{"id":44830,"date":"2018-11-18T06:00:34","date_gmt":"2018-11-18T11:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=44830"},"modified":"2018-11-18T05:00:03","modified_gmt":"2018-11-18T10:00:03","slug":"blizcon-survey-results","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=44830","title":{"rendered":"Blizzcon Survey Results"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week I ran a poll<\/a> asking people how they thought Blizzard would respond to the recent controversy<\/a>. Too late I realized I’d conflated two different ideas:<\/p>\n

1) How will Blizzard handle this short-term PR problem?
\n2) How will they change their behavior in the future?<\/p>\n

As a result, the answers were muddled. Here’s the chart:<\/p>\n


\n

I wanted to stop at 666 responses, but it got stuck at 665 for most of the evening and then jumped to 672 the next time I checked. Oh well.<\/div>
I wanted to stop at 666 responses, but it got stuck at 665 for most of the evening and then jumped to 672 the next time I checked. Oh well.<\/div><\/p>\n

Ugh. Stupid google forms leaving all that whitespace and then truncating the answers. Obnoxious. For the record, the original questions were:<\/p>\n

    \n
  • Nothing. They wait for all of this to blow over, then proceed with business as usual. Future mobile projects won’t get the spotlight at Blizzcon.\n
  • Nothing. They wait for this to blow over because they don’t care about the PC and this is the first step in a company-wide pivot.\n
  • They issue a non-apology, make vague promises that they still love their PC fans, then pretend the whole thing never happened.\n
  • They take whatever Diablo 4 assets are available and quickly mash them into a teaser trailer just to show fans it’s being worked on.\n
  • They over-correct and announce every PC-based project they have in the pipeline.\n
  • They misjudge their mistake, and try to placate fans by porting Diablo Immortal to the PC.\n
  • They double down and announce their other mobile projects soon, before any further reveals for PC games.\n
  • They double down and treat it like a joke, putting meme-ish references to it into their games and portraying their displeased fans like entitled babies.\n
  • I don’t know or care about this, but I feel compelled to vote anyway.<\/ul>\n

    The only two important ones are the “non-apology” and the “Wait for this to blow over”.<\/p>\n

    Thinking about this more, I think this should actually be broken into three questions:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. What caused this mistake? (Activision meddling, miscalculation of the market, change in company priorities, insanity, etc.)\n
    2. How will Blizzard handle this short-term PR problem? (Groveling, Non-apology, silence, etc.)\n
    3. How will they change their behavior in the future to avoid this? (No change, no more Blizzcon, no more mobile stuff at Blizzcon, etc.)\n<\/ol>\n

      Or maybe trying to track this in survey form was an inherently bad idea because the situation is too complex. I don’t know. Making a good survey that yields interesting trivia is hard.<\/p>\n

      Also, I left the survey open for write-in answers. Most of these were combinations of the existing options, underscoring how poorly I’d constructed the survey. However the whole thing was worth it for this answer:<\/p>\n

      They fully embrace the darkness, using the next Blizzcon as a mass sacrifice to open a rift into Hell itself and summon forth the Lord of Terror and his hordes of demonic minions, bringing a thousand years of darkness to the Earth. Centuries from now, the historical video game depicting the event will be an Ouya exclusive.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

      This is so obvious I’m embarrassed I didn’t think of it myself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      Last week I ran a poll asking people how they thought Blizzard would respond to the recent controversy. Too late I realized I’d conflated two different ideas: 1) How will Blizzard handle this short-term PR problem? 2) How will they change their behavior in the future? As a result, the answers were muddled. Here’s the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[120],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-videogames"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44830"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44830\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44850,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44830\/revisions\/44850"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}