So, who's ready for the Q&A tomorrow?

I've seen this happen a couple of times including with Overwatch's dev team and lead director Jeff Kaplan. They don't want to see criticism because as long as you do that;they won't respond or they'll brush it off and tell you how they don't want to see anything "negative." Critique isn't even a bad thing, not even dramatic and the community just wants what can hopefully be best for players in this game's community. So the long way to go is give it a while and vote with your wallet as stated by different users. Technical issues which leads to unfairness of the whole gameplay resulting in bad matchmaking is what makes the audience less likely to play the game. It's apparent too whenever you see someone's reactions when playing a game like this, there's bound to be salt and toxicity. It's bound to happen, it is a PVP game after all. Happens all the time, there's no stopping that at all. BHVR just needs to have the bigger ears to listen to enough feedback to consider what could be the conclusion on managing what's best for the players and the eyes to see what's going on with the game for themselves. It's almost like they themselves don't play test their own updates, it's bad enough people don't communicate at all in online games like this because it's easy to avoid engaging in toxic comments. Which I believe that could be one of the few reasons some players just don't chat at all. The other issue is that there's people who if they manage communities or not, can believe that problems usually derive from "drama" that is not even objectionally true, so far what I've seen is people wanting technicalities being fixed in order to bring balance.

My guess is seventeen random lore questions about why Charlotte has a hat, maybe one or two questions about the chapter which will be brushed off, and them going into detail for six minutes about why they did the bloodlust experiment. A lot of "We can't answer this right now". The word "Dwelf" will be said many times.

They are choosing based on community questions and upvotes..

Haven't watched dev stream for years now.

I see it hasn't changed much. Back in 2016 it was like that too, but also lore was non existant back then (they didn't establish anything and tried to hide it behind "that's a secret/entity works in mysterious ways").

So not only most gameplay related things were ignored, lore based questions were "We cannot answer it at this time" or "because <Improvised bare bones and overly generalized answer about lore that barely touched the subject>".

Why do people keep bringing up lore? For the past several months or so devs have said they will answer questions from the Q&A that get the most upvotes/likes. So if a lore question gets answered, it's because a lot of people wanted it answered. You'd know this if you read the guidelines and participated in the Q&A.

May I ask is there any questions about the new flashlights? No one really had time to ask about them because they were collecting the questions a week ago.

If the questions that the majority of the community actually wanted were answered you wouldn't see so many threads complaining about every Q&A being useless. You see them before them, you see them after them, yet you still say that you're choosing the right ones based off of upvotes. Even if these questions are based off of upvotes, it just means the system's gathering of questions is ineffective and you should change it further.

The community upvotes the questions, yet you imply these are not the questions the community wants answered. How would you determine what the majority of the community wants, if not by a simple, straightforward vote?

There is a downvote button for questions. Have you never browsed the Q&A section?

If they don't address the DBD community with an apology at the very start of the Q&A, then I may very well be done with this game for good. Honesty goes a long way with me. Whoever gave the green light to release this new chapter in the state that it's in needs to admit that they screwed up, and that they'll fix the game.

Standing behind such a broken product and being comfortable selling it to your community was probably the worst thing I've seen BHVR do yet.

How are the upvotes not already representative of what the community wants to hear?

Because they're the questions asked by a small majority of the forums instead of the large majority of the whole community. If you look literally anywhere and take out the confirmation bias you'll see that most players agree the Q&A is currently in this state. As much as I would like to say the 'upvoted questions' on the forums represent the community, they simply do not because of the lack of knowledge about the questions beforehand. People don't want to upvote because they know their vote doesn't actually change the questions, and now you have a ton of unhappy players because the questions answered weren't wanted at all.

For example: The devs love to just randomly put Lore questions and cosmetic questions in there that I've never even seen on this forum. Where the heck did they come from? I won't know, and neither do most people know (which is where a lot of frustration stems from). Whether that be due to them being buried or just me brushing over them is irrelevant because I could not clearly see the answers chosen, therefore I cannot believe that my say or anyone else's actually went into choosing them. Making it clear that these questions are what the majority want answered through something as simple as a survey gets rid of my, or anyone else's, claim that the current system doesn't reflect what the community wants.

I addressed your first point in a previous comment.

If you did more than gloss over my solution to this you would see that I'm not advocating to just "ask to upvote more". That would be pointless and a waste of time. I suggest you read over it.

Also, this is not true. The comments of cherry-picking being prevalent in Q&A are everywhere, and I wouldn't mix up minority with majority. Literally just search Q&A on reddit and you'll see an example of this: other than the advertizements for the Q&As themselves, they're just used as a punching bag and are often regarded as a joke because of how dumb the questions are.

I did read your suggestion, but apparently my example was too indirect. I'll try again:

There is no way to reach every player and get them to participate in a survey of any kind.

I thought it'd be clearer since the current system is literally the survey you suggested, but over a longer period of time rather than just before the Q&A stream. You are, in effect, saying that we should vote twice, but the second vote would only include those who can be present right before the Q&A stream. Your suggestion would be less representative of the community, not more.

There are also plenty of comments appreciating the Q&A. Reddit is not representative of the community. Neither is any one social media platform - or even all of them combined.

Just because I haven’t seen it mentioned: they are also gathering questions (based on upvotes/likes) from Twitter.

of you are really in a state where you think the devs/forum admins manipulate the votes on these questions, why are you still here? If I would think this is as manipulated I would abandon the forums and the game..

Is it possible to expand the system to also cherry-pick from the questions with fewer upvotes that you think are still worth an answer?

The most upvoted questions should obviously still be featured, but there are some questions (eg the mouse keyboard for console one) that don’t get enough upvotes but would definitely be worth an answer (in this case the previous statement from the dev team was made when crossplay wasn’t active and the answer was m&k would be unfair for those that don’t have the option on console iirc)

Can't wait to see all the constructive questions such as "How dare you release this DLC, I hate BHVR!"

No, it is not. This is why there's a clear "Dev vs. Community" mentality expressed throughout the forums: the devs and forum moderators simply don't understand the community's reasoning or they flat out ignore it.

How many people is the "majority" that've "taken the time to go through the questions"? You have no proof of anyone actually upvoting instead of upvotes being manipulated, as do I, and the only reason this paranoia has spread is because a lot of people don't trust the forum's current upvote system (as it is viewed as basically just a censored election). Letting a third-party site (that the devs already use) ask the community to verify the questions gets rid of any opposition stating that the questions are being cherry-picked or aren't reasonable to ask.

Like I said earlier as well, you can't satisfy everyone. However, you can make the opposition's points completely moot if you actually put the effort in to stop them before it becomes the majority's view. If you had something like this in place since the start, people complaining about questions not being answered would be an entirely separate topic.

And look, I understand your view completely. I also understand where your apparent tone of a lose-lose situation with the community arises from, but this is only because the steps haven't been taken to alleviate the situation. Looking at it from the view of nothing being changed? Yes, it's a lose-lose. But actually changing something about the process that both discredits the opposition and could help the community be less divided on this type of issue? I don't see the point in not doing it.

Why would you trust that survey thing blindly but not the forum or Twitter upvotes?

i don’t have that much knowledge of Twitter, but can’t you see every person that upvoted a post there somehow?