i cant be the only one who thinks this is actually one of the most useless threads on tftv that isn't a shitpost. this doesn't tell us anything about what we want to know, or anything at all really lol. what is the point of it?

I could do without the cool beans. Also I don't think anybody outisde Valve has anything like the whole roadmap. I think they've taken what they feel they need from meeting with b4nny and geel probably just invited himself.

There is no point for you to think that Valve expects you to stay silent about their thoughts and general info about the next update.
Trust me if they didn't want to leak any info they would very easily not tell you anything.

Jon, all we want is something like this post which they put out last year in September. Is that too much to ask?

I understand your reply to me Jon but the thing is is your argument doesn't make much sense. Even if Valve's structure was - for whatever reason - preventing such a thing they can literally just hire people who work outside that structure to PR for them.

Also I think your argument about the developer update video is a bit odd, it told people it was still coming and not delayed, it told people they were making format changes that we now know specifics about, that the seasons were being extended due to player feedback, and that their would be special rewards for it. Not long after Jeff went to the forums and told people about the upcoming McCree/Widow nerfs and gave some decent specifics on McCree, as well as mentioning that they were looking into Dva buffs and trying many different ways of adjusting her and weren't sure on what they'd do.

Then today you get a post like this: http://us.battle.net/forums/en/overwatch/topic/20745504371#post-3

Which I think you'd be hard pressed to argue is "publicity bullshit" or anything of the sort. There is no PR here, it is just his straight up thoughts.

While I wouldn't expect that level of communication from Valve because they are nowhere near that point, Jeff Kaplan has repeatedly made posts like these for Blizzard ever since he started working with them on World of Warcraft and he still does it. They're fine. Riot said they were going to release Magma Chamber, then never did. The worst they get is memes about it. Most people are well adjusted enough that they understand plans change, and as long as you had a disclaimer or don't give super specific values, most people aren't going to care if shit changes. These are games with tens of millions of players just like DotA or CS, and they are fine. A lot of it has to deal with the way you word things and how much into specifics you actually get, but I guarantee you 99% of the people complaining here would be content with just "we're looking into adjusting some of our maps" or "we're looking into making some of the unused Soldier unlocks more viable" or "we're looking into making Syringe Guns more used" and probably get the biggest boners over any of that even though all of that is barely specific.

So while I can accept maybe Valve's infrastructure has something to do with it (somehow) and they could fix that with outside help, my point originally towards Geel was that arguing that Valve can't communicate because "you can't promise things in their position" is just bogus when two large companies in the same position as them (if not larger when it comes to Riot and how big LoL is unfortunately) can do it. Don't blame their position, blame them.

Sure, if you haven't watched the video linked at the bottom of page 3 it should answer some questions, Robin Walker puts it better than I ever could. It also addresses content similar to the battlenet forum post you link in some respects, in that they probably want to tell people more about matchmaking and mmr in order to inform players and therefore make the quality of community discussion about it more likely to be useful when developing the game. Valve have done that for Dota and may do it for TF2, although I don't think they've said much about CS. It's important to recognise that stuff like that isn't done just to be nice or useful, they expect to get something back.

If you're not talking about the kind of hype type marketing that other companies put out as "communication" then questions about involving marketing decisions at an early stage don't arise along with the organisational problems it might cause. Outsourcing that kind of thing is hard because they take a long time to plan and they want concrete information while the devs want the flexibility to change things and also to ship early. There's inevitable conflict there and it's very much a dev driven company so I think that's limited to events like TI.

The frequency of blog posts is also addressed in the video towards the end - the less frequent the better because of rarity value and I think they would treat Valve visits and b4nny teases in a similar way. I guess what they've allowed to leak through b4nny is what they're comfortable with people knowing, although for some it's obviously not enough.

You know just because Valve made a video explaining why they think what they are doing is good doesn't mean it's good? Hitler did the same thing and as it turns out he was wrong.

