If you don't have experience with a Valve-run game specifically, they are not interested in PR. They aren't interested in community managers, or hubs for people to speak with developers or complain with developers.
That being said common complaints for games do usually get addressed but it is entirely on Valve Time and they do not adjust this due to people complaining (typically).
The reason I am saying this is because I have played dota 2 since closed beta (10ish years now?), TF2 in early years, and they just have always worked on their own time. And they are typically not interested in having a community facing worker, as that work fucking sucks.
I'm not disagreeing with you at all man, it is just that they run their games, the way they want to run their games. Sometimes, with cheaters, griefers, ruiners, etc, Valve works on a fucking MASSIVE update for their games, at least in my experience with Dota.
We got a massive update to dota, along with a huge cleanup of cheaters, talking about hundreds of thousands of accounts of cheaters got deleted overnight one day. It was big news for dota, and they had spent a considerable amount of time with the biggest cheats to find what they do, how they work, and how they can keep them from accessing dota. It was irreversible VAC account bans for anyone using the tools iirc, and the community rejoiced.
It didn't delete cheating, but it made a big impact, and also got rid of many smurf/griefer accounts based off of other factors so it was a big win for the game. One big part of this was overwatch (not the game) which is a system Valve uses to have players judge whether someone was actually griefing/cheating/etc. It's quite a great system, and I think it came from CS:GO originally, so hopefully they can apply the same big update they did for dota, for CS eventually.
All that to really close out with, Valve didn't say they were doing this, they didn't have a PR person saying cheating/griefing/smurfing is a priority, but they were always working on it, and dropped it on us out of nowhere.
If you don't have experience with a Valve-run game specifically, they are not interested in PR. They aren't interested in community managers, or hubs for people to speak with developers or complain with developers.
That being said common complaints for games do usually get addressed but it is entirely on Valve Time and they do not adjust this due to people complaining (typically).
The reason I am saying this is because I have played dota 2 since closed beta (10ish years now?), TF2 in early years, and they just have always worked on their own time. And they are typically not interested in having a community facing worker, as that work fucking sucks.
I'm not disagreeing with you at all man, it is just that they run their games, the way they want to run their games. Sometimes, with cheaters, griefers, ruiners, etc, Valve works on a fucking MASSIVE update for their games, at least in my experience with Dota.
We got a massive update to dota, along with a huge cleanup of cheaters, talking about hundreds of thousands of accounts of cheaters got deleted overnight one day. It was big news for dota, and they had spent a considerable amount of time with the biggest cheats to find what they do, how they work, and how they can keep them from accessing dota. It was irreversible VAC account bans for anyone using the tools iirc, and the community rejoiced.
It didn't delete cheating, but it made a big impact, and also got rid of many smurf/griefer accounts based off of other factors so it was a big win for the game. One big part of this was overwatch (not the game) which is a system Valve uses to have players judge whether someone was actually griefing/cheating/etc. It's quite a great system, and I think it came from CS:GO originally, so hopefully they can apply the same big update they did for dota, for CS eventually.
All that to really close out with, Valve didn't say they were doing this, they didn't have a PR person saying cheating/griefing/smurfing is a priority, but they were always working on it, and dropped it on us out of nowhere.