[Community Council] Feedback

Community WoW Community Council
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Seeing as my time in the community council only has like 25% left, I want to give my feedback and review on the project, while it doesn’t directly effect the game, indirectly it does and I think it’s good to get this ball rolling on how we see the program and how we think it can get improved.

Member Activity
The first point, is I feel is one of the elephants in the room. The Community Council exists of 100 people, yet only a handful of people are posting on the forums or are active on the Discord. And yes, for the people who weren’t aware, there is a Community Council Discord where we can talk with eachother and some of us use this as a means to flesh out ideas we have before posting them here. But, on the member list, there are quite a few that I haven’t seen posting on the forums or typing on Discord either at all or very little.
Now, it’s understandable that not everyone can always find the time to be active and posting, but it does defeat the purpose of the Community Council and to be blunt, why did you accept the role if you do not engage?

EU and NA seperation
Now I know I already made a topic about this, but it is worth repeating and I’ve actually noticed some side effects. The fact that I cannot post on my main character feels weird and hindering, noone can check my Armoury page and see that I am a collector/pvp’er/raider/m+ or whatever you can think of, and it shouldn’t be an issue but it feels like it is, many people feel that the members of the community council represent a certain group (more on that later) but all they see is an empty lvl 10 alt with nothing to show for.

Besides the above, the EU forum posters have no way to create a thread using the topic link function to get the discussion rolling among people that can’t reply to topics made in the CC section, which doesn’t feel very community engaging.

Community perspective
There seems to be confusion among the community as a whole about what this council is about, from what I gather there seems to be the opinion that the community council is a PR stunt and that the people who get chosen are representing the community’s opinion as a whole, not ourselves. I don’t think this is true and I’ve always thought that I should add in my views, and not those of a certain community, perhaps an extended explanation would help again on this project and how the selection goes.

What to talk about
I know this has been a recurring topic on Discord, but it is worth mentioning here. We have been told that there is no structure in what we can talk about, so basically anything game related goes, which is great… but also very difficult because you’re not sure where the focus lies for the developers. Perhaps a CM can continue to make threads like “Post your feedback about the raid here” and “Give us your thoughts about X feature in Dragonflight” so we have both the freedom and a direction.

Feedback and Blizzard communication
This has been talked about a lot, and I think this is probably the most important part and can make or break this project as a whole. There is an obvious lack of interaction between the community (council) and Blizzard, which does make the providing ideas and feedback a little one sided, though we have to believe that everything is being read and forwarded, else we might as well stop.

Anyway, it obviously has very little value for a CM to tag every post with “this has been read” or whatever, but perhaps one of the CMs could gather topics been made, discuss them with the developers of the appropiate deperatment and every 3 months write a post with the thoughts and maybe future actions of the developers regarding our topics.
I think this would entice more people to engage and give ideas on how to improve, and it personally would make me check outside the CC forums more and see what other things are important for others.

Anyways, this is all I can think of, I personally think this project is great, but there is definitely a lot of room for improvement going forward.

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This is a topic we discussed a lot recently in the CC discord (which to clarify we don’t get additional game info everyone else doesn’t, Any blizzard messages are purely council related)

On the topic of communication, I do think there is always room for improvement here,
from what I’ve seen, currently there is a sort of feeling among the council that, all threads get read, but if you want an answer you’re better off waiting for a live chat,

how it got to be like this:
Blue replies, Especially directly from devs and not through CM’s have become a 4 leaf clover, when one appears, people flock to see what it is, every word is scoured for meaning,

From what I know, the decrease in blue posts was partially from a fork of this, every blue post on the council was receiving a fair bit of attention, and most were getting reposted by wowhead, which is where many players get their news about the game,
as a result blues started to become extra careful about what they posted to the council, but the result of this seems to have instead intensified the problem,
Its sort of the opposite of whats happened in the Customer Support forum section, there is so many blue replies, some of which can contain interesting info, but the common place of them has caused them to lose some of their mystique.

This isn’t something that can really be “solved” but I think there is ways to mitigate the ever increasing impact of this,
-Dont be afraid to post about small things, if every blue post is about a large broad topic, its going to get reposted and spammed everywhere, where as smaller ones with a highly specific topic such as discussing making a boss from a legacy dungeon less painful to solo, or changing the criteria calculation of a specific achievement. are less likely to end up having a 100% repost rate and the crazyness that surrounds it.