This is ridiculous and dumb. Are people satisfied with Blizzard's posts? Yes. Are people satisfied with Valve's posts? No.
Thesis refuted.

Yadda yadda still saying it can't be done when everyone else does it successfully. It's not hard to outsource PR, there is hardly a major company who doesn't do it and it's ridiculously easy in this specific case. Being a PR manager for a private security company is difficult. Being a PR manager for Comcast is difficult. Being hired to write informative but sufficiently ambiguous blog posts about a grand total of 3 well-known video games is fucking easy.

And lastly I'll quote my post from earlier.

Even in the most catastrophic of outcomes which could only be brought on by a literal braindead chicken disguised as a PR manager, in which a ton of features are promised for an upcoming update that cannot possibly be implemented, there are NO repercussions for Valve to be afraid of. Everyone will still buy their cosmetics. Everyone will still be hyped about all updates. No two fucks have to be given. And THIS WON'T HAPPEN because you would have to be actually retarded to fuck up something as simple as writing a blog post about a state of development.

I would never have predicted that you would be the one to bring Hitler into it.

I'm sorry Robin Walker backed up what I said but really, that doesn't make him a Nazi.

No because u see I used Hitler as part of a humorous hyperbolic simile, not a literal comparison.

.

Given your expertise with comedy I'm surprised you didn't notice the sarcasm in the reply. Anyway it's been lovely, thanks for the thoroughly engaging and mutually enlightening exchange

valve really needs more dedicated community managers for this sort of thing

like the only time TF2 was fully transparent was because robin walker was willing to make constant blog posts about it--and that's not his actual job, so it's just something he basically did because he felt like it

It's astonishing watching the frags fluctuate in this thread from negative to positive. I read the initial post in this thread and I was confused as to what the point was. I scrolled down and saw that one guy getting -fragged into oblivion and I just assumed it was due to like a hundred or so b4nny subs. It's nice to finally see some rational arguments. Even following the argument recently I don't really see the point of the valve sympathizing. You are aware it's not good to have literally all of the update information and matchmaking information go through one person, yes? b4nny is not the community hivemind (in this sense, a collection of uniform opinions across all competitive players). And not to insult anyone's intelligence, but assuming he knows more than every other player on every aspect of how to improve TF2 and make everyone happy is ridiculously biased. It seems he's used as a singular point of hype for the update, while also being a constant reminder that he's the only existing bridge between Valve and the community, which achieves nothing but to marginalize the amount of work, effort, and time other competitive players and especially content producers/TFTV production have put into the game.

It's absurd that even the majority of those with knowledge and influence in the community cannot have an engaging back-and-forth with Valve about what's needed, what we should prepare for, even tentatively. We as a community have offered FREE SUGGESTIONS and free labor to keep the competitive community afloat for like literally 7 years. It's very understandable that anyone would be annoyed about the lack of information that's available. Signing NDA's and discussing closely with the company who holds the fate of the competitive game you love in its hands would be more than welcome. A valve tweet or blog post about the future update doesn't have to be a binding, pinky-sworn promise. It has to be a fucking update on the status of the update and potentially a few specifics that they're focusing on. Leaving the entire community sans one person in the dark is really annoying, especially when the only things I'm left with are hype-garnering tweets that could be placed on a motivational poster in a high school.

You guys are holding up Blizzard as a shining example of transparency or whatever, but they know perfectly well that they're running a risk by sharing all this information:

Luckily the English language is lenient enough to construct a hard-hitting, effort-inducing tweet such as:

Currently taking a look at items such as the Vita Saw, Darwin's Danger Shield, and the Caber to see if changes are necessary.

Then, people reply to the tweet with a mess of good and bad ideas. You sift through the bullshit and find someone who makes a good point, you potentially test their suggestions, and they bring a lot of good fixes when you mix your own expertise as a game designer into the equation. Perhaps their suggestion is bad and you don't change any of those items (unlikely, they're all fucking terrible). It doesn't matter, because 0 promises were made.

