Color me impressed. After a series of controversial decisions and growing discontent that boiled over with frustrations from the staff and the player base, I think that this is an appropriate platform to start to rebuild the relationship. The first part of this post is going to be more of a statement, followed by a suggestion and maybe a wish list item.
My main concern with communication appears to be acknowledged with the announcement post that preceded this one. I know that the players are extremely passionate, regardless of monetary investment. I appreciate when the content creators and staff of CG playfully banter with us, but the last few days has been mildly contentious. Do you have a soft-skills program or recurrent training for the customer facing ambassadors of CG and the development team? If so, perhaps revisiting it would be a beneficial move. A have a feeling that even with the unpopular decisions recently, it would have gone down more smoothly with a different approach.
One suggestion I have would be to involve your Game Changers program in helping to evaluate and craft messaging for the community. Perhaps reach out to them to get a feel for how some decisions would be received. They all have NDA's so you have some amount of risk prevention built in. These players have a good feel for the community. Use them.
One wish list item - perhaps add a PvP element for guild members only. No rewards, just a mode where guild members can battle each other's arena teams to help with internal theory crafting and even building rapport within the guild.
Anyway, thank you for hosting this Q&A
EA Staff (Retired)
