But I’ve been wondering, are the dev teams from other MMO’s more… Talkative? Do they communicate with their players? Interact with them even?
It’s just seems so odd that we never see or hear anything anymore from the dev team, and I’m curious if it’s a Blizzard thing, or just the new norm for MMO’s and such.
Edit: If you do play an MMO where the devs are more active in the community, do you find that affecting your experience with the game? Does it make it better? Worse? Doesn’t matter?
I’d say yes, other development teams do communicate more but there’s a huge difference between Blizzard and other ones… most other gaming communities don’t constantly rage and bash other games and teams. The WoW community is notorious for its negativity, this isn’t something new either. Many other teams would simply ban players that constantly fling negativity around, Blizzard lets those players keep ranting.
Feel free to go check out any of the LoL communities out there and you’ll notice an insane lack of negative players. Players don’t sit around bashing the dev’s and game like they do here. Anyone that has participated in any of the LoL communities would know this.
Note that devs are not authorized to negotiate with players about game features. So even if they could talk to us in the forums, we would not be co-designers of the game, or any part of it. Players cannot design anything. Players cannot “accept” or “reject” or “vote on” anything.
So what is there for them to talk about? They can’t agree to anything you suggest. They can’t tell you anything that Blizzard hasn’t announced publicly. For better or worse, WE are “the public”.
Note: for many years, blue posters often posted in these threads. Then the Blizzard attacks got worse and worse. You can’t debate someone who is yelling at you, while totally ignoring anything reasonable. So gradually the blue and community posts stopped.
They don’t communicate with players because they have nothing to say to them. They are planning on sticking with their plan even though they know a lot of players wouldn’t like some or all of it. That’s what happened with Shadowlands.
I believe it’s a Catch 22 for Devs:
They communicate and get harassed and beat up by Players.
They don’t communicate and get harassed and beat up by Players.
A no win situation that nobody in their right mind would sign up for. Lol.
It’s not too far of a stretch to realize that as the game grew over the years, it became impossible to address all the issues and keep in touch with the player base.
Yes. This radio silence is mostly a Blizzard thing. The only MMOs with devs this silent are dead ones like Rift. Blizzard devs don’t even bother to do the bare minimum amount of engagement with players, which is simply making the occasional post assuring players that their feedback is being heard. This is mostly due to the fact that the devs have already made up their minds and will not change course unless the game hemorrhages subs like Cata or WoD, in which case they will quickly abandon the expansion and divert all available resources into the next one currently in development.
Any “community” where there is no give and take between posters, no actual discussion taking place, one where all posts are glowingly positive or effusively complimentary toward the devs, is one where everyone would assume the entire forum was produced by a PR firm.
There was a point and time where there was a pretty good amount of communication from the devs. May not have always been as direct as say Ghostcrawler’s posts but seeing blue posts on the forums were pretty frequent. I’d say kinda MoPish time frame.
I lost interest in the game during WoD and checked out like many. Dabbled in Legion, played the start of BFA but during those times I can’t say I really looked for dev interaction so maybe it was there.
Came back for SL and it’s been pretty vacant. Staff has been cut short but still, devs could still speak out more. Seems like now our best source is through content creators, which can be good and bad but to get the word out, but it’s still quite lacking and leaving the creators to speculate which probably does more harm than good.
Firstly; a lot of developers aren’t good at talking to consumers.
Secondly; I think there’s a somewhat common occurrence where a small/indie team starts off being all excited to talk and get feedback and do whatever the player base asks. Everyone hypes them up to be the greatest thing ever. Eventually they start getting too big and ignoring the players because they’re successful now.
I have no idea why they’re not talking with the players more, anything I guess would just be a bum pull.
Maybe if yall werent so negative all the time the dev team would communicate with us more. If we’d be happy and positive about the new features they gave us theyd be happy to give us more of it instead of constantly having to rework it taking up all the time to rework and rework instead of expand upon it.
It was something I always will remember blizzard for. They used to keep very open lines of communication, be it in game GMs appearing or chatting, or posts on the forums. For a long time it was normal to see a few replies in threads like this from them too.
Other games, in particular the one I play as my new main game, is a lot like old blizzard. They have posts, they talk with fans consistently. Heck, the game director has been known to personally apologise when he and his team got it wrong. He’s also been known to show up in game, although I haven’t seen this myself.
Are the community better for it? Heck yes! People are much more positive and happy than here. Not saying negative feedback or little squabbles don’t happen, but in general people are happier within themselves which translates to being happier in the game and on the forums.
