Community Council, and Blizzard's Listening Problem

Community General Discussion
1

I don’t post here, often, but I do read here often. I’ve been playing WOW for 19 years.

Over the past several months I’ve watched as time and again Blizzard runs the predictable pattern of creating problems in new features, ignoring the feedback of the community during the creation period, implementing only partially complete features, and only after multiple months bringing those features in line with the exact recommendations that users gave during the initial feedback window. Each time, they say the same canned corporate jargon response. “We’ve heard the community and the feedback they’ve given.”

It’s nonsense.

Blizzard’s own Community Council, nominally selected to help blizzard listen better, feels like they’re being ignored.

When they changed from valor points to the new currency, everyone on the forums told them, vocally, loudly, and sometimes aggressively that filling the bags with a bunch of garbage was a bad idea—but they plowed ahead, only to revert that decision a season later.

They said they were implementing cross faction guilds so you could “experience more content” and vehemently refused to answer whether queueing for content would work with your guild-mates right up until the patch release where, surprise, it did not. People were angry and told blizzard that it was pointless; that it didn’t do anything different, but still they billed it in all their posts as if it meant you could “experience more content with your friends regardless of faction.” Now, more than half a year later, they have still done nothing to change that. (Before anyone says it’s a technical limitation- if it were, why can i random-queue as alliance and and up with horde in dungeons?). Mark my words, they’re saving that change to dig themselves out of hot water and garner some positive feelings form the community the next time they make another boneheaded decision and charge ahead while damning the community response.

Public relations matter, actions matter more. Blizzard, you spend a great deal of effort saying you listen to your community, but the management team clearly doesn’t. You might think you’re fooling the community with your constant cycle of ignoring feedback, making bad decisions, and then reverting them under the guise of “listening to the community”, but we, your community, sees you. Our memory isn’t that short.

What do I expect this post to do?
Honestly, I expect:

  • Blizzard to pretend it doesn’t exist
  • Apologists to try to sell blizzard’s patch notes as evidence blizzard listens
  • An abundance of trolls
  • No actual change to happen

Why did I bother to write this? It’s a saturday afternoon and i had 30m to kill before a dungeon with my guild.

Remember folks. Blizzard only cares about doing the bare minimum to keep your dollars rolling in. They don’t actually listen, they just go through the motions.

8 Likes
2

we know.
Why is this surprising?

we’re not exactly a beacon of understanding either. How do we talk to their employees when we don’t get our way?

3 Likes
3

Ok this is way too long to read. Stopped reading after ‘’ been playing for 19 years ‘’

1 Like
4

…that is listening?

You can claim it was late. But it still was.

5

People who say that are like Cartman saying “respect my authority!”

6

It has felt particularly frustrating lately because this past year it feels like they’ve been making a lot of noise about how they’re really listening to the players’ feedback now. While that does seem to be true in some cases, in so many they definitely aren’t. Like the fact they saw the throng of negative feedback about the change to have rares in zaralek despawn after 15 minutes, and they responded not by reversing the change but by trying to justify it with an explanation that made zero sense.

3 Likes
7

But they do, and there is evidence of it. On many major features they are listening. That doesn’t mean they aren’t dropping the ball elsewhere, like the neglected community council, but your wording suggests you aren’t interested in any meaningful discussion unless it involves complete agreement with you. I’m nobody’s echo chamber.

8

You have an interesting (if not new) perspective. However…

Clearly you are not looking for anything from your post, certainly not feedback as you won’t believe or trust it anyways because you live in a world where only the dollar matters to anyone who puts their efforts into a game you have played for 19 years (so they must have made something you love and enjoy or you wouldn’t still be playing it). Good luck with your jaded perspective as you keep paying for a game you are clearly enjoying but have some beefs with.

A few paragraphs is too much to read eh? I wonder why the world has problems, lol no i don’t.

9

TO be fair the majority of the people on this forum should be ignored.

1 Like
10

Blizzard’s own Community Council seems to not understand their purpose, as they admit. Comments like “I demand…” and comments about blizzards “brainless decisions” don’t lend themselves to conversation. Lately it seems the council expects ideas to be run by them before implementation. The entitlement seems high.

