I’d say one of the goals is to enhance the brand’s reputation.
For me, WoW CM achieve the opposite. And I don’t blame them: they have clear limitations, Blizzard is to blame for those limitations.
But when an issue has been discussed for months, threads have reached hundreds if not thousands of replies with no sign of life from Blizzard, and suddenly some guy makes a fluff thread like “something that made you smile” or “here’s my daughter’s drawing of Y’shaarj”, and you get immediate answer from a blue, it hurts.
Nothing meaningful ever comes out of blues on GD. The arena forums are completely forgotten. They appeared for the tournament, ignored replies with 20 upvotes tackling glaring balance issues, and replied to silly answers. It was actually pretty pathetic to see.
I mean, read the thread, it’s just sad:
Might as well not have CMs at all if the few times they do appear, they anger people by completely ignoring any relevant criticism.
CMs are basically moderators. They are here to echo the US forum blue’s posts and ban anyone who dare to say a censored swear word. Don’t expect anything more than those from them as they aren’t able to do more.
It’s Blizzard’s strict policy of not having the staff involved in discussions with players because “some of them can’t handle it” according to that developer who left recently.
Basically they are explicitly forbidden to interact with players other than official announcements and silly stuff. That goes for both Community Managers and Devs.
This dev said he actually got in trouble for personally interacting with us.
Open one of their job-openings and you will see that it includes:
Develop community activations that acquire new fans and engage existing ones.
Assist Communications team in developing influencer campaigns across streaming networks and content creator platforms.
Coordinate directly with streamers, creators, influencers, and business managers or agents to build and execute key influencer, high-impact programs in TWHK.
Deliver against global social posts and curate culturally relevant content for your market.
Provide the voice of our players back into the business.
Help craft our narrative message, including talking points, messaging, and social posts.
Work closely with the rest of the integrated marketing team (Brand and Communications) to support key pre-release beats, content release opportunities, and post-launch calendar dates.
Support tours, event executions, live streams, trade show activations, partner promotions, and competitions as well as other opportunities to share our games.
Manage real-time reporting across streaming networks, creator platforms, social media, and community discussions; including analyzing key performance data, industry trends, and emerging opportunities.
Work on deadline, balance multiple projects, and manage toward results.
Support product launch PR logistics, including launch programs and experiential opportunities.
Track program budgets, invoicing, and reporting.
So no, it’s not a “respond to every player on the Forums” kind of job.
During the SL beta I sometimes visited the US side and there they actually did occasionally respond to certain comments.
The EU side is merely used as an echo-chamber of patch-notes and hot-fixes, at least by the blue side of the forum. Aside from the limited support they can offer here.
But again, clearly managing the community on the Forum is not their main priority.
Instead, forums are a junkyard full of “I cancel sub”, “torghast bad”, “game is trash lmao”, what kind of interactions would you even except?
And when they post, there’s always that dummy with room temperature IQ that will quote them and go “stop posting and fix the game”.
Maybe it’s different on the US forum. It is a well known fact that nobody from blizzard cares about what is being written here.
This forum is more like a psychological tool for frustrated players to let some steam off. You write about what angers and frustrates you in the game you pay for and think somebody will read it and give a sht. This makes you less angry and you pay for the sub again, or even buy a store mount like good consoomer.
Meanwhile all the blizzard staff does here is checking if you didn’t say the n word
There job is to communicate everything from forum to devs, they are clearly under staffed cos of all the people that keep getting fired for one big bonus while we all suffer.
To me it just seems they wait around till they get fired or find a better job while they do their best to ignore these forums or players unless its a ‘Twiluna kind of thread’.
It be more honest at this time to just have a European section on the US forums and close this down. But ha, can you imagine the chats between two cultures whom vastly differ? My guess it won’t go as well these days as it used to.