-A steady consistent amount of discussion would also help, if something is scarce it becomes a special occasion, if you can get it to a point where it isn’t seen as such, that should also help

-Encourage replies to popular threads, in particular ones with a solid community consensus, this sounds a bit backward after what I said above, but popular topics are important,
We have had several topics in the last couple months that have had very strong support and little to no opposition, but no word from devs on, and they have just turned into echo chambers a bit,
The best example of this is the collection achievements, there has been numerous threads on this topic, and nearly every reply has been positive,
These threads end up stirring confusion and frustration when the community cant see why what may look like an easy win to make players happy is silent,

overall I think the council has been good, but some slight changes could make it even better, I hope this feedback can be taken in the positive tone I intend :slight_smile:

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For my personal taste, there is just not enough involvement or feedback from Blizzard concerning the Community Council. Makes it tough to want to engage.

I understand devs working on parts of the game aren’t community managers and their job isn’t to engage with the CC though. I just want to know and see more that Blizzard is paying attention here. It is very tough to be hopeful that anything I or anyone else says here is meaningful in any capacity.

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I agree with this.

I understand that responding to everything is a mighty ask, but something other than radio silence would be appreciated. We have some topics here ranging backwards an entire year with people still posting in them, to which theirs never been an official response.

Heck a “We see what you’re going for here, but at this current time we do not have any plans to action on this” is better than nothing. Makes it feel like the subject bars no weight to even mention something on and then it further makes people not want to talk about that subject because “obviously” it isn’t important enough to bar a response.

Maybe even like a weekly rollup would be awesome. Like a “We have reviewed the following subjects this week and provided the feedback to the developers” And in said rollup could provide the response from the developers if you’d like on those subjects.

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Understand this. I feel like in the beginning it was more frequent and has just dropped off.

I believe earlier this year, someone posted the stats (I don’t recall if it was here or Discord though lol) of how many CC posts there were, what categories the topics were, and how many times the devs engaged with those posts. It was really cool, and I wish I remember who did that… but would like to see some updated stats on that.

I love this idea!

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I agree.

I am very bothered by the lack of communication from Blizzard on all of their forums. In the past, there were some brief responses to encourage the opinions of other players in the community regarding the topic discussed in a forum thread or requesting that the thread not be derailed. Unfortunately, today there is a silence that greatly disturbs me.

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The maintenance of a player/user on the Council Community should be proportional to their level of activity in that section.

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In my opinion, the Community Council is a section that has always been missing in all of Blizzard’s game forums, designed for providing feedback and suggestions but separate from the General Discussion section, similar to what exists in many other forums for different games.

There are many feedback discussions in progress about the game that are being addressed in another forum section and not here anymore.

Perhaps it’s a good time to make some specific adjustments to the Community Council.

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Echoing many of the points presented in the first post. Primarily the ones about direction and communication - the current iteration of the council feels a bit like throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks and gets a reaction, which leaves both the community and the council disillusioned about the initiative. It needs more of a guiding hand from the organizers, to figure out what it is that they prefer to see discussed.

The idea suggested above of a weekly round-up that just points out what they found relevant would be interesting for this.

There’s also the point of organization. Currently, the council section is a single stack of threads that are sometimes bumped back up for some visibility, having left it to council members to appropriately tag the threads in order for them to be found more easily. It discourages interaction, if someone doesn’t find a thread that is relevant to their interests. The forum’s already have a very simple solution for this too: make more sections, allow threads to be made in the appropriate ones, and it’ll quickly become much better organized.

The other point, which I recognize is a bit more pedantic, is the separation of EU and NA in the forums, as I doubt most of the EU is even aware this exists, and can’t really contribute in discussions that branch off of threads made here.

The council is overall a net positive regardless of the community perception of it, because there really isn’t anything to lose from its existence. But it could be better if it was nudged ever so slightly every now and then.

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I feel mostly the same about this. While I get it’s not particular amazing to write posts into a void, some sort of participation would be nice even if you not 100% into a topic (An outside perspectiv can sometimes spark new ideas). Perhaps this changes if we get more recognition as council (not asking here for special treatment - in general more forum activitiy would be nice in all parts of the forum).

