[swarnie_]

People give Jagex a lot of abuse for treating Reddit and Twitter as a support channel, personally i think its great community engagement.

It could work for Blizzard too, they share a customer base with similar outlooks and mentality... to put it politely.

[livueta]

It's great community engagement for certain values of both "community" and "engagement". Personally, I find that (largely as a function of the consensus-manufacturing effects of Reddit) it leads to a distressing loss of diversity in the ways the game is enjoyed. In short, you get a feedback loop. A blob of players vocally supports a particular paradigm of gameplay (call it the PvM/ironman/slayer industrial complex), so they talk about it on Reddit. It helps that this approach is attractive to newcomers and inexperienced returners. The developer notes this and produces content accordingly. More players are attracted/kept around by this additional content, leading to requests for more of the same. Rinse and repeat.

As a result, the more fringe communities (which tend to be correlated both with emergent forms of gameplay and experience with the game; skilling and PvP being the big examples) get starved or actively harmed by the course of development. As a result, those players leave or become less engaged, furthering the cycle and leaving the game a less-interesting place.

Back in the day I never thought I'd whine about Jagex becoming better at listening. I guess it's sort of similar to issues that can be had with A/B testing - when engagement is the name of the game and you have easy access to knobs and feedback, you can end up overfitting. In the terminology of this thread, the bean-counter approach makes you long for the touch of the auteur.

disclaimer: 20k-hour multiply maxed get-off-my-lawn grump with several axes to grind