Guild Wars 2

My suggestion is a simple one: please rethink your strategy on community engagement specifically on distributing information. At the moment official announcements are spread over the website, forums, email and more. Also many a developer or other employee makes some kind of statement or official announcement on one of these platforms that misses the mark, lacks clarifying information or isn’t replicated across platforms clearly. These then sometimes get picked up by Reddit for example and blown way out (looking at Ascended items for example here).

Personally I work in a technical position but that requires extensive engagement using similar platforms with large multinational businesses. In a way its similar to what you do at Anet here, but these people hold my job and pay check directly in their hands (especially if its the payroll system!). I would not distribute the information you do in quite the same approach, rather I would make clear to everyone a single official source, then use the other mediums like email/forums/etc to broadcast the exact same message each time as much as possible. I would also engage some large communities more direct to make sure a very clear message gets across, for example there is nothing wrong with unofficially re-posting links on community forums like Reddit instead of relying on the community to relay your messages. I would also regularly repeat in my messages where the official source can be found, say your GW2 news page.

While I don’t think that allowing developers etc to directly engage with the community is a bad thing, I do shutter sometimes when I see what is said and how its delivered. Like everything as well, timeliness is also a really important thing, as is repetition of your message especially for ongoing issues like performance. Give the community regular updates in a quick and official and efficient manner, this will buy you the time to fix the issue properly without all the rage. Just make sure the community know you care and reassure them frequently.

Also I’ve noticed I hardly ever get an announcement email from you these days, it appears Google picks most of them up as spam. This highlights the pitfalls of relying on a single medium for some messages and not others!

Hopefully someone reads this, I really do like GW2 and so does most of my family. We personally struggle at times to get accurate information about the game though and sometimes even we argue because we’ve gotten our information from different sources but the truth can be somewhere in between.