The thing is Valve work differently. Blizzard and Riot are run along much more traditional business lines and construct marketing campaigns to match game updates and new releases well in advance. It's a much more product cycle based approach.

Valve has it's famous flat structure and a different ethos. More chaotic, apparently prone to blundering but also able to make brilliant games. It's nice that a company can still be successful without having to ram marketing shit (which you end up paying for in the purchase price) down your throat 24/7, a perceived lack of communication is an OK price to pay for that.

The 2 things have nothing to do with each other and there is no reason to "pay a price" of bad community management in exchange for no aggressive advertisement.

Of course they have, ramming publicity down your throat is the flip side of communicating every little thing to the players in advance - they are basically the same activity, and they both require changing development practices in order to match activity to a layer of communication.

If you've chosen to be a Valve dev then you've done it for a reason, and being able to be creative and not having to deal so explicitly with marketing goals that float down ethereally from an executive layer of the company is probably one of them.

I'd rather we got the creative output without the bullshit and I don't care if it comes as a surprise. The only way I think it's been a negative is that the development of Twitch and esports is clearly something that works well with an overt marketing strategy so it's slowed down their engagement with that as far as TF2 goes. They seem to be getting on track now though, fingers crossed

will they include b4nny remix in the next update

How would releasing public statements about the development process on the tf2 website whenever there is actually new interesting information available force them into a different way of developing tf2? It wouldn't at all.

Once you start releasing information ahead of time you become locked into it, then if there's a revision or a problem you have to go back and start explaining it. You start to become accountable for things that wouldn't have been a problem if you'd kept your mouth shut. You lose the freedom to scrub things that become too time consuming because there was a press release. You have to organise those releases so you need materials available by a certain date and time to promote them which means you have to schedule development around that and lock in design decisions.

I'm not going to speculate in detail about how they organise themselves, but I like what they produce as do millions of others and if this is their preferred way of working then I'm happy for that to continue.

No Blizzard style publicity? I couldn't give a shit, Overwatch publicity started trying to directly target fans of other games from day 1. That's cynical and I think it reflects poorly on them.

Frankly I think you should direct your fury at geel for taking up their valuable time when they could have been working on HL3.

e: also I think the dev videos for Overwatch about ladder were completely pointless. A dev gets wheeled out to say a grand total of nothing meaningful except "it's coming when it's ready". Is that what you're looking for? I can't see what difference something like that makes.

I never understood the whole privacy thing with game updates.
Sure, if a game is early-access you might not want someone taking the idea, but at this point, is there anything left in TF2 that someone hasn't copied themselves?

Why doesn't Jill & Co. Just say "here's what we're planning, no timelines at the moment". What's the negatives behind it?
What stops b4nny from just saying everything he talked about? A banned steam account?

When you tell the community something before it's absolutely confirmed (which only happens on release), you're either locked in to doing that thing in the way you said it (which means you can't iterate on it and improve it before release), or you have to disappoint a lot of people.

I don't know where you're getting this idea from lmao.

Valve isn't locked into doing anything, and no matter what they say or do, they won't ever "get locked" into doing or saying anything they don't want to. I have no idea what even makes you think that.
Valve make 2 million dollars a day from selling pixel items to dota, cs and pub tf2 players and there is NOTHING you or I or anyone else can do about that. They can give away ANY amount of information they please at ANY time and they can change this behavior ANY time at their discretion without ANY problems whatsoever. If they give monthly development updates and then stop, people will be irritated and nothing will change. If they give updates only when something major is underway and sometimes don't deliver, people will be hyped and then disappointed and nothing will change.
This is exactly what happened with end of the line and NOTHING HAPPENED. The gazillions of youtube videos complaining about duck update didn't change a thing about the ludicrous amounts of shekels that valve made with said ducks.
They have nothing to lose with transparency and communication. And in a time where they are trying to promote a competitive mode in an e-sports scene where it has become commonplace for developers to be involved closely with their communities, they only have to gain.

