Just not from the devs. KEKW
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You are more in the hands of corporate and tied to your job. Your priorities I assume shift, but I do believe they read or some devs read the stuff there. It doesn’t necessarily mean they will react to it there and then.
All I’m saying is, I wish people were a little more reasonable with their own expectations, it’ll help in the long run for themselves. Expecting them to work all day, go home to their family and read the forum, reply etc to… it’s never been in Blizzard’s M/O per se. So expecting this CC forum to be any different is a little… bit of misplaced expectations.
I do agree that they should be called out a tad on their mess ups but past that, it’s just about having an understanding where your expectations are reasonable and can verge on unreasonable when comparing to said company.
I didn’t expect this. I assumed they had the manpower portion worked out by hiring more people or freeing up time from somewhere else BEFORE they announced and implemented the CC.
They fired a lot of their CM and QA people.
This whole CC forum thing is in my opinion just one giant PR move.
I could be wrong though.
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Ok. If I grant that this is true, then my criticism is that it is a failure as a PR move. They aren’t even pretending to communicate, which would take very little time.
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Well it did work for a little while 
People are desperately looking for ‘hope’ to turn things around for them but honestly, for me at least, I treat it all the same. Until I see the changes that I want to see, stuff like the CC forums or what have you I just kind of ignore.
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Sadly, that is probably the best way to handle blizz. It almost seems like you are better off by playing the game only and not being informed any other way.
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I don’t know how many of us have worked for corporations but right now things at Blizzard are a mess from the perspective of employees.
All the legal stuff from the discrimination lawsuits which includes fallout from corporate HR and the changes there. There are accusations flying along with investigations. There are disciplinary actions going on and a lot of push toward cleaning up corporate culture.
There is a major patch that Blizz is clearly worried about player reaction but very little time to make significant changes.
There is expansion 10 well underway and probably passed the point of no return in terms seismic shifts in the story or major mechanics.
There is the Microsoft buyout and wondering who will still be employed as that comes to fruition and wondering who will be employed if it fails for some reason. Likewise, worry as to how much of what they are working on will even mean anything depending on what ideas MS has for things.
In short, player concerns are probably way down on the list for real Blizz employees and the feedback loops are there as corporate directives and waiting to see who gets voluntold has to participate in it.
As Khronys says, keep expectations low.
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Like so much (oh so VERY MUCH) that is wrong with this game for a long time now, the community council is a joke of an idea to begin with. Its pure PR in light of the horrible press Blizzard has gotten (rightly so btw) – so that’s nothing more than a saving some face move. The players in this game have ALWAYS stated, LOUDLY, FREQUENTLY and CLEARLY what they like and don’t like about the direction of this game for literally years – Blizzard always ignored it and had the brash and arrogant ego of “no its our game we’ll do what we want . period”. So then Blizzard’s sins of many years come to light last summer, everyone hates them (more or less) , stock drops (until the Microsoft deal was announced anyway) so now they say “oh we will do better and listen here’s our Community Council idea”.
Its BS . its smoke and mirrors…its “nothing to see here”…
The best hope WoW has (and all the Blizzard games really) is the purchase gets Approved and when it is Microsoft cleans house without prejudice and no hesitation. Wipe out all the big wigs, starting with Bobby boy – I mean to him it won’t matter his parachute will be about 300 million, but fundamentally it will matter for quality of the company and therefore its games.
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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.