At least in the office 
The more graphic ones are all reported as part of our standard HR procedure… and we also have a policy of no-response in such cases, but except in a few situations like this one at Blizzard, the police are unable to do anything because the threats aren’t taken seriously (and honestly, we’re aware the ones we received are almost certainly all bogus… it’s more how disturbing they are that starts to wear you down).
It helps to have a friend who is a police who can help look into the situations privately.
Of course, you’ll probably have to buy him a lot of steak and beers over the weekends afterward.
I’m sure you could find someone who is capable and willing to help from forum community. How about it? Any Australian police or lawyers here volunteering to look into it?
Yep - I totally get it! We realised there was something up about the same time the community did!
I think part of the issue at higher level play is that the way defense teams are constructed means they are REALLY good at taking advantage of this.
Considering Sirrian is talking a lot this week we may see a Sirrian’s Lair post instead of Nimhain’s. And maybe finally be granted access to the elusive Sirrian’s Lair
Yes we know about @Saltypatra being an interface between devs and players. But I assume @Saltypatra has no control on what she can say or not: could she for example give us some spoilers about the Crafting system without your approval?
The critizim here is not about who are giving the informations but the lack of informations. Example: gem spawners. In the middle of the week, I was totally lost between the gem spawners too strong, after too much nerfed, etc.: the only informations were coming from players… One new topic about gem spawner status would have been appreciated so that everyone could understand clearly what it was going on.
@Beowulf don’t you mean Sirrian’s Tower? (Spoiler alert!)
@turintuor I can say the things. Promise. Also, if I’m an interface, don’t you think I’ve asked whether or not I can give spoilers? The answer is no. We are not ready to announce anything at this time. Let us fix our game before we start giving more sneak peeks.
Respectfully, it’s nowhere near how the old system was. I’ve had to shift completely away from random gem generation in order to keep playing and enjoying the experience. I’m hopeful that the next set of tweaks makes an improvement.
This is ridiculous and unacceptable. To threaten someone over the internet because of a game is such a chickenshit move it makes me sick… For future reference for anyone thinking of acting in this way… STOP. Then think about what you are about to do for a sec. Now put on your grown-up pants and be a friggen decent human…
Just disgusting… I am ashamed to be part of a group of people that may include ppl like that, no matter how few they may be…
Now i feel dirty so off to the shower… Good day to you all…
This is insane… I had absolutely no clue stuff like this was happening… I’m baffled by this.
I’m at a loss of words, honestly…
I am very very very sorry this is happening at all, and happening to you.
The people that do this should be prosecuted by the law to the fullest extent possible.
I am vocal on these boards, but because I love the game. If I didn’t care I would not post.
And I know things can get a little heated, but nothing like this should ever happen.
This is insane!
Is there no way of simply putting it back to the way it was before 3.0.5.? Gem spawners were in a decent enough place then, while 8- produced extraturns rarely they also weren’t terrible, and 9+ spawners actually had a value justifying their comparably higher manacost to lower spawners.
Now simply taking a 3-match with cascades on average yields about as much managain as actually firing my Jarl spending 15 mana…it also has a higher chance of creating an extraturn for me by random cascades than Jarl does.
For someone who appreciated the niche usefulness and mediocre powerlevel Jarl used to have compared to other legendaries, because i simply really like the troop, this change in game mechanics making him beyond useless(statistically he produces more mana and extraturns for the opponent than for me) robs me of my motivation to play the game right now.
This has me thinking about the overall situation. We have quite a few players feeling unhappy about gem spawning changes, wondering what’s going on. And we have a team of developers diligently working on improving the gem spawning algorithm. I suspect if the players had just a little more insight into what the developers are doing, the average happiness level might improve quite a bit.
Would it be possible to pass on some information about those updates whenever they get deployed? Nothing requiring a lot of work, a one-liner (e.g. “tweaked gem spawning algorithm”) would do the trick, possibly within a sticky “minor updates” thread. It’s really about seeing that something is getting worked on, us gamers tend to get itchy whenever there’s a perceived issue accompanied by an extended period of silence.
