Blizz Interview and the "Blizz doesn't care"

Community General Discussion
61

This!!

For example, Community council was created to gather feedback from players, almost since it was created a lot of conversations about bad luck protection and low drops…etc

Halite did a thread and nothing, They should take feedback and work proactive, If a change happens after a bug like this one, it was just a fix to the whole drama situation.

A clear example of Devs paying attention was this:

When Devs changed this meta achievement with low % during 9.1.5, yeah it took a while and I did this meta achivement with the worst RNG possible but it was fixed because they checked feedback, We need more changes on legacy content if there’s space for improvement, that doesn’t mean hangouts but a better game for everyone.

There’s a big lack of communication with Reward Devs…A lot of QoL and things that Blizzard must check on legacy content.

also, there’s a lot of mounts, cosmetics that are just a time sink with 0 fun gameplay.

We didn’t need a bug to get these changes…Just check Collectors communities and you’ll find a lot of frustation about their design…

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62

It’s dismissive to say Blizzard doesn’t care. They do, but as stated in the OP, they have to handle diverse input to try and find a balance. I would wager the majority of developers care about creating a quality game for us. Having worked “behind the scenes” on various projects, I would wager the developers are sometimes frustrated by the restrictions placed upon them, and I would also wager there are probably some fairly spirited discussions about the direction of the game overall.

That being said, there are individuals at Blizzard who have openly declared their contempt for games and gamers. Unfortunately one of them is the CEO, Bobby Kotick. There have also been some developers who have acted unprofessionally in interactions with gamers, especially on social media. Whether that was just a bad day for them or something of a pattern, I don’t know.

Even so, those few individuals are the rotten apples in the bunch, but shouldn’t be taken as representative of all the people at Blizzard. They do a fairly thankless job, especially considering how many of us have had a negative experience here or there and gone off the handle about it here on the forums or elsewhere.

They are a small group of people dealing with a much larger group of players, and I know from experience how easy it is to feel like you’re being mobbed up on. It’s really disheartening, and the fact they’re able to work through it is a testament to their professionalism and work ethic. The developers aren’t perfect, of course, but they still do good things for us in providing this game at all.

One thing I would like to see is a pinned thread providing examples of what the developers consider excellent feedback. It might be useful as a template for people who want to provide feedback, though I believe many who complain here on the forums aren’t really interested in providing feedback. They’re either selfish and unreasonable consumers, or merely trolls interested in stirring the pot for their own sad entertainment.

Still, I’d like to see a post detailing the attributes of good feedback. At the very least people could point to it and say, “Follow this if you want to provide feedback the developers can utilize.” They could then prioritize the feedback that follows such “best practices.” So-called feedback that just ends up being a run-on wall of text, ranting and rambling and complaining, could be easily ignored.

I know if I was a developer, I would need a higher monetary incentive to put up with walls of text and rambling rants. When I was in a position to receive feedback from consumers of a product, I didn’t bother trying to decipher rambling statements, bad handwriting, or angry rants. Whatever gems of goodness they held were lost on me and handily chucked in the garbage. I wouldn’t blame the devs here for doing the same thing.

I do appreciate the developers, and everyone who truly loves World of Warcraft and wants to see it succeed. It’s a fun game, and still pulls at me after all these years. Of course nothing is ever perfect and nothing is ever exactly the way I want it, but the net result is a positive one I can wholeheartedly get behind.

This game holds a place in my heart because of where I was at in life when I started playing. I was looking for something to hold onto. A creed, a place to belong, something to inspire me to be better than I was. In small ways, my paladin served to stoke the fire in me to be a better person, and I shamelessly admit I often thought of myself as my character, acting out thrilling heroics for a cause bigger than myself.

Until I found where I fit in the real world, I found a place to fit in Azeroth, and in some of my lowest seasons in life, I had Stormwind, the Alliance, and the hope that I could be something more than what I was. World of Warcraft has been entertainment, yes, but also a haven and an inspiration, a way to kill time, to meet new people, to escape the absolute flusterchicken the real world can be.

For that, I appreciate what the people at Blizzard have given us.

For the Alliance!
And the…Horde, if we must.

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63

This here exactly. If the devs cared memes like “Small indie company” and “Fun detected, fun nerfed” wouldn’t be around in the first place.

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64

Or mog secondary armor types? Hunter NPCs of generic types don’t even wear MAIL as we do… they wear LEATHER.

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65

Oh please, get over yourself. The developers are working their butts off to give you a great product and all you can do is smack them down. Get a grip.

66

Blizz if you care for community so much then why our repeated requests to make older transmog runs faster and easier never seems to go through? Transmog is such a popular thing in WOW and yet you try your best to ruin it for players.

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67

I mean if indeed true this is a fair question for sure.

68

While true they should act like a business. In business speed is king and they are not acting with any urgency to communicate or resolve issues.

I miss old BlizZard for that very reason as they were business oriented but still had a passion for the game.