As a pub player, I wouldn't want to get involved in a competitive beta that the devs themselves don't seem to acknowledge, where I have to find out about tf.tv to get any info about what matchmaking is all about, and where said info consists of "I ate sandwiches with Valve and I'm not telling you anything about it".

15+ years commercial software development experience

e: I'll explain in more detail. When you have those kind of PR and marketing activities you have people dedicated to doing them. When you have that you start to get struggles for authority, promises are made about how x will achieve y to senior management, people start to develop little fiefdoms in the company. Valve supposedly doesn't have much in the way of senior management, which might be why they don't attract or employ hordes of PR people. Valve has always put talented creative programmers and game designers and their instincts at the centre of their business.

If you're lucky the right lines of command internally are maintained and marketing decisions happen at board level and clear objectives are set about what needs to be produced and when. If you're unlucky, and in a flat organisational structure like Valve I can imagine it being a nightmare, you start to get conflicting targets and objectives being set by people with different interests asking for different things and the developers become the people caught in the middle.

As I said above I don't want to speculate too much about how Valve actually work but the more you have a multi disciplinary setup involving marketing people with no real technical knowledge of what they're saying then you need more management, more lines of command and more hierarchy to hold the whole thing together and keep people working for the same goals. That doesn't sound like what I've heard about Valve

I don't get the desire to see developers wheeled out when they have nothing to say. If they don't want you to know something you'll just get someone saying "we're taking user feedback into account" and other meaningless platitudes.

Hasn't blizzard done a pretty good job with being transparent before updates officially release to produce hype? They don't seem to have a problem with being "locked in" with an idea or dissappointing the community with an update because they announce their goals. The idea behind somewhat vaguely announcing what they want to do, yet being quite transparent, is that it still leaves room for improvement and experimentation. If they do somehow release a disappointing update, they can just release another update to improve it.

There is absolutely no way you can argue that being transparent with the community is bad, especially considering it allows for more communication between the developers and community to fix true problems.

Allow me to oblige. If the game developers and designers don't want to deal with it, and don't want marketing people putting words in their mouths, then doing it anyway or forcing them to do it quickly nets you a set of pissed off developers who leave. If they did want to do it then they would do it already.

I don't get why anyone would think their desire to be acknowledged by Valve is more important than them working in the way they want to. Everybody here enjoys the fruits of their labour, and they produce best in class games and products. Are people really so scared of Overwatch?

Blizzard do things their way and produce a different style of product, I don't want Valve to be like Blizzard. I don't think people realise how strongly the culture of the company informs the products that they create. If Valve changed to start doing all this marketing activity it changes the thinking of the company.

how else am i supposed to know if they are planning on making the game better and more fun without whitelists that prevent the aids unlocks

The point isn't that valve is supposed to emulate blizzard/overwatch, and the fact that valve and blizzard work differently is completely irrelevant, because efficient communication is key to literally everything when it comes to improvement. Valve can still run the same loose way.

I don't get what you're really trying to say though, since you didn't even argue that communication is a bad thing, even though that's what you quoted. It's just as simple as valve making a post or video to communicate, and it has nothing to do with the way the company is run. You guys are over complicating this.

Are you really content with just hearing "Neato" and "Cool beans" from them? Especially at a time where this whole community is banking on them to deliver a good competitive update, also why are they only telling their roadmap to b4nny and geel, we also want to know what's going on.

I'm not as calm as you because I have seen what Valve can do to a game full of die hard fans. Quake is quake because if the developers took it anywhere else, it wouldn't have been the same game and the players wouldn't have played it, (Quake 4). If they force viewmodels, a direct negative response will happen, and it will cause more and more updates to aid the gentrification of the community for the benefit of Valve's pockets the same way that they changed small things in CSGO for 4 years, every month I was more and more disappointed and now the latest update comes out with a noise that lets you know when you're low on ammo? Is this the direction we want to take with TF2?

