I often come to the forums to voice what I think is going well or not so well with the game and I’m mostly just talking to myself or the wall here for all the good it seems to do.
I think it would make players super happy if they got to see exactly what feedback of theirs is being internalized and acted upon. Just to let us visibly confirm that anyone making decisions at blizzard is reached by what players are saying.
I used to play a lot of another MMO called Black Desert. There used to be a lot of unrest in the community because the Korean developers were completely ignoring the feedback of other regions and near exclusively listening to the Korean players. Eventually Pearl Abyss acknowledged and relented their bias and implemented a new system. If a suggestion was ever implemented into the game, in the patch notes they would directly reference the specific forum post they got the idea from and explain why they accepted the idea and implemented it.
I think it would be awesome if blizzard started doing this, as it would let communities in wow start to feel represented by knowing their voices are legitimately heard and considered. It would also introduce some accountability and show in a measurable way if a class is being ignored or left behind, for example.
The reality is that if they did that, then the feedback channels would be clogged with billions of armchair game designers sending their “feedback”, trying to get their 15 minutes of fame.
Then it would be virtually impossible for them to find the good feedback in that sea of randos throwing stuff on the wall to see if it sticks.
Players should give feedback because they want to see the game improve, not because it could lead famous people to mention them and give them bragging rights.
If bdo, a game where you can’t turn off the open world pvp, doesn’t have a problem with this sort of system then I see zero reason wow can’t manage the same.
There’s already a lot of bad feedback. Some good. That’s why you read it to look for what’s good. There are excellent, practically lovingly crafted posts on these forums and we don’t have any way of definitively knowing that anyone at blizzard knows about it.
This perspective is pessimistic and defeatist and I struggle to find the point of why you typed it to me.
If you give people rewards for it, people will do it for the rewards, not for the improvement of the game. And then the process is corrupted. The amount of bad feedback, which is already humongous, would increase exponentially because everybody thinks they have a great idea and now they have a reason to use it.
Trust me, I’ve had my 15 minutes of fame after Blizzard mentioned me. It’s exhilarating. You make that a lottery prize for the “right idea”, and everybody will be sending their feedback multiple times a day every day until they get the winning ticket.
Say what you will. Think what you will. Blizzard won’t do it because they know what I’m saying is reality as it is.
Give the world a longshot ticket to kinda sorta fame, and people will crawl out of the woodworks and do anything and everything for the infinitesimal chance of winning.
Continuing to yap about fame and likening taking feedback to drawing names out of a hat is precisely why blizzard needs to have a clearer and more focused plan for communicating with players that aren’t content creators
This assumes that all the ideas will be bad, and people with good ideas who keep their ideas to themselves because they feel Blizzard wouldn’t listen to it anyway. wouldn’t step forward, too. I think it’s a great idea, if only so they openly acknowledge that they are listening, or, as is more likely, acknowledge they don’t listen.
A great example of what I’d like to see and what gave me the idea for this thread in the first place is the shaman board, where people will do fantastic posts explaining what doesn’t work about talent setups and ability scaling, and show their work every step of the way.
Yeah there’s gonna be knuckleheads that are going to just whinge that their spec isn’t topping every meter and wanna have their spec get reworked from the ground up so they have more number than everybody else, but there’s valuable stuff in between that’s being skipped over.