So you expect everything? Patch notes showing change as evidence bliz listens, while bliz pretends it doesn’t exist and no change happens?

The biggest thing tho, is that listening doesn’t mean agreeing. Most forum complainers don’t seem to understand that. Bliz has implemented things based on feedback. They give shout outs to the council for Q&A and feedback, opportunities the average user doesn’t get.

11

I debated whether or not to respond to this; but let explain the reason I feel their loud declarations of listening to feedback don’t fly.

Indulge me as I write a perhaps unnecessary metaphor.

Suppose that I’m building a new community recreation centre. I have my own ideas for how things should be made and what the centre should include, but I’m banking on community good will for the project to work and for it to meet the needs of the whole community.

I announce my list of what the rec centre will include and solicit community feedback. During multiple public forums, thousands of people in detailed speeches and letters tell me that my plans aren’t going to work and that with some small changes they’ll be more acceptable, offering clear solutions to problems they can see coming that I’m not anticipating. I ignore that feedback and build the centre I planned to build anyway.

Months after construction is finished and the centre is open, there are constant complaints about the way the centre’s is organized that mirror exactly the feedback given in the pre-construction period.

My plan for the cafeteria was to make it token-based, but that causes delays and confusion as they don’t take real money, and people aren’t sure if they need a donkey token or a horse token or a bull token to get the meal they want.

My plan for access to the sports gym was to allow registered teams to book their court time, and I implemented a policy defining what makes a team that says you can only register for league pickup games if you are either a women’s team or a men’s team, not a team made up of both women and men. Despite that, I told everyone that team registration is open and that it doesn’t matter if your friends are men or women, because we’re all playing the same game.

Everyone in town told me in advance that these were unnecessary hurdles.

When I finally give in and change my vision, resulting in reduced confusion in the cafeteria, and remove the arbitrary restriction I’ve placed on registering for pickup games, it is because I am admitting that I was wrong.

I don’t get to claim that I listened to the community. I didn’t. I was arrogant and ignored the community’s informed feedback because I thought I knew better.

12

But you are basing this on feedback from where? The forums here are skewed notoriously negative. For many it’s the complaint department for Blizzard, and in fact it’s where players wanting to give feedback are directed by Blizzard employees. Third party forums still get the negative feedback to a degree, but are far less negative overall in my experience. The same goes with most social media.

Then there is data. This is something they have tons of, and it is far less susceptible to being slewed by echo chambers, and peer pressure. Observing player actions and habits can often tell a different story to what people say publicly when they’re worried about what others think.

I’m not saying your observations are wrong, in regards to what you are seeing. I’m just saying there’s a lot more factors to look at when taking into account what players want than what we see on the surface.

13

to be fair…they probably wanted to see how things would shake out before abandoning it.

14

What kicked off that thread is blizzard making a change, that poster demanding that it be immediately reverted, and blizzard responding with “this is why we made that change”, instead of doing exactly what that poster wants.

15

Pausing my forum vacation for this in particular:

It wasn’t that change alone that kicked off the thread. Also you’ll forgive me for my “demand” but I’ve have a very tiresome week and when I made that post about the hotfix it set me off because I had alluded to that zone becoming deader than a 3 week old bug corpse 6 months prior when they decided that the purpose of the zone was not to rare farm and nerfed that into hell. I told them the change was going to destroy it.

Fast forward 6 months later and they claim “Oh we discovered an ‘issue’ with the zone being underpopulated!” and yeah. I knew the “Rares now despawn in 15 minutes of no activity.” was going to hurt a lot of people and more people were going to chime in. Even if I wasn’t on the Community Council my post layout would have remained the same.

Once again though it proves a point that we aren’t listened to. So your logic of “Oh that hotfix last tuesday set them off.” No my dear sweet Capslock. It was an ongoing issue stemming from way before then.

Anyway back to the void with me to continue my rest.

16

Last Community Council live chat was at the begining of December…

Why don’t do a thread asking Council Members about Love is in the air changes? What should be improved?

Does anyone in the Council know anything since Holidays?

We already have threads on the council for several new topics, some involving the bad experience that’s doing the Holiday mount grind, if Devs don’t want to improve it more, at least remove the instance limit.