I'm tired of quitting games I love because of this.

I really think inviting feedback in a way they don't want is what would complicate things. People always get the wrong idea, there is always some kind of social media shitstorm about something someone said that might mean one thing or the other, and then the inevitable corrections and backtracking. Why would they want that headache?

I wouldn't call it transparency to post a video that tells you nothing, it's just there to keep you engaged with a company while there's nothing tangible to actually put out. That is all about how the company is run, Valve focus on the gameplay or the utility of what they make. It's what makes what they do good, but it also means that they don't do all the other peripheral bs.

I dunno, I'd just rather not rock the boat on expecting them to do all this other stuff if there was a risk of it interfering with how they do things. If they all suddenly realise they want to evangelise about their products and start pumping out the videos so be it.

My understanding is that the game will be playable when the updates are released

How is announcing your goals telling your audience nothing? and you're right, these announcements would keep you engaged, but that's exactly the purpose of this communication between the community and developers.

I'm not sure why you said "while there's nothing tangible to actually put out" when I said put goals/what many other successfully companies do. This means concrete things to accomplish. It doesn't need to say how exactly they're doing it. For instance, I believe blizzard told the community mccree and widow were getting nerfed but nobody knew what exactly they were going to do; that's the point of the official update. That's enough communication. That's engaging.

I can't tell if you're legitimately trying to say that communication is irrelevant in succeeding.

The only PR channel they actually use, b4nny, has said they're looking at weapon balance and if it takes off there will be tournaments so I guess you've been told. Is that not enough? You need a video?

Also implying Valve are unsuccessful, interesting.

Your arguments stink.

-They shouldn't use b4nny as their only PR channel
-The fact that they want to use MM to rebalance weapons doesn't come from b4nny but has been known since Salamancer's Valve visit (and please go back and compare his thread about it with this one) 3 years ago
-The fact that if the e-sport takes off there will be tournaments is common sense
-Thus the community has not "been told" anything whatsoever
-He was never implying Valve are unsuccessful, he was implying that competitive tf2 could be significantly more successful with non-garbage communication between the developers and the community

If you already know everything why do you need more communication?

You're shitposting at this point.

It's not professional to have one tf2 player communicate what the updates might entail. Do you think the entire tf2 community knows what b4nny said on his stream or twitter? More legitimate information can be spread if the actual company did this.

Sure, valve telling b4nny that there will be weapon updates is some communication to start, but I highly doubt they're going to say which weapons in particular they might buff or nerf. That's the whole issue here.

Are you implying that a company is perfect and can't improve to be even better?

I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree then ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

theres literally nothing we know about the direction they are taking with weapon balance and class balance, which is what we want to know
what the fuck are you posting

i cant believe i watched a guy argue transparency wouldnt be a good thing because some people might say stuff that is wrong

welcome to everything ever

i'd rather have the tf2 team communicate their intentions via an official steam blog or the tf2 website or SOMETHING that reaches more than the ~6,000 people that follow b4nny's twitter out of the 50,000 people that actually play the game

B4nny is a comp gamer so assuming he shares most comp player's concerns with unlocks he'll have probably addressed those, things like stuns, bleed, free uber, troll weapons, etc. That's a reasonable conclusion to draw no? B4nny stuff gets on reddit now, his pronouncements get as wide an exposure as any TF2 figure could expect I think.

Professional, yeah, I would say that it doesn't produce the air of a slick corporate machine but as I've described above at length there are reasons Valve are different. You don't believe that those reasons are immutably linked to how they work and I think they might be, so that's just a point of disagreement that won't become clear unless one of us gets a job there.

Of course they can improve, I'm just not sure this is that big a deal.

I wouldn't say that was the fairest summary you could have written

Have the people in this thread not seen this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fwv1G3WFSfI#t=33m43s

I was going to reference it earlier to someone's very angry reply but didn't think it would be worth it

Although now I've realised the irony of it being a video with Robin Walker explaining everything I wish I had