Did it work? To answer that there is another question: what was the goal?
Improve the game: nope
Coordinate feedback in a more controlled manner: yep
Listen to that controlled manner feedback: nope
Occasionally bounce ideas around: yep
Make it look like something is being done when nothing is being done: yep
Maybe there are some other things I guess.
I was in something similar in another game. Only this group of 20-ish people had Alpha access to content, classes, changes, gear, etc. and was expected to do a lot of testing and provide a lot of feedback.
There was also a forum where people were free to make suggestions and discuss improvements. Devs had a lot of focus on the testing, and a lot of focus on tracking responses to their questions, and near zero focus on player-driven ideas.
It ended up getting disbanded and the key dev who ran it was sacked when money got tight. They ended up with a community council of sorts, which was exactly like the WoW one.
My brother/sister in the Ebon Blade I am trying, but I am simply one person in a 100 person discord and I cannot keep up with all the threads that are posted to put my 2 cents in.
Exactly this, that’s the same with love rocket, when Chimes said:
"Yep, this isn’t fun. I’ve done the event a dozen times a day on my characters before in previous years and probably would be doing it again this year if I didn’t have other real-life stuff going on.
Right now, if you want to maximize your chance of getting the mount, it’s in your best interest to repeat this event every day on as many characters as possible. That’s… mathematically correct, but not a great experience."
Well, His solution for this year was more of the same…Artemisha from the CC did 2 accounts for an extra attempt, that’s the new approach that some players have in mind for next year…During a whole year the reward dev never discussed anything with players. Btw, We’re still waiting for any follow up since February and now Love is in the air is on PTR and 0 changes regarding this drop…I hope they don´t do something like Hallow´s end that introduced a new pet with really low % and Hardmode that only add longer queues.
Its literally a " You Think You Do…But You Don’t", Yes, they’re game developers but their solutions are still providing frustating experiences for a reason and this is the same story with yesterday changes, 0 Insight about that change…you can’t just push a hotfix like that without any context.
You can count me as one who is not afraid. I’ve been openly discussing and memeing with the lot of you since I was appointed and before that. Granted I took some breaks due to work and family issues but I try my best to interact with the masses.
Though I do understand the concerns that some CC members feel like we’d be openly attacked - I think most of it just stems from non-cc members not being able to voice their concerns directly ON the topics made in the CC forums.
I do feel like the CC creates this hostile division between us when at the end of the day we are just the same so demolishing it and just going back to MVP titles would probably be for the best.
Not once was anyone being afraid mentioned other than the just posted assumptions.
General Discussion is a place with plentiful trolls, flaming, and a huge mess of clutter with some nuggets of useful discussion interspersed, and TL3 is not hard to get to be any kind of limiting factor to all the former.
Opening council threads to that is not beneficial to anyone, all it means is those threads will be full of the same flames, bickering, trolling and other that GD threads are, and make more work for moderators to have to clean those up now, etc…
Making a GD post for GD discussion with a simple link to the council thread is not complicated, at all, I made one in my post with one simple link, and in that one simple link, the council thread I used as an example has a clickable link if someone were reading that thread, to go somewhere that was talking about it.
GD discussion stays in GD, the original thread stays clean and not need to be continuously moderated and full of the usual GD bad behavior.
The forums are something like .1% of the WoW community though. They (Council members) DO interact with their WoW communities, on Discords, in guild, in PvP, in RP groups, in streams, on guide websites, etc. It really is NOT their “job” to interact with the forums. They are only required to keep interacting with the Community they came from.
MVPs are the ones who interact with the forum community to answer questions, chat, etc. They don’t have access to Devs though and are not a means to pass on feedback. That, and the last Community MVP induction was 2018 and I don’t think any are active anymore. Just the TS/CS MVPs.
You´re right some recent changes had threads in the council that were never replied by a Dev, however; that´s also an issue because Devs don’t check with players feedback before doing those changes or do a follow up after doing the changes.
Just take in consideration how the holiday cosmetics were changed to a daily boost attempt, that didn’t address the core issues mentioned by players and Reward Dev never addressed the council members that posted feedback during 2022-2023 period before that change was implemented or their lack of follow up since February…they just push the same change to next Holidays receiving the same backlash from the community.
Why isn’t productive? It doesn’t seen like the council is helping since Devs and CMs aren’t replying at all since its introduction…There’s a big gap between threads and Dev response. How can they improve that? This isn’t the first thread about their lack of communication with the council and I doubt it’ll be the last one or frustation when players provide feedback and there’s a lack of interaction between players and devs.