Current BlizZard is full of red tape styled business which makes them slow to respond or their M.O. to not even bother responding.

:surfing_woman: :surfing_man:

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69

I’ve touched on this interview in a few other threads already, but I have something more to add on the matter: Shadowlands was pushed for a long while as the ‘character customization’ expansion. In response, A LOT of us created threads for each race.

Fenelon created the massively popular Void Elf Customization Thread (for the Void Aspect). Morbann created the " Kul’tiran Love & Customization Thread". I created the Human Customization Mega Thread. Keori created the long lasting, hugely popular Worgen Customization Mega Thread.

There are at least thirty to forty others out there that I haven’t included, seriously. When Blizzard reversed gears a couple of months later, the blowback was huge, showing up in several online gaming articles, and in a fairly large thread of it’s own:

Players have been calling for aid for a long while, and though Blizzard’s Art team is out there just KILLING it, some races, and several classes, need some deep customization and heritage options.

Speaking of an ignored population: Roleplayers. When announcements were made regarding Shadowlands’ open world, there were plenty of threads out there that advocated for the part of WoW that WoW has been missing for far too long.

With Dragonflight coming soon, the game would benefit GREATLY if it were to embrace, and innovate on, its roots.

You want to show you’re listening Blizzard? You want to show you care? Customization and RP. Show us what you’ve got (reference intended).

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70

It’s a very Ion response. Which is a nice way of saying it’s a very corporate response.

The classical problem that plagues any corporate outlet is when they get so corporate and so bloated that they’ve lost all ability to respond to any kind of expectation other than what can be discovered by “market research.” This then leads companies to making terrible decisions because a bunch of idiots who scream about how, “they’re number guys, the numbers never lie” proceed to give bad advice.

Classic example is Xerox. You know, the people who make copy machines and printers? Yeah, they used to make computers. Up through the 1980’s they actually made some great computers and they were a major player in the personal computer market in the 70’s and early 80’s. In fact, they actually invented the idea of a GUI. That thing that greets you when you turn on your computer or phone? Tiles? Icons? All that business? Yeah, Xerox came up with it. Not Microsoft, not Apple.

So what happened? Xerox got cold feet and decided that instead of iterating on a unique idea that instead there was no market for it worth pursuing. Today Xerox is still only known as the printer and scanner guys. Microsoft is one of the most valuable companies in the world, and Apple is the most valuable company in the world. Or at least it regularly competes for the title.

What does this mean for Blizzard? The simple fact that we get dead air on feedback and concerns tells us one of two things: Blizzard doesn’t care, or that they are so aggressively corporate that the answer is, “We can’t tell you, but the answer is, ‘no.’” How do I know this? Because FFXIV simply does not have this problem. No, you don’t have to like FFXIV, but it’s an objective fact that SE is much better at responding to player feedback and acting on it. We regularly see situations where the lead director for FFXIV will acknowledge feedback and give honest answers as to how realistic it is to see something done about it. It took less than a year for SE to go from acknowledging the shortcomings of the FFXIV UI to including specific elements from mods (icons having the option to reflect how many seconds remain on an effect) into the core game.

Blizzard? Blizzard is notorious- and no, this goes all the way back to '04- for leaving problems on the shelf for whole expansion cycles before acknowledging them.

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71

Well if they do care they sure as hell have a funny way of showing it.

They post once a day on the forums, the dev twitter has 8 posts in the last year…

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72

Well, the most critical problems should be solved with DF, don’t you think? There are still things to do, regardless how small they look.

And yet, they still provide the quality required from such a big title.

73

so when do they fix the legacy raid scaling

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74

In 12.0, likely, when it’s an after-thought and they get reminded that there is still some things open from the sticky notes.

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75

+1

:ocean: :dragon: :ocean: :dragon: :ocean: :dragon:

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76

the business plan for WoW is not about making players happy, in fact misery and envy are the primary motivators to create profits.

if you accept that the game becomes more interesting…

77

Maybe they should listen to the players then? How about allowing people to just fly without annoying time gated pathfinder or Mario 64 wingcap controls IE DR? Maybe they could do something about the plague of bots in WOTLK classic? How about they stop messing with old content so people can farm transmogs? What about nerfing heirloom armor people spent tons of gold on? How about the design choices that push players to feel the need to buy wow tokens?

These are all things they bring on themselves. When you constantly screw your player base over they are going to dislike you.

Dev actions are the reason players are as salty as they are. They are more interested in making a game they want to play instead of the game players want.

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78

Typical of these forums to find someone who sees Blizzard devs saying something and tries to twist it around. You, and those like you, are the reason why Blizzard developers rarely post on these forums.

An unforseen bug caused issues with mount drop rates, and so rather than do what some people were demanding, which was go and remove mounts from collections and ban people, they decided “You know what? We’re going to increase the drop rate for everyone else, because it’s not fair that some players got a 100% drop chance and others did not.”

