In the online shooter Anthem , the atmosphere is thick. Now the Community Manager Jesse Anderson from BioWare takes a stand. He specifically addresses the criticism regarding the embarrassing stream from a few days ago. The poor mood was palpable throughout the Twitch stream.
Why was the mood in the stream so poor? There was a problem with expectations:
- The BioWare staff only wanted to introduce the new Stronghold, which had gone live a few hours earlier in the new update.
- However, the fans in the chat had questions about the future of Anthem and especially about the loot. The BioWare staff did not answer these questions but instead ignored them.
This is what the Community Manager says: Jesse Anderson from BioWare states on Twitter that the stream was really difficult for him. He doesn’t want to hide that.
He couldn’t give the people the answers they wanted, and it was extremely difficult to pull questions from the chat that were related to what the BioWare staff was actually doing in the stream.
Frozen instead of making a cool remark
This was the worst moment: In the Anthem stream, Anderson and a developer opened a chest hesitantly, from which purple items fell. Purple items are considered useless rewards at this level.
But in the stream, no one addressed this situation. There was a brief awkward silence.
This was heavily criticized. BioWare was accused of ignoring the “elephant in the room,” as expressed on social media.
This is what Anderson says: He says that when the chest opened, he almost said “Purple Rain”. But he didn’t, instead he froze and couldn’t find words because he didn’t know how people would have reacted to “Purple Rain”.
Normally he would just laugh about it and make a remark – but at the moment, the situation is so tense that it doesn’t work.
He hopes that they can return to a point where they can have fun in streams with the community again.
“The damned cable made my life hell”
This was the problem: From Anderson’s perspective, the issue was that they had to move the stream back by a week.
It was actually planned to show the stream a week before the patch and introduce the Stronghold and the update that would come a week later. That would have provided new information for the fans.
But the “damned cable” turned his life into hell – because due to a cut cable, BioWare had to postpone the stream by a week.
So they actually had nothing new to report, but could only refer to the Reddit post about the future of Anthem.
This is how he wants to avoid such situations: Anderson says he wants to do everything in his power to avoid such situations in the future.
- They want to clarify in the future what the stream is about and that they are only talking about it so the viewers know what to expect
- Additionally, streamers should not play and talk at the same time. Because one can only really talk about what one is currently playing; otherwise, it is incredibly difficult
- And he knows that people want to talk about drops, so he will also see what he can do
- In the future, Anderson aims to avoid being silent for so long – if he must remain silent, he will inform the community
More about the future of Anthem:
