[2022] Only two legendary skins?

This year’s skins were a deeply personal, labor of love for the art team. We’re so happy with how they turned out, and plan on sharing more details about their development later this week in a deep dive blog by Jodie.

While we know that we’re offering fewer Legendary skins with this year’s event, the Skins team is hard at work on new content, with more Legendary skins planned for retail than any year prior. We’ll be sharing more information on this throughout the year.

I don’t know the specific breakdown of the numbers offhand, but I can tell you I am not talking about only OWL skins.

I get this feeling. It’s understandable that folks want information right now.

To provide some insight as to our processes; any announcement or news that we share is heavily coordinated, highly scrutinized, and meticulously planned before it ever sees the light of day. There are several stakeholders at every step of the process that need alignment and to have their feedback both listened too and considered. Major announcements are even more complicated, sometimes needing approval from all the way up the chain.

By the time we’re ready to announce something to the broader community (let alone preview it with our trusted content creators), months of work and the efforts of many teams are represented in the final product.

When we use phrases like “throughout the year” it’s intentionally ambiguous as we’re not at a place where we’re ready to communicate firm schedules. I know that’s not the most satisfying thing to hear as a player. In this particular case, we anticipated conversation around this topic and believed it better to provide some additional context.

To manage expectations, you should never be looking at blue posts (from CMs) on these forums for major announcements. The community team is here to facilitate conversation and provide additional granularity whenever possible

Should go without saying, but no leaks from us either. I have a family to support.

I hear what you’re saying here.

In another post, I made mention that we want to focus on letting our work speak for itself this year. Not much more I can say aside from this feedback has been communicated to the team, and I personally feel it was well received.

I’m going to assume you’re talking about the collective “you”, and not myself specifically.

There are people who have been working on this game since before we were even Overwatch. I’ve worked in this industry for over 15 years now, and I can tell you that developers do not work on a game they don’t care about for more than 5 years.

Not to be overly effusive, but Team 4 is hands down the best development team I’ve had the privilege of working alongside. I have regular 1:1s with Aaron, Gersh, and several leaders on the team. We have full access to the dev team, and they have always been excited to answer our questions and to listen to player feedback.

When you conflate a lack of content with the team’s dedication and desire to do the right thing by the community, it pays disservice to how much those individual people actually care about both this game, the community, and Blizzard as a whole. Be critical of us. At the same time, please remember that the team reads these forums and that your words have power.

I promise you that this isn’t unique to Blizzard XD

I don’t expect anyone who is frustrated with their current experience to tone police themselves, within reason. What I would implore anyone to do is to lead with empathy and not assume that we as a team are apathetic to the player experience.

I’m not prepared to address that topic today. Apologies.

I can’t really speak to that as it was before my time.

If that’s what you took away from that statement, I apologize. I clearly miscommunicated it.

It’s more of an emphasis of having something concrete to discuss with our major announcements, so players actually have something to be excited about.

Just as player feelings are incredibly important, so are the feelings of the people who work on the team. We are a team of humans, not machines who mindlessly produce product.

If the last year has taught me anything, focusing on the human side of the industry is something that we could all use a bit more of.

This was a conscious choice on my part, so please feel free to direct any ire towards myself specifically. There was a zero sum chance that this topic wouldn’t be addressed in the community, and we knew there would be an opportunity to respond directly to player conversation.

Keep in mind that we have many channels of communication we manage, and we’ll activate them in different ways, depending on how we want to communicate something. Sometimes we want for information to be announced through media. Sometimes we’ll want to partner with content creators.

Major beats and information will always be from us first, on our “owned channels” (whenever possible)

Practically speaking, if we announced this the day before, that’s all that would have driven conversation for the next 24 hours, rather than excitement around the new skins.

I’d much rather that myself and Jodie take it on the chin in a thread like this after the fact, than to do anything that would diminish excitement around the work of the development team.

I’m not saying I’m 100% right, there’s truth to what you’re saying. These are the kinds of decisions that face those of us in comms positions every day.

This was a miss on my part. I should have noticed that there was a lack of developer notes and called that out before the notes were published, especially for changes like the Cassidy air roll, and the Wrecking Ball grapple.

Jodie and I will both be more vigilant about this in the future.

CaptainPlanet shared some stats with us internally. I’ve not had the bandwidth to prioritize chasing down if we can share it publicly or not. I’ll try to ask about that this week.

Friend, contributing to the writing of prepared statements is an important part of a community manager’s job. We provide insight into how players will respond to what we say, and suggest edits that will hopefully sound less “PR” and more appropriate for players.

It’s a collaboration with multiple communications disciplines, which means there’s give and take on all ends.