These are solid points. Well said.
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So, I found this quora post that seems explanatory enough about issues of communication. None of us get regular one on one responses, not even the CC.
Many issues don’t have easy answers or they simply aren’t issues worth discussing because only the company can really see the forest for the trees.
mega wall of text: BEWARE
"Game companies listen to their customers and those likely to become customers intently. Game companies pay people to monitor forums and feedback closely. I get notices on my phone in the middle of the night when forum posts meet certain conditions.
I suspect you are overlooking a few key aspects to this feedback loop.
- We listen, but we interpret. We use a statistical and scientific approach to harvesting quality information from the raw ore of player comments. We very much want the best and most accurate information we can get.
- Science shows, for all manner of Internet product feedback and especially for games, the demeanor is much more negative, angry and confrontational than the average for all customers. What we hear is concentrated negativity.
- The unsolicited player feedback we get represents only .03% of our player base. The few, the loud, the extreme. We also collect feedback from focus groups made up of more mid bell curve players to improve our understanding. We will not implement changes that 14 people want but 30,000 would hate.
- Players do not tell the truth in forums. Player analytics show us exactly how and where people play, for how long, on what difficulty settings. Their successes, failures, trading, crafting, upgrading and numerous other details. When we compare that to what players write online, there are predictable differences. I know other companies experience the same thing. Features that the forums hate often increase player counts, sales and average time in game.
- Conversly, studies have shown that players are poor designers. If you give them what they literally ask for, they like it less. It is a deceptively difficult medium to design for. What works better is to have professional designers make well considered changes based on the issues revealed by analysis of lots of feedback.
Games companies do listen, but the signal we get is noisy and scrambled. We apply various techniques to tease out the actionable data. That sometimes means individuals do not feel that their specific request is addressed, but know that their statistical influence is."
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I think a little blue eye to show that it’s been read might help.
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So are Blizz devs. I don’t know who this guy on Quora is, but he’s reeking of pretentiousness.
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Not sure
https://www.quora.com/Why-dont-video-game-companies-listen-to-their-customers-more
As i mentioned around my topic on this some days ago
my biggest problem is that those forums doesn’t feel like alive with 100 players yet, besides Devs being busy with 9.2/10.0, there’s not a good player communication on the threads or lack of threads for some topics.
Also, during CC video presentation, Devs talked about calls between players and Devs, we don’t have a Q&A for almost like 1 year, I was expecting one between those players and Devs before 9.2 launch, instead of the usually Dev / Streamer/ Community Manger Q&A .
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If science concludes that players are poor designers, then that says something about the industry, doesn’t it? Given that the designers themselves ARE players…
PR stunt from day 1, not surprised at all.
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And yet, they are not comprehensive players. And they need not be.
These designers didn’t design a game but rather tapped into a psychological dependence construct. They researched how to sell not only a sense of urgency and necessity in fun, but also, and more importantly, a high quality digital manifestation of an addiction.
Blizz is selling emotional real estate with burgers and fries.
Some discussions I have read before:
- add-on client war, should Blizzard interfere?
- is the standard hud good enough?
- casuals vs raiders: world pvp scaling too hard? Why are raiders awarded this much?
Flight Whistle was removed due MAU-concerns.
If you haven’t noticed it yet, they started to change invisible parts of the game for longer MAUs. First the world quest finder in Legion and later on enemy leashes and placements of monsters in BfA and now the Flight Whistle. And this time the Flight Whistle and unfavorable flightpaths
Maybe you should make a topic about this?
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Well you do have to ask if it was your career on the line would you still bank it on the current Retail WoW still succeeding as a product?
I’d wager that faith is very, very low.
I think the flight whistle removal falls under timegating and they havent really addressed it yet
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Where do you purchase your optimism from and is there any in stick because I’m running on fumes here.
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Another high quality posting worth reading:
Yes and No.
I like Prosident. But the interview with Asmon didn’t really help him at all.
Not really a fan of giving people who use racial slurs so flippantly or even when he did so younger, didn’t really grasp why it was wrong.
This is kinda how we got Alex–ignore the bad because he does a good job, well that comes with a price.
Maybe this issue impacted CC or just Blizzard forgot about CC, the last comment of the “present yourself” was 20 days ago, you can check and there’s only 40+ comments on that thread, if you remove blues then you’ve like 30-35 players on the CC and there’s like only 5-6 players doing post and comments… even Worldpvp profession thread didn’t receive comments, i was expecting profession focus players there too.
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CC to casual players was always a joke. I think there was 3 total casual players in that group compared to the countless high end guild leaders and CE players which again–seems like WoW cares more about their concerns than anyone else’s.
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This is true for every game, movie, show, job, relationships, and basically every facet of life.
The whole notion of “we read this and will get back to you on this” sets the expectation of a continuous dialog that Blizzard would be stupid to fall for because it just invites the “when” question and puts them on the defensive where they have to act or justify why they dont.
Just like in the corporate world, people hate those who stick read receipts on emails because you know their intent is just to bludgeon you with it. “My records show you saw my email on X. Why did you not respond?” That is basically what you are trying to achieve here.
We didn´t need CC Forums or 100 players, besides GD forum, they could just promote the existing forums, there’s a whole gameplay section with forums for professions, new player, raid, m+, pvp…etc, they just needed to respond to some of the topics there than were ignored for years and players will start to post more frequently and according to the topic section (avoiding toxic behaviour that’s common on GD). However, they took this as an opportunity to show that they listen and now players want answer to the threads on the forum, also it diminish the whole player population to only “100 players”.