Frustrated by the dearth of Battlefield 2042 news? You’re not the only one. While DICE has said before that they are going to announce something about the Battlefield 2042 beta “later this month,” some gamers assumed that given we’re in the end of September, that it was any day last week. Unfortunately, nothing about it was announced from Monday to Friday, except for something regarding Battlefield Mobile, which triggered some franchise fans.
Over on Twitter, a new thread (among numerous ones) have singled out DICE Community Manager Adam Freeman’s tweet as the studio “lying.” Here is the said Reddit thread along with the tweet that was mentioned in the thread for relevancy:
Please do post your gameplay of Battlefield Mobile and share your feedback with us if you’re in the Region and playing!
It’s not a leak – we’re just getting started 👍 https://t.co/VWmfUDpCgn
— Freeman 🇸🇪 (@PartWelsh) September 24, 2021
In the same thread, DICE Producer Ben Walke (posting as F8RGE) explained some of the misconceptions regarding a Community Manager’s job, and touched on other things, too. Here’s his message in full:
Hello there,
I’ve seen a lot of threads like this recently and as time goes on, they get more and more aggressive, and that anger gets directed towards Freeman and the rest of the Community team on a personal level. I don’t think that’s fair, but instead of saying “don’t do this”, I wanted to explain a little of my thought process.
Working in Community is probably one of the most misunderstood roles within the industry. While on the surface it’s easy to think that it’s one of the easiest jobs around, from experience I can say it’s not.
You see, the problem with working in Community is that you’re always stuck in the middle. You have everyone looking to you for the answers, and that includes both internal teams and of course your player base. When things go well you end up in a great situation (which is sadly all too rare) where everyone’s wants and needs align.
In times like this, working in Community is at its most enjoyable. After all, you’re around happy people, and it becomes infectious. You ever play a round of your favourite game and everything just clicks? It’s kind of like that.
From experience though, those times are fleeting and my advice to anyone working in Community is always to enjoy them while you can because there’s always something around the corner.
I should note that working in Community is very much an iceberg job, in that the vast majority of your work goes unseen. Back when I was doing Community stuff (hello there /r/starwarsbattlefront, miss you) I would say that the public speaking element of the role was likely less than 10-15% of my work overall.
I used to joke that being a Community Manager is a bit like being a weatherman. You do your best with the information provided but if you say “It’ll be 22C tomorrow”, and then it turns out to be 21C, people start calling you a liar and various other things. It’s a poor analogy, but at a base level, it does kind of fit.
That’s likely the most frustrating part of the whole job, you’re reliant on receiving that information and if you aren’t given it then you are left in limbo. It might also be that you need to wait for other teams as well. I don’t want to go into the whole Marketing machine, but I will say that it’s far more than “send out a tweet”.
Even the simplest thing can be a monstrous effort, needing multiple teams across the world to come together to get it done. Is it a website update? Do you need to source artwork, is the artwork in the right ratios? Can someone write the copy? Then you need a team to localise it. Then the pages need to be built, social teams need to be informed, and customer support is brought up to speed. Do you have any partners? Do you need to let your platform holders know so they can support, do any store pages need an update? One tweet can often turn into a pandatableflip.gif of a process that needs to be followed. Nothing is ever as simple as “just a tweet”.
Let’s take an example I can speak about with some confidence. If you are familiar with my work on Star Wars Battlefront II you will know that we used to release Community Transmissions. In the simplest form, these are just posts on Reddit containing info that we thought players wanted to hear. On average I think it used to take around a month from the first words being written to the CT going live. I’d have it all written in a day, but the rest is of the time is all that process that you need to follow.
There is so much work that goes unseen, it’s that iceberg from a few lines above again.
Of course, Community is just one cog in the machine, and as a cog it’s very hard to turn on your own, you need all the other cogs to be turning to allow you to make your rotations. If those cogs aren’t moving, you’re stuck in limbo. Sometimes you just need to wait it out, no matter how much WD40 you apply, time is the only thing that gets things moving.
I’ve never met a Community team that isn’t passionate about their players and want nothing but what is right for them. I’ve seen your Battlefield team go to bat for you with my own eyes, they care and rest assured they likely always will.
I suspect I’m starting to waffle on now. I’m not sure if this helps give some clarity into the realm of Community, and while I no longer work in that field, I hope you appreciate that I couldn’t sit back and not step in and have their backs, because they really do not deserve all the hate that is being thrown their way.
In short, this isn’t to say you shouldn’t or must not talk about things that you aren’t happy with. But do consider that there are people on the other side of the screen who your anger and frustration is directed at, and those people 100% don’t deserve it. None of your Community team are out there lying, everything they say is correct at the time they post it, sometimes the wind changes and you get caught in a sudden rain shower. All of them are doing everything they possibly can to make you happy.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading and I guess this is where I do my best Lars impression and say, See you on the Battlefield.
Ben
While it is frustrating that we haven’t heard anything from DICE yet, the community (and everyone) needs to know that it’s not just DICE’s call; the studio needs to clear things up with publisher EA before they can relay any info, and this goes with developers too.
Hopefully, we’ll hear something ahout the Battlefield 2042 beta this coming week.
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