BuzzerBeater Forums

so, let's add a "board" level

I guess our philosophy is that we already have one -- it's called a message board. :)

Seriously, one of the major reasons we wanted to add staff is that the BBs actually read everything posted in BB Global, Suggestions, Bugs, and several other high-traffic forums ourselves, and the community has grown too large for us to both do that and develop without adding BBs. There are also ways that GMs can contact us more directly, and we use this as a high-priority way of identifying and fixing bugs. But, as much as possible, we'd like to hear what managers are telling us without going through the filter of GMs, or even worse, several filters (GMs, a board, then us, or something like that). One of the main reasons we hired Edju and Patrick is that they already had a track record of reading every post in a large number of forums and identifying the main problems we needed to tackle.

I realize that this does not work as well in languages that we don't speak, and that sometimes we do have to rely on GMs to bring things to our attention. We also get to use extra information that might not be available to GMs or individual managers. For example, there were several posts recently in Global (English) from Italian managers suggesting it is very difficult for promoted teams to compete in their new division. While anecdotal evidence supported the claim, we looked more widely at all promoted teams in Italy in seasons 9 and 10 and found this was not really the case.

I guess my point is that our philosophy has been to have as few layers as possible. Because we cannot read posts in many languages, GMs and LAs have become a necessary layer in some cases, although anybody who wants to post in the large, English-language forums will get their posts read. But, even though we give the GMs additional ways to reach us with urgent problems, that's not an ideal solution.

With regard to Italy specifically, we have been lucky in two other ways. While Italy is currently the second largest country in BB, there are several countries fairly close in size. It is therefore rare that a problem affects Italy without affecting several other countries. We have also been lucky that several Italian managers are quite vocal on the English-language message boards, so that those of us who barely know enough Italian to find the Italian -> English button on google translate often find out pretty quickly when there's a major discussion in BB Italia that we should be responding to.

so, let's add a "board" level

I guess our philosophy is that we already have one -- it's called a message board.

Seriously, one of the major reasons we wanted to add staff is that the BBs actually read everything posted in BB Global, Suggestions, Bugs, and several other high-traffic forums ourselves, and the community has grown too large for us to both do that and develop without adding BBs. There are also ways that GMs can contact us more directly, and we use this as a high-priority way of identifying and fixing bugs. But, as much as possible, we'd like to hear what managers are telling us without going through the filter of GMs, or even worse, several filters (GMs, a board, then us, or something like that). One of the main reasons we hired Edju and Patrick is that they already had a track record of reading every post in a large number of forums and identifying the main problems we needed to tackle.

I realize that this does not work as well in languages that we don't speak, and that sometimes we do have to rely on GMs to bring things to our attention. We also get to use extra information that might not be available to GMs or individual managers. For example, there were several posts recently in Global (English) from Italian managers suggesting it is very difficult for promoted teams to compete in their new division. While anecdotal evidence supported the claim, we looked more widely at all promoted teams in Italy in seasons 9 and 10 and found this was not really the case.

I guess my point is that our philosophy has been to have as few layers as possible. Because we cannot read posts in many languages, GMs and LAs have become a necessary layer in some cases, although anybody who wants to post in the large, English-language forums will get their posts read. But, even though we give the GMs additional ways to reach us with urgent problems, that's not an ideal solution.

With regard to Italy specifically, we have been lucky in two other ways. While Italy is currently the second largest country in BB, there are several countries fairly close in size. It is therefore rare that a problem affects Italy without affecting several other countries. We have also been lucky that several Italian managers are quite vocal on the English-language message boards, so that those of us who barely know enough Italian to find the Italian -> English button on google translate often find out pretty quickly when there's a major discussion in BB Italia that we should be responding to.

It would be also great that when Italian managers decide to write their thoughts in global, they receive proper answers, and not ridicUlous ones like "shut the hell up because you and Spain are 1/5 of BB community" "you're playing the wrong game" and so on.
Your main focus should be to make Global community larger and larger, isn't it?

I don't like the arrogance that some GMs use in the forum, and I am a GM, too.. I can only imagine what a normal user think about GMs, and i can't image good things