Originally posted by
L0ngTmeLurker
So how do you know what the wider communities opinion is on all this? Since links to the polls were posted on Twitter and reddit but no poll was taken in-game. That means it's the more hard-core fans that take these polls and it almost feels unanimous that pre 5.2 was better.
Are we just in an eco chamber? If we are please at least tell us and let us know what the wider community thinks. Show us the data that you're using and let us understand how and why we're the vocal minority.
I think alot of the disdain comes from the core community apparently agreeing on something but dice seems to do the opposite without explanation.
If the game has been seeing an uptake in popularity or player retention because of 5.2 specifically (and not just because this happened near the Pacific) please let us know. I'd rather be told I'm wrong and why rather than being asked my opinion and then seemingly be ignored.
Optics just look so bad because it feels like the games been dumbed down just like last year for Christmas noobs. If the wider community like the games better now then ok. However it just looks bad having a flawed patch come out near Christmas that totally changes gun meta and the game at its core.
I can't speak much on the direction of soldier and weapon gameplay things as it's not my area. I have insights, but I am not a spokes person on this. So I will not even try to cover that topic.
On the "how do you know" and "echo chamber" topic tho:
We, like most other games on this size, do audience research in a lot of different ways. EA has whole departments doing just User Experience Research (UXR) and they go wide (weekend games, person who played for 10h and then dropped, hardcore gamer, veteran, professional player, etc). So that's about that.
Is Reddit an echo chamber? I don't know. I know too little about Reddit and how it works. Are you an extremely dedicated player if you go on social media to talk or write about it and engage with the game and it's community? Absolutely.
I am here reading this Reddit not just because it's my job, but also because I am heavily interested in BF. In the past weeks I clocked down close to 100h in CoD and got plenty in Insurgency. Other games I put hundreds of hours in this year are Assassins Creed, Overwatch, Anno, Hunt and other games. Yet I never engage with those communities. I am out on a limb now, but I assume that's the same for you?! Please correct me if I am wrong.
So like everything we do, we try to do for the whole audience. I am not saying we are always getting it right by any chances, but any change we do makes someone happy and someone sad. So when we take the data (objective and subjective) we base our decisions on, we try to take the data form all kinds of sources. Think about it like the news. You shouldn't just take them from once source, you should go wide.
I don't know if this answers anything you asked really, but that's as far as I can go sharing those information. Again, I am not the spokes person for any of the things you want to know. I just like to talk about gamemodes and maps. :)