Can’t add more…

get rid of it.

Have encountered multiple people on the forums with the believe that we are corporate puppets without an own opinion. In my case it may be the way I write and think about ideas and changes (I usually maintain a neutral perspectiv that trys to value all perspectives the same - this can sometimes be in favor of blizzard (which usually get backfire) or in favor of the players.
Initially the council was pretty good communicated to the public, yet it kinda lacks visibility for those who don’t engage with the forum on a regular basis. The Community Council Livechat f.e. can only be found inside the post of the Livechat (inside the CC Forums) or wowhead news but isn’t listed in youtube so you can’t even search for it. I get you may not want to post it on the offical wow yt channel but having a seperate one just for council chats wouldn’t be bad either. Also a news bar to the forums could be benefitial to give some more visibility.
TL;DR communicate better what the council is for to the general player audience.

Really wished we had those Feedback related topic in here - currently I stick to the PTR forums for this.
For this to work we still would need sub forums inside the council with the main forum being for announcements and directly asked feedback and the rest being separated to sub forums for every game aspect.

A monthly roundup post on what has been discussed internally of the cc topics we have provided, and a quick summary would be beneficial. In general, I feel like it’s way better to be open about what’s going on then remaining silent about it - I mean we can see in the PTR Forums where this led to with ppl bagging for some kind of communication on the very valuable feedback they provided towards their classes changes f.e. .

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There is something to lose. If not handled correctly, it can just be more water in the bucket of Blizzard not listening to players/bad PR.

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What to talk about
I know this has been a recurring topic on Discord, but it is worth mentioning here. We have been told that there is no structure in what we can talk about, so basically anything game related goes, which is great… but also very difficult because you’re not sure where the focus lies for the developers. Perhaps a CM can continue to make threads like “Post your feedback about the raid here” and “Give us your thoughts about X feature in Dragonflight” so we have both the freedom and a direction.

This in particular I think would go a long way.

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Obviously I don’t speak for others, but I don’t post on Discord because I really don’t have a lot of free time. I work a lot of (unpaid) overtime as a Special Education teacher — managing both middle school and high school — so I really only have a few hours (and energy) after school to run errands, do house chores, play WoW, and read and post on the forum.

I just plain don’t have time for Discord.

That, and I’m not a fan of the Discord system.

But I do agree with your sentiments about some people just… never posting. Like, what’s the point in applying for this if you aren’t going to post? But I won’t be so hasty to discount people if they only post occasionally — like me. Due to my real life circumstances, I’m known to go MIA for months at time. But then again, I literally applied as a casual player with forcibly limited time.

As for the discussion here… I love the idea of a “weekly rollup!” I think that’d go a long way in making players (both Community Council and not) feel heard.

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This is something that we can commit to do more often.

It feels like the sweet spot between not starting enough conversations about active game development and being too pushy about what council members talk about is: asking for your feedback immediately after we’ve announced something that is currently being developed.

To that end, for instance, we’re planning to start multiple new threads here on Friday. :smile:

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Awesome! Great to hear this. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Thanks for the reply, Kaivax!

I understand that the team must be quite busy this week with Blizzcon in mind but would it be possible to get some more responses on the points that have been given in this thread?

While some points are obviously out of your hands to make a decision on, it would be nice to hear the thoughts about them from the team.

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I gotta feeling that Friday is going to be a good night:

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One thing I feel should be pointed out is there is a natural ebb and flow with WoW due to patch/expansion cycle. We are in a spot where there’s not much to talk about because it’s already set in stone but not yet released (patch 10.2) or it’s a pure mystery (the next expansion).

We’ll kinda have a double dose of flow with the new patch going live and Blizzcon in the very near future. This forum will be a lot more lively then.

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Fair, but I’ve been in a group that joined almost a year ago, and I have seen some never engage. There are probably many reasons why people can’t/wont post, this isn’t aimed at anyone directly, but I do feel like there is at least something that someone has an opinion on, or insight.

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Sometimes the topics just do not pertain to me. I was expecting more blue posts asking for opinions on things.

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