Legion Hype: Post-BlizzCon Developer Q&A

Yeah, trying to enjoy something instead of talking about post-election insanity, so here's another World of Warcraft post.

If you haven't seen the BlizzCon panel where topics here get addressed first came out, here is that panel so watch that first.

These Q&A videos take their questions ahead of time, so I didn't get anything in (missed the deadline), but (contrary to a lot of spergs) I find that Watcher (that's Ion) was as honest and transparent as sensible corporate management allows.

Now, I didn't just post this for shits and giggles. If you're a game-maker, a novelist, or any other figure who needs to deal with an audience or customer network I suggest that you watch this video and the preceding ones. This is a good example of how you engage with the folks who pay your bills without handing them your balls. The use of social media, especially live-streaming and video-on-demand, is fantastic for this once you know what you're doing.

The practice of taking questions beforehand is smart. That cuts down redundancies greatly, allowing the asked question to incorporate all of those redundancies together into a superior whole. It also allows you to ensure that all of the questions you have answers for get answered; no point saying "I can't answer that." or "I don't know." repeatedly (when you can just say up-front that you won't answer what you can't answer), something that is lacking here.

What answers are given are also good; acknowledging that some of the issues can't be handled by the developers is necessary, and pointing out what is within audience or customer power to change is good and proper to do. Where specfics can be given, give them. Where details are useful, doll them out. Where they aren't, don't. Learning how to handle such things is necessary to success in such fields now; you can't rely on some PR guy to do your face work.