Bex's Four-Year Community Manager Anniversary

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Xedralya wrote:

Bex, following your meme-tastic excellent adventure through the community to where you are now has been one of the fun little side-notes of the Path of Exile experience. Thank you for engaging as much as you do, and for lending your personal energy in ways that are surely beyond the scope of your official duties. I don't think anyone would disagree with me when they say that the sum of your efforts is far and away a privilege for us - one we wouldn't enjoy in almost any other community in gaming.

I don't know if you're up for doing a little extra Q&A here, but if you are: What is it about communication and feedback with a game community that you think other companies get wrong? You make developer transparency and responsiveness look so easy to accomplish!

Thank you so much for this lovely message! You are a perfect example of someone in the community I've been familiar with for years. It's so weird to think that while I'm seeing you, you all see me too.

To answer your question, I don't know for sure because I've never worked in another gaming company at this level. However, my suspicion is that it's potentially because companies are afraid of criticism or at the very least, don't value the feedback. I suspect that many don't understand that even when they have an enraged user base, they have a community full of passion and dedication to what they're doing and they don't really see that for the gift that it is, despite those situations being difficult to navigate.

I really don't know and I expect every company is different and has a different combination of reasons for doing what they're doing. Also with pay to play games, most of their marketing is focused on getting you to make the single purchase to buy the game rather than ensuring that you have an ongoing positive experience with their game that then encourages you to invite your friends and be more likely to buy future games they put out.

I think another thing to consider is that once a game becomes a certain size it would become almost impossible to engage on the personality-level that I try to engage at. If you imagine an audience the size of GTA V or Fortnite - it really doesn't work, you'd have to give more generic, less personal responses.

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Erasculio wrote:

Congrats on the four years, here's to many more!

A couple follow up questions:

1. What video editing software do you guys use now?

2. How old were you when you first joined Path of Exile (if you don't mind answering, of course)? I'm asking just because I'm curious at what age someone could completely change their life around like that.

Thank you! I was 23 when I first joined GGG. I'm about to turn 29. We use Adobe Premiere now but back in the day we were using avidemux.