Black box for updates that significantly affect gameplay, since people who just play the game won’t visit the blog, twitter, or flamebate.

Blog for general announcements and ‘behind the scenes’ stuff, or anything that requires more than one or two lines to describe.

Twitter for minor changes, status updates, and other quick blurbs.

Flamebate for things that require user feedback, like this thread.

That’s basically the way things are now, it just needs to be codified as procedure.

The reasons for this is simple:

The black box is invasive, annoying, and as near as I can tell impossible to hide or remove. That makes it perfect for it’s job, as it should only be used for short messages that people NEED to see. It’s the “You are going to ****ing pay attention to me” way of telling players things.

The blog is like a dumptruck; you can load so much **** into it that it just feels wrong to post in it for tiny chucks of text. Also, smaller messages clutter things up while pushing the larger posts off the page.

Twitter is ideal for having lots of short messages, so anything that doesn’t warrant a flood of text (Hi!) can be easily handled there.

Flamebate lets users respond without having to make/login-to a different account on a different service; if they play forumwarz, they can just go into the thread and contribute. That makes it perfect for getting feedback from the community (Moreso for ideas and suggestions than sample data – threads skew early and often if you’re trying to get facts out of them)