People always say alpha and beta are for advertisement and not for feedback or anything. But, as always they are proven wrong every time like in Dragonflight and now in the war within alpha there are numerous feedback coming out of the woodwork. It’s like some people love to stick with this narrative that the game developers don’t read or take in feedback but in the end there are far more feedback than say any modern expansion in existence.
For one they have been very proactive on feedback and changing stuff and listening to suggestions and giving developers notes when explanations are needed for why certain things are that way and stuff.
And yet there are those who are out there labeling the game developers like they don’t listen to feedback or this or that.
When people say that it’s usually because they’re looking for specific feedback.
Hunters have been dying for even a “We see you’re unhappy” snippet of feedback and we’re what, build 7 or 8 now with nothing? Most of the feedback I’ve seen has been for the same 3-4 classes. Mages. DKs. Warlocks.
If you’re not among the focus group then yeah, it can be a little depressing build after build with nothing. I can see why people get frustrated and think their feedback is being ignored.
Or (unless i’m just out of the loop and people suddenly loved it) a Hero Power that is a literal coin-flip after years of people not being happy with a dice-roll mechanic.
Alpha is when they are most open to change. Once it hits beta, big changes become less and less likely. Alpha needs all the feedback it can get with people that are going to play the game, not streamers that only hop on to show their community new shiny race customizations.
Arcane Mage and Shadow Priest were pure trash design when Dragonflight released. They literally did not listen to player feedback in Alpha and Beta. Only after several iterations in the middle of Dragonflight did they finally look at what people were saying in Alpha and Beta.
They were dealing with a lot of stuff in dragonflight and plus dragonflight was practically redoing everything. And there were no doubt behind the scenes interruptions but hey at least class changes happened all patches and season long.
Let’s be honest here the system were implemented far too late in the testing cycle and there were nothing they could’ve done and which is why these systems were bad in the first place it took too much time for its development.
It’s likely they get a lot of feedback, and I’m sure they work with what they get. But sometimes it is too late to change a core concept, even if people hate it. I’d still suggest giving constructive criticism and genuine feedback whenever possible.
I think a lot of that sentiment comes from Shadowlands, which was abysmal as far as feedback went. A lot of feedback was provided, and tons of it was ignored or utterly deleted until a massive sub drop and a sexual assault/harassment controversy forced them to turn things around in order to keep some of the subs they were rapidly hemorrhaging.
Seriously, players gave very loud feedback in BFA, Shadowlands, and even Legion. All of that feedback was ignored until the end/middle of each expansion respectively.
Players warned Blizzard about Azerite armor. Said warnings were handwaved. They warned Blizzard about the GCD change, such warnings were handwaved, “you just have to get used to it :D”. Covenants, same thing, players were practically begging Blizzard to allow free covenant swapping at the beginning of the expansion, it wasn’t granted until (to my knowledge) 9.1.5 after pretty easily refuted defense from Blizzard. Legion legendaries, even, were vehemently rejected by the playerbase (particularly the acquisition method), and that wasn’t fixed until the end of the expansion.
Dragonflight was very different, feedback has all around been pretty rapidly acted on, apart from full on spec overhauls for hurting specs, which tend to take a while, but I’ll take that over another Azerite, Covenant, Legiondary, etc. situation.
Arcane mage was in a degenerate state of game play at the end of Shadowlands. The new talent tree for Arcane did nothing but push players into the exact same game play. Talents that were dead in Shadowlands were still dead going into Dragonflight.
They tried to do a complete overhaul of how to play Shadow Priest without any idea of what that game play would look like. We got a “build your own” Shadow Priest tree where some cooldowns and talents were contradictory and having two filler spells competing with each other.
Having been in most (all?) of the betas since BC, here’s my observation:
Alpha: They listen to SOME feedback, and might make some small changes. But for the most part, they have a vision, they’re going to follow it, and all the mountains of evidence you have to explain why something is bad/ needs to be changed won’t matter.
Beta: This is the part people still don’t seem to get.
Everyone wants Beta to be about feedback, and changing things etc.
Beta has one purpose: DOES IT CRASH TO DESKTOP??
As long as the game doesn’t outright crash to desktop, it’s good to go.
They don’t listen to feedback. They aren’t changing anything. No classes are getting adjusted. NOTHING MATTERS. The ONLY thing that matters once it gets to Beta is: is it stable?
That’s it.
And it why stuff is so broken when a new expansion releases. Because no matter what is said, no matter how good the feedback in Beta… it’s all 100% ignored.
This isn’t true because they made several sweeping changes for classes such as Warrior during Beta. Others such as Arcane Mage got radio silence while Priests got a big middle finger. Who remembers the blue post saying “Holy and Discipline priests will not get a silence because too many specializations have one. We know it seems unfair that literally every specialization has a silence except Holy and Discipline, but we just don’t care.”
Well, there is a rather obvious example of that not happening in the remix: its called the Frogger situation.
The Frog hyperspawns were a thing since the original MoP and when people played the Remix on the PTR they mentioned this, and when nothing was done about, people assumed it was fine and went on a farming loop. Then got smashed because Blizzard called it an exploit. Despite, as I say, it having been in the game forever and nothing being done about it, despite reports.
So…yeah, there’s that. Blizzard, over the last few years, seems to have assumed the position of launching things and then ‘hotfix’ stuff that turns out to be broken in some way. Rather than fixing things before launch.
You might be able to cherry pick one or two oddball examples over the 20 year history of this game, but for 99% of the situations, my post holds true.
Even in your post, you try and make the exception about Warriors (in which beta???), but also mention how they ignored every other class (which is to my point).
Bottom line is: they don’t listen. Torghast says wut?