We do announce the small changes we make when we push a small fix or udpate. The issue might be that we don’t make seperate threads documenting these changes. I’ll make sure to do this in future.
perhaps you edit recent update/patch notes to add small fix changes?
would be useful to keep em in one place
Yep this guy Blizzard was an idiot. I love this game BTW. And I can see how it prolly grew really fast with the release of GOW on PSN for free. That’s how I found it. So I would imagine that anyone with any kind of intelligence would be playing. Cause what can I say except…THIS GAME IS THE TRUTH!
This is why we can’t have nice things.
Now that i have had some time to calm down i have a few comments so here we go;
I would like to give props to the op for clearly statimg what many of us were feeling and in doing so drawing @Sirrian out to make a statement. So thank you for that @Pantenkind
I also want to thank @Sirrian for making said statement as we all needed to hear it i think. I for one feel much better after reading most of what you posted brudda
As for the rest of what sirrian said… I would like to apologize on behalf of the community at large for the ignorant an inexcusable actions of those chuds who would threaten you in any way and if i knew who they were i would like to smack them around for a bit…
@Sirrian, @Saltypatra - I apologize to both of you and your team for posting in frustration and venting on the forums.
I cannot believe you get death threats for changes made (or not made) to GoW, that is horrifying and I hope all that you reported to the police found out the hard way that making threats over the internet is a serious issue.
I never understood all the hate. The game just got another patch and some bugs came with it, I do personally call them minor bugs. Well, its obvious that the Devs is trying to fix them, and make the game better. But all the fixes is not done over the night. We need to be a little patient.
The thing that always annoyed me in this game was the few reworks of troops, to make them more viable for endgame players. But I will survive.
@Sirrian @Saltypatra
Allow me to thank you, from the depths of my heart to you. I salute you both.
As I’ve had my good share of forum presence throughout more than 10 years of my life… I have to say that you guys make the present one the most enjoyable. And I do not exaggerate.
You share what really is happening behind the scenes - and that is invaluable. I might not say this on behalf of everyone, but I do know how stressful and time-consuming your work is. And I appreciate your “trip to forums”, because I know Sirrian and Nim can hardly afford it, anymore. And I also perfectly understand how @Saltypatra’s work is limiting.
I’m not sure how to say it in different words.
Thank you, guys!
We love you. Go catch them bugs! 
Hey, thanks everyone!
It’s nice to hear from you all… as I said, I really love most of the community, and would happily hang out and talk with you all for hours.
The people who cause the trouble are NOT you guys! Not at ALL. But the internet being what it is, there is no wall we can put up to keep the crazy out, and that level of crazy can honestly wear you down. We’re absolutely going to try and find ways to deal with that better in the future, but at the moment, the best solution I have is to limit my time (and for Nimhain to limit her time) in the community while we get the next phases of Gems of War released.
The internet just has so many people of ALL types, and some will go from 0 to 9001 in a single interaction without ever trying to engage us in a dialog. If they did TALK to us, they would find that EVERY single one of us here wants nothing more than to make an awesome game that is the best possible thing we can collectively make… and I think almost every game dev team I have ever worked in or talked to is identical in that respect. Just know two things about all these teams:
When we screw up, it’s generally not because we’re incompetent or lazy… it’s because we’re ambitious, optimistic, and trying to juggle a lot of difficult tasks at once. Every engineer in the games industry is here because he/she loves their job - even though they almost certainly have the skills to be earning twice as much somewhere else.
When we don’t answer your questions directly… we’re not avoiding you, or ignoring you - it’s entirely possible we’re trying desperately to finish our work, or design a new thing (or fix a screw-up… see #1 above!!!). That’s why Ms. Salty is here, to make sure there always is a conduit for your voices to reach us, and vice versa.
And, you know, I think most of you guys here probably KNOW all that. It’s really there for any of the 0-to-9001 folks on the off chance they might read it and realise there is a better way to work with us than just yelling & threatening!
Have a great day everybody! I’m off to continue work on the crafting system… nothing quite ready to share yet, as I’m still working on some of the details involving how we select which Mythics are available for crafting at any given time (since offering them ALL is something that’s not going to scale well as we move forward).