Dezmont, I daresay you're mistaking plebean forum chatter as CGL communication.
The marketing is those updates like the one this thread is discussing. Everyhing you've seen in this thread is fandom discussion. Even the statements by those posters bound by NDAs.
I am aware! I have been under NDA with Catalyst before, I 100% get that people often confuse you with an official company rep.
I mean I read those. I am saying it wasn't good. It definitely is a step waaaay in the right direction for Cata, definitely a vast improvement, but there is a ways to go. It is a solid B- in terms of being a product teaser, maybe a B, but it has some flaws if I were to grade it (and I do, actually for the record if I may flex for a bit, assist in grading articles like this now that I work part time teaching at a vocational highschool while I get my masters in communications theory with a concentration in applied social media, so I kinda want to stress I at the very least am crazy in debt to own a document saying I know what I am talking about here, even if you want to claim I actually don't!).
But for example, the article decided to make the lead answer to the question of 'What makes SR6 combat awesome' with 'First and foremost were the complexity of rolls being made' and 'we looked to stripping it down.' It builds up to the fact it is going to say more about combat... but then every paragraph is how much more streamlined things are! The conclusion is strong, but, again, focused purely on simplification. Every single paragraph and new concept introduced loops back around to simplification, and fails to talk about how it actually plays or feels.
There is one positive anecdote, and to be fair it is really strong.
"In the end, we came up with a system that kept my groups hacker and mage happily sitting at the table and waiting for their next turn instead of whipping out phones or checking out or going to pick up pizza, while also making the street sam feel like she still ruled combat in the shadows."
This is great. It is strong, it claims to solve to an old problem SR has, this is definitely something that will get people to notice a major improvement if its true. But... you will notice... its not talking about how combat is specifically good. It talks about removing a problem, and alludes to something good unsupported by the work. In fact, it is the only reference to a combat PC type in the entire release. If the article also included some information on how it feels to be a combat PC in this system (it contains none, the entire article is purely about how edge makes things more simple) this would be the thing that puts people over the moon and gives it an A+ over all. As is though, it is the thing I would circle on the paper and write 'elaborate?' on in red pen. They managed to point out that being a mage or decker in a fight feels less draggy in the article, but didn't talk about the converse 'but samurai still feel really good' line, which is bad because Mages and Deckers got a lot of love in other articles already and this is nominally about The Street Sam's entire gimmick. It is easy to see why people are talking about the dawn of Troll Soaktank mages replacing sams now, even if that won't actually end up being true! We haven't heard anything about why samurai will be rockin, but we heard a lot about mages to make people either over-evaluate their capabilities in a way that makes them have negative perception of the product, or accurately clock that they will be way too good this edition. Regardless of what is true, you don't want people
thinking that!
This article needed a paragraph or two to build up to that last sentence. Like a few sentences mentioning that having a high attack and defense rating makes you feel really strong in combat or is really helpful because of edge generation would help so much, but they literally did the opposite and in paragraph 11 said that edge is no longer as precious as it used to be!
Also they have some single line paragraphs. Looks good talking casually about something, which is the tone they went for here.
But sometimes they are separated out for no reason when they aren't used to bridge two paragraphs and are really about the one above.
I can't stress enough how much I thoroughly applaud CGL for these articles, how they actually are really useful and do help manage expectations and mellow the discourse. I suspect things would be a LOT worse without em. But this article really... doesn't address many of the concerns being raised, and they were raised as far back as the Shadowcasters preview. So it isn't like "Cata are such idiots" or "The game is going to suck hard" but there is a lot of validity in the concerns and perceptions being formed because Cata either doesn't have a response (AKA it IS actually going to suck and they don't want to lie), they don't know how to respond, feel uncomfortable responding because the internet sucks and is good at sustaining infinite negativity (which is why I have kinda avoided talking about 6e with people as much as possible because I found getting stuck in those cycles unhhealthy), or are just inexperienced when it comes to this sorta thing (the most likely actual answer). Better does not mean good, but better should be applauded as long as Cata continues to seek better, which I think it hopefully is.
But to be clear, when a company has a PR crisis, especially at a product launch, traditional wisdom is to always internalize the failure and view it as 'your own fault.' Trying to blame your customer base for not liking you irrationally is sorta appealing on a human level but doing so is basically admitting you have no control over your company's perceptions or success, so absolving yourself of that blame is actually sort of nihilistically accepting failure. And, in reality, PR and community management are sciences and in general it is very easy to see where negativity comes from in hindsight. And I think Cata has historically done that, but has been getting more succesful recently in realizing it has the power to control and redirect perceptions about them. It is why these articles exist at all! A big complaint about Cata has been their design process has been very opaque when it leads to bad results, and now the curtain is being lifted a little and while there is still belly aching it is hard not to notice the tone hasn't changed a bit. It is a step in the right direction.
Hopefully they keep making more, and a good way to do that is, again, to make people excited and feel like they are getting something new, no matter what kinda PC they are, where currently a lot of focus is on mages and deckers right now in terms of what they are getting and there is a lot of dancing around what Samurai obviously lost. That dancing is not subtle, and pretending people noticing it are just whiners does not build confidence, even IF they start getting transference and start complaining about the entire edge system (which admittedly may be happening, but I doubt it because, again, new edge inverts why narrative resource mechanics work because it forces the amount of detail the GM must include up rather than down) and being overly negative. Even if the complaints are irrationally hitting unrelated stuff, pointing that out without addressing the thing that was accurately noticed doesn't win you any PR points. it actually loses you them because despite being technically correct your trying to push through an irrational distaste backed by something that is actually rational to be concerned about.