And for the most part they really didn’t do much of anything. Radio silence from Blizzard was the norm for a long time.
But Josh came from a background where he had his own YouTube channel and did the TankSpot episodes and was quite a known person in the community - and also a person comfortable with being on camera.
So all these twitch and YouTube Q&As that we’ve had over the years, that’s largely because of Josh.
And as a community we have been 100% better off with having Ion and Brian and whoever do a Live Q&A on camera than sending off some written questions that we would receive small written answers to months later - as it was in the past.
So don’t dismiss what he has actually done, because the absence is surely felt.
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To be clear though, just because he’s leaving it doesn’t mean they can’t continue doing those. It’s up to the new head of the CM team to make those kinds of decisions, but they’ve got the experience of arranging those Q&A’s the same as Lore, only difference is that Lore was in front of the camera.
Anyway, personally, I think it’s a bad strategy to do them. If they’re not in a position to say “Yeah, you’re right, that IS a good idea!” or “Yeah you’re right, I’ll change that as soon as possible.” then those “letters” does a better job at keeping the fans happy since they’re easier to do thus should be possible to do them more often.
So now that the weight of doing Q&A’s is gone from the team, perhaps they can shift into a more efficient mode and stick to those letters.
Ahhh … Tankspot, The Weekly Marmont, Gamebreaker.Tvs Legendary show. So much nostalgia. Will be great to see his viewpoints on WoW nows he’s free from Blizz. No matter what you think of him as a Blizzzard employee, he existed way way before the likes of Asmonbald, Taliesin and Evitel and many many other current streamers/content creators.
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Highly doubt he’ll be able to say anything of substance about Blizz for a while longer. Confidentiality agreements don’t go away just because you quit working for a company, they will last the duration that was agreed upon which can take years.
But yeah sure, stuff about the design might get a few words as long as he’s not mentioning anything about the process behind it, assuming he’s still bound by such an agreement.
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Sure. As I said in my initial post, then Blizzard’s other game teams have done them as well. But in my opinion, the WoW team did them best. And I’ll credit a lot of the reason to Josh.
I’m not sure. Fact of the matter is that there isn’t much of a CM team left. It is one of the areas where Blizzard have definitely done some cost-savings, so to speak.
We used to have 4 dedicated CMs here in the EU-EN alone. Nowadays I can’t name 4 CMs within all of Blizzard.
And Josh was the top CM with the most experience. That’s a huge loss of talent.
It wasn’t to imply that Josh just did Q&As and nothing else.
As a random example, then Preach got 2 interviews with Ion on his channel, and in both cases he gave credit to Josh for setting it up and making it happen.
I don’t think one should underestimate the connections between CMs and content creators and fansites. And Josh has been these people’s primary link to Blizzard for close to a decade.
That’s not a task that’s easy to carry on for a new CM.
So these off-handed “good riddance” comments are a bit baffling. Blizzard are just losing talent. That’s not good. Not for them, and not for us.
They’re still around, but they have always been subservient to the marketing department. And the marketing department have been really tight-lipped about anything and everything Blizzard, and you’ve only been able to see pre-approved messages come out from Blizzard this last while, which I credit the scandals for.
So the CM team have likely been effectively held back by the PR people, due to damage control.
Which is why I’d argue those Q&A’s are inefficient, since they can’t say anything not pre-approved, and since they can only say approved things they might as well put it all into a letter and work on other stuff instead.
That’s not really true. Ages ago when I was an MVP we had open lines of communication with the CM team. I chatted with them on a daily basis! And they involved and invited MVPs and content creators and fansites to a bunch of stuff and provided quite a bit of insight into their work of community management and were happy to take on suggestions and ideas.
That’s not how it is anymore. And I don’t think it’s how it will be in the future. But it’s false to say that it’s always been this way.
Again, as far as Josh is concerned, then he’s one of the last of the “old” CMs. And I quite liked that bunch of “old” CMs.
And when it looks like Blizzard are happy to shrink the CM team into nothingness, then I certainly lament the loss of each and every CM. Because it can be felt. I certainly miss having 4 CMs on this forum alone. Now there’s zero.
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When was this, out of curiosity?
Cata to WoD period, roughly speaking.
So did you ever see them reveal something that the marketing department denied shortly after?