Yes, people will always be upset if Blizzard or whoever says something and it doesn't happen. But even MORE people are angry that Valve is being extremely non-communicative with the only thing that could bring this game back from the brink competitively.
We're not asking much, just a little bit of what they're currently working on or what they have in mind for what they want to do next. B4nny is a fragger and everything but I'd rather him not be treated as the community ambassador that Valve funnels all information regarding the future of the game through.

Honestly, probably another duck update but instead you collect beans from the floor to add to your strange part beans collected for your scattergun

As said before by Robin walker, Tf2 has a small team which works on updates which they feel like, its all up to their discretion to add or change something about the game if they feel like, even if the team size has increased now do to the upcoming updates and growth of the tf2 comp scene, im not convinced they have changed just yet on their decision making until esports tf2 starts making banging money.

Just throwing this out there but have you guys considered that people have had conversations with the TF2 team outside of the guys who publicly post or tweet "hey I want everyone to know that I went to Valve HQ"? A post doesn't have to be made every time the TF2 team reaches out to the community.

I've heard from a number of people in the competitive community that they've had conversations with the TF2 team and have had many opportunities to give feedback to them, but I don't think that those conversations warranted a thread on the forums. For example, Dave Riller reached out to me when they were putting streams on the TF2 client, and I had a great ~45 minute phone conversation with him where I got a chance to pick his brain about matchmaking changes and the possibility of supporting future events in TF2. Super nice dude who surprised me with how much he knew about the competitive community and how in tune he was with us, and I'm definitely not the only one who has had a chance to talk to him or other members of the TF2 team.

My point is that they pay attention to the community, our discussions, and the things that we do and just because they're not posting or directly talking to us all the time doesn't mean that they don't care and, more importantly, people shouldn't feel like they're being left out of the conversation. Sure they pay really close attention to content creators (such as b4nny) and website owners (such as Geel) but they read the forums just like everyone else. Whether you realize it or not you're giving them feedback about the game and they're taking that information and incorporating it into the game to make YOUR experience better. You just don't always see them working on it until it's released, polished, and ready to present to the public.

Will everyone in the community have a chance to talk to the TF2 team? Probably not. They're pretty busy working on the upcoming updates and they already have a good idea of what needs to be fixed (remember that Valve has a lot of experience working on competitive games and esports). Some of these things just take time to build. The community is obviously excited about matchmaking, but they want to make sure that they do it right. As many of you suggest, they could make announcements about every change that they make but they risk disappointing the fans should their plans fall through and that's just not worth it. It's better to keep it secret and release the information alongside the update when it's ready.

At the end of the day you'll have what you want, just be patient. You're not going to get any information out of the TF2 team that you don't already know, and you just have to trust that they care enough about the game to do things the right way and honestly the updates have been awesome so far. I can't wait to see the next one.

heh, if he worked where I work, his email would be driller. Thats awesome.

that's also his alias..........

yeah like any sort of PR doesn't have to be binding if you're not an idiot about how you say it

even if valve already has an idea of what they're doing to x weapon they could still say "we're seeing if x weapon needs to be changed in any way" and get 1) a satisfied response from the community that they're saying SOMETHING and 2) less angry people because the only thing that's being put forward is that a change is being made, not what the actual change is. why do they need to show us their hand when all we want is to be dealt in?

There are already a million different ideas for changing every weapon in the game out there on forums or message boards or whatever. There's simply no need for them to waste time on doing stuff like that.

Yes there is, the need is to be a company eoth not garbage community relations

Even if they don't take weapon ideas, they could see how people respond to their suggestions; you could kill the weapons like the darwin and pomson before they're even born.

http://i.imgur.com/qr2iqze.png

snip

steam forums are a garbage factory of scrubs who don't actually represent the game's audience. if you threw out an idea on twitter and just skimmed through the replies you're far more likely to get ideas from normal people

Guys were getting our bean update tomorrow (hopefully)

Nothing screams "let's work with the community to improve our game" more than putting them in the dark and only discussing changes with b4nny.