That question doesn’t really make a lot of sense.
Well, I mean, either they’ve been acting on their own, or they’ve been following the marketing department’s guidelines. One or the other. The devs aren’t even allowed to talk to outsiders about company stuff without the marketing team’s approval, you know?
The CM team is also under their domain, since “blue” represents Blizzard after all.
I see.
So in my example of Preach getting an interview with Ion and giving credits to Josh, then your question is whether Josh handled it all or whether he needed approval from other departments?
I’m sure interviews, fansite material, tours, and so on, is collaborated on between multiple departments.
But I don’t think Blizzard’s organization structure places the CM team directly below the marketing team. That would be a weird structure.
That isn’t really what I meant, I meant that when the marketing team gives out an order, then the CM team can’t overrule it. And when the CM team wants to do those community events such as a Q&A, they have to run it by the marketing department to get their approval, including what questions they’re allowed to ask and what they can’t say in the answers.
You’re implying that there’s a conflict, but I don’t think there is.
The CM team and the marketing team ultimately share the same goal - which is to present Blizzard’s product - a new expansion or patch or whatever - in the best light possible. They all work for Blizzard and want Blizzard to succeed. They just have different work angles to what’s effectively the same end-goal.
That’s how it is at the company I work for anyway, and we have community managers and marketing people as well.
It’s more collaboration and teamwork than hierachy and orders, in my experience.
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Well, you can call it what you want, but the CM team isn’t in a position to overrule the marketing department. And the marketing department has without a doubt been running around putting out fires this last year, which means tightening the grip further.
What scenario are you thinking of where the CM team would want to overrule the marketing department?
If I think about the company I work for, then our community management team might send out some new product to various content creators with an NDA that they’re not allowed to reveal it before a certain date. And that’s because the marketing department will have prepared an advertisement campaign for the launch of that new product on that specific date, so everything has to align with that.
But that doesn’t conflict with the community management team. Their primary task is just to facilitate the connection between the company and the content creators and then coordinate and collaborate with the marketing team to ensure that everything can be ready in time for the launch date.
Because again, the goal of both teams (and everyone else at the company) is for the launch of this new product to be as awesome as it can be.
It’s teamwork.
In the communication with players. For example, the CM team staying away during times of scandals is a valid strategy marketing-wise, since otherwise it’d just give consumers a target to aim for.
Another is the Q&A stuff, do you really believe all questions and answers in every Q&A have looked like that from the moment the “pen touched the paper” so to speak?
Another is how leaks have originated from Blizzard, although anonymous so not necessarily a CM, about the negative work environment, over many years. Leaks like that started several expansions ago.
Well in those cases it would typically fall outside of the CM team. There’s usually a legal team that handles such sensitive matters.
Again, that’s not really a conflict internally, because you tend to know what your job entails and what it doesn’t entail. And if there’s overlap between your job and someone else’s job, then a good company will foster an environment of collaboration and team work.
And yes, most companies are structured this way to ensure that some random employee doesn’t just YOLO on the keyboard. Different teams for different responsibilities.
I’ve had several questions of mine answered in various Q&As over the years, and Blizzard haven’t modified or edited them in any way or form. But then again, my written language is pretty good.
Blizzard’s answers are definitely sensitive to confidential information and public presentation, but that’s how it is.
Again, my work is the same. And there’s nothing unusual about it. It’s standard business practice. Although from the outside it sometimes feels silly to hear some actor or developer or whatever talk about something new yet manage to say very little about it, because most is confidential.
But that’s how it is.
I don’t mean the players’ questions. Sometimes Lore have asked questions of his own, because they wanted, as a company, to get the answers out there.
As for players’ questions, they pick what they know they can answer, that goes without saying.
I know. I never said anything different. I’m just saying that the marketing team outranks the CM team for such matters, and the reason you haven’t seen them around lately is probably due to damage control with the scandals.
Ah okay.
In that case it’s probably the struggles of the individual employee working in a big company. Your ability to turn the ship is limited, takes a lot of work, and if you do manage it, then it usually takes forever.
It’s one of the bigger drawbacks of big companies versus small ones. Everything gets slower and more complicated internally, because there are so many more people everything has to go through. And meetings and mails. It becomes endless!
I suspect that’s an issue for Blizzard as well, and the source of their “internal discussions” on some design subject which ends up taking forever. They’re a big company, there’s lots of people with lots of input, so empowered decisions tend to drown in management chains.
Of course.
I think it’s mostly due to Blizzard laying off most of these people.
I mean, that was part of their re-structuring, to emphasize the areas directly related to game development and de-emphasize all the rest.
And so far they certainly seem to succeed at the latter of the two.
Glad he’s gone. But I know they’ll replace him with someone worse.
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Blizzard is an American company based on California…
So I believe you will probably be right in that assumption considering the current Murican hiring trends of prioritizing “trendy” phenotypes and ideologies over qualifications
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Why?
Why?
Why?
It’s so funny to see people who seemingly have absolutely no idea who the person is, or what he’s done, what he accomplished, be so full of hate toward him, purely because he worked at Blizzard.
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They see lore and think “omg I hate the lore so I hate him!”
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Because he was toxic against the playerbase? Told us we would get over it when people complained about azerite armor pieces being so hard to get in BfA? Closed the beta forums after people pointed him towards feedback that he just ignored and said there were none?
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I would like to see something like this but from danuser
that would made my day better 
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This is true
private server right now emulate what wow was and should be way better 
but people don’t play there so they can’t understand therfore many people here deffend blizzard for their decisions
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