BuzzerBeater Forums

More communication is of course a positive thing, and I think it is something both the BBs and the community wants. One way to achieve that is having a more or less dedicated PR person in BB staff. That has been done and it is a step in the right direction. The thing is, most things in BB relate to the underlying technologies in one way or another. A PR person can handle the "soft issues" and the "feel good communication", but ideally you therefore want a technical person to be part of the communication. Some key things will otherwise be lost in translation however well the PR person does their job.

So, anything approaching a real solution to improving the communication on most hot topics is to involve the actual technical guys in the discussion. This can either happen on the side in every day work (which at times has worked very well with several good posts a week or so; lately not so well IMO) or through some extra effort such as organizing a forum day. A forum day (or a forum working day / half day) would be much better than a one-hour chat to get into the real stuff. One hour is a very short time to discuss anything complicated or in depth in writing. This applies even if you do it every month.

+1 to Perpete for the forum day.

Obviously the BBs are busy doing lots of stuff but surely one of them online for one hour every three months wouldn't hurt, actually far from hurting it would be a great PR move, the sort of thing that is badly needed.

I say it again. A chat would be really difficult and saying the contrary would be made by someone who doesn't go on the chat during games. Small, overcrowded, flooded and of course trolled and flamed. Forums are far more manageable.

Once again the naysayers say nay...

A chat like this would be moderated, so one person would receive all the questions, pick a few and those would be answered. I frequently take part in such events as one of the major newspapers in Austria offers moderated chats with interestin persons.

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A PR-BB would be nice? Srsly? I think we already have two of them, don't we?

On top of all that, I made an effort to continuously communicate with users when they had questions or comments. A lot of the time that meant reading harsh insults and criticisms about how we weren't trying or that we didn't care. I'll admit I became impatient at times and ended up responding sarcastically, but a lot of that was the result of having to read such negative and ignorant comments. It's demotivating when you try to inform everyone of what's happening and they respond with cheap shots and snide remarks because they don't like the news.

What news? The "frequent" news posts released once every season, or the tweets every couple of hundred days?

If you work as a customer support you should know that you will have to handle frustrated customers 90% of the time...

Also, if you spend some time customer support you get to know that out of those angry users at least 75% usually are self-responsible for the mess they are stuck in and keep blaming you for the wrong reasons.

This last statement was not about BB in particular, just life experience.