Destiny 2 Developer BUNGIE staff revealed on the bulletin board that reduced dialogue with users. In addition, the title, such as Minecraft , is also increasingly avoiding dialogue with the user community. The background seems to be the acts of slander and intimidation from users.
In recent game development and operation, there are many development attitudes that incorporate the opinions of player communities. It is especially noticeable in live service-type games that are continuously updated. SNS such as Reddit and Twitter is also used for exchanging opinions, and some developers are actively interacting with users. There will be aspects that such communication has helped develop.
BUNGIE, which works on Destiny 2, is one of the game development companies that are active in communicating with players. On the official website, information for users is posted every week as BUNGIE of this week. The exchanges between developers and users on SNS were also actively performed.
In such an exchange, the game development policy sometimes gets a user’s antipathy. At the end of May, Kevin Yanes, the sandbox design lead for this work, tweeted that the TWILIGHT GARRISON, a popular equipment in the previous work, Destiny, will not reprint. In response to this, user dissatisfaction spouted. According to Kotaku, he received many harsh opinions, and had to temporarily close his account.
And BUNGIE has been further passed by some malicious users. The target was Bungiee Headquarters, and DYLAN GAFNER, DMG04, a senior community manager. According to Polygon, Luca Leone, who had repeated fraud in Destiny 2, has tweets that suggest threats to Bungie and Gafner. LEONE said that he had even armed to Bungie at the headquarters. In response to such evil, Bungie has been sued Leone.
After this one, Bungie decided to reduce communication with users on SNS, including Reddit. In response to that situation, the user has posted a thread on Reddit.
In the Reddit community, a Bungie Replied tag is given to the thread reply by Bungie developers. The above posts are based on users who feel lonely that such threads are no longer seen. Gafner also commented on this thread. It talks about the causes of BUNGIE developers to reduce interaction with users.
According to Gafner, Bungie is ahead of communication with users, which is also due to the real threat to the studio the other day. The decrease in communication from the development side is the result of the best path for players and employees. On the other hand, many of the development teams have confirmed the Reddit threads every day, and they are discussing feedback. It is also revealed that new communication methods with users are being considered.
The case where communication with users has been troubled can be seen in other titles. On June 21, Minecraft announced the introduction of a chat reporting system to the Java version in version 1.19.1. This community has been concerned about the introduction of a system that was not in the Java version. There were also BAN punishments that ignored the context, and others were worried about privacy. Although the system is applied to private servers, it does not always monitor chat, and it has been revealed that the moderator intervention is not performed unless there is a report from the player.
However, after the introduction of the system, some users began protesting under the hashtags of # SaveMineCraft. MojangMeesh, a community manager of this work, commented on Reddit’s official news thread for this movement. He said he was grateful for feedback, but he did not plan to stop the new chat report system.
MojangMeesh also pointed out that some users are sticking to Mojang developers on Reddit. He reported that in a thread unrelated to the chat report system, the act of investing opinions on the developer on the system was rampant. He called for this act and stated that this kind of harassment would hinder the constructive and open dialogue desired by Mojang developers. He also reports that such an act will be reluctant to convert the developers in the community. And if he has a strong desire about Minecraft, he wants his feedback to be notified in an appropriate thread.
As mentioned above, it seems that communication with users in game development may be more serious. In order to avoid that, there may be more development studios that are reluctant to dialogue with the player community. As an example of the developer to refrain from using user dialogue, Battlefield 2042 also reveals that the community manager does not reply on Reddit (related article). In addition, there are slander and intimidation by users for domestic manufacturers, and there is a possibility that the same trend will be the same from the viewpoint of risk avoidance.
While SNS such as Twitter and Reddit can easily incorporate the raw voice of an unspecified number of players, there is a high risk that problems introduced in this article occurred because of the high anonymity. As long as these problems continue, the tendency to avoid dialogue with users may expand in the future.