They did not have to do this, at all. A lot of mounts have very low drop rate chances, they could have just left the drop rate as it was, but instead they changed the game for the better, making it easier to get some of the rare mounts from old content.

If something is not ready, then it’s not ready. Keep in mind that the white transmog change was never promised to drop before Dragonflight launched. The official line was that it was planned to come with Dragonflight or possibly even before Dragonflight. Possibly gives them wiggle room, and I’d rather they focus on the important things, which is making sure the bulk of the expansion is ready to go, before they work on adding minor things. If that means we don’t get white transmog until a future patch in Dragonflight, then so be it.

Body scaling is not something that is easy to do, and quite frankly none of the players working on ‘fan projects’ have access to Blizzard’s tools or know the restrictions of them. They have access to tools in programs like Blender, but actually making body mass customization a thing in game? Not as easy as you pretend it is.

Because this isn’t FF14.

I mean that should be painfully obvious, but if you want a game that has FF14 systems, you can go and play that. Is there room for improvement? Yes, but expecting Blizzard to just port over what other MMOs do in their games is just stupid. Also I don’t know how this translates into Blizzard somehow ‘not caring’. Just because you don’t get what you want, doesn’t mean Blizzard doesn’t care.

Show me one MMO that has ‘done this better’?

I mean you’re spot on about FOMO. So we agree there, but the whole thing with mounts and updating existing models? Blizzard is one of the only developers that actually goes through the effort of updating models and applying those updated models to older creatures, as evidenced by the most recent update to Gnolls.

What about them? Blizzard said they’d add more heritage armor sets when they can, and they’ve done that. Shadowlands for example saw heritage weapons added for the Dark Iron and some more heritage armor added for Blood Elves (specifically Blood Elf paladins) so they’re clearly working on it. But they don’t operate based on your timetable, and not working to your timetable doesn’t mean they don’t care.

I stand by what I said earlier, people like you who twist statements around are the reason why Blizzard doesn’t communicate with folks on these forums often. Look inward and stop taking every little thing Blizzard says so negatively.

79

You literally just listed a ton of very different issues that large swathes of the playerbase have VERY polarizing takes.

I have no trust that a company has my best interests at heart, but ultimately Blizzard has to produce a game people will play. For all of the misgivings I’ve had with Blizzard over the years, I can’t disagree with Ion’s point. The WoW playerbase as a general “rule” is incredibly vitriolic, and even if it’s a response to a slight (real or perceived), people can and do take it too far.

There’s always a list of critical things, and unfortunately priorities have to be decided. It’s not as simple as “okay, we hit A, B and C… now we’re going to jump to P, JUST to spite the playerbase!”. They do drop the ball at times, but that’s going to happen.

… because they’re getting PAID to do it, and it is their livelihood? I’m confused as to your point with this one.

80

I’m a paying customer, I can compare the situation to other similar games and I do spend money in a vision which could be better. So, no, you’re off track here.

And where is the part you forgot about the CC? This whole story began months before, you know.

It’s not math or rocket science. These things require to go through all the white items, and if you have done this before on wowhead, you would know that they don’t have many items in this category. It’s a 1-3 day work until it’s done. It’s not complicated, it’s just tiring.

Then perhaps you should go back to reddit and read the topic about it? If an amateur can do it with no problems, so why can’t Blizzard?

https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/lojxsp/having_given_a_large_amount_of_feedback_on_player/

And here is the part, which should interest you. The video is also inside the link.

I used to think that body shapes would be difficult but that’s also absolutely not the case. The common excuse I’ve seen and thought would be that blizz would have to make those 3d armour collections reshaped for each body shape, each race, each gender, etc.

While that is true for the differing races, body shapes (if implemented correctly) can actually be controlled via scaling the animation bone itself. When this is done, the armour scales with it. In this example I display such with the blood elf female model.

FF14. There, I said it. The irony with FF14 is that the game’s relaunch is based on WoW but for some reason our game got worse over time (hint: game director).

It simply takes too long for a mere request to be fulfilled, which is what it boils down to. If they need years (!) to add a finished weapon transmog to a vendor, then something’s wrong with this team. People shouldn’t have to wait for something so irregular, so small decades just to have something, what would fulfill the race and class fantasy.

It’s the other way around. Because they believe they are at the top of the world, we need to remind them that they still go to the toilet and require food to sustain themselves. They are no gods, they don’t know better. We support them, their vision, with our money and if the majority agrees upon not liking what they see, then it’s their duty to act upon it. Small changes can be done within one week, actually. Big changes require complete overhauls, which is understandably. But we’re not talking about SL > DF changes here.

If they don’t have their heart at the right place and deliberately do things the community ask them not to do, then perhaps they are not fit for the position they work in. It’s about inner peace, your devotion to something you want to do and a shared vision. I do blame Hazzikostas for twisting the knife too much and not standing his ground with the community. People, like Jeff Kaplan, are liked, because they are empathic players and don’t mock them in past videos with sly comments.

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