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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Hard to imagine this fine upstanding citizen being so degenerate

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ClTzTrDWMAEBFMx.jpg:large

He brought Buckfast with him?

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

So is this their fundraiser?

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.

Why not just switch to Overwatch?

Yeah I realised I didn't really answer the question after I wrote the reply. There were going to be individual graphics for each player but it had to be cut. I would imagine stuff will be uploaded to a gallery here like last time to get decent quality. Everyone at the event seems to now be wheeling a huge shopping trolley of booze to the nearest convenient place to get plastered so we might have to wait a while