I was just reading a forum post where a returning player expressed that they found it really difficult to navigate achievement related unlocks for certain things. I read there post and thought, you know that’s reasonable. The achievement area is a bit of a mess. For many of us in the know, we might suggest a helpful add-on (which someone did) but the underlying point was one about unintuitive systems, as far as I could discern. One of your Blue posts asked for some clarity - which I thought odd since it seemed pretty obvious - but hey what is obvious to me, might not be obvious to them, so cool! So people gave their responses.
Then an MVP responds, and I’m going to be straight forward on this - I have started to groan when I see green print. I do so because I generally find your MVP’s rude, and condescending. Indeed, to paraphrase they stated that understanding unlocking flying is easy and they didn’t understand why the poster they referred to shouldn’t find that easy…seems small doesn’t it…it shouldn’t.
My background is education, I’ve worked in both High School and Higher Education. None of us know what is easy or not for someone else, until we show some empathy and tease their problem out - this is a skill, it needs to be learned. It has been, in my experience something that Blizzard sucks at, seriously, as a whole, you lot are terrible. I have encountered it a lot in computer programming, so I wonder if there is something in that with why it is such an issue in the online gaming industry? However, in people that are community relations, MVP (Most VALUED players), or Blizzard execs - how does that work?
The example I gave about the most recent thread I read is but one, and possibly the least offensive I could mention. Personally I think you should scrap the MVP thing altogether - all your players are valued, they all pay a sub - none of them should be more valued than others. Furthermore, if you are going to have them, and you are going to offer them a position of privilege, then that means they in someway represent your company. Not as much as a Blue poster, I’ll give you, but that ought not to matter.
Have you trained them in customer relations? If no, then pick up your game, stop with the amateur show. If you have - pick up your game, I can’t be the only person that finds too many posts of the MVP’s derisive or condescending. Yes the ordinary poster can be those too - but the ordinary poster doesn’t have a position of privilege in this system. There is little impetus to hold people who have no connection to your company to account unless they threaten someone else’s well-being.
I believe though since watching your company’s public interactions since BC (but really in Wrath did the hype train hit me) that MVPs would be well-argued to say they are no worse, generally speaking, than someone like Lore being condescending or abusive, or your devs at Blizzcon publicly putting down the player base with “You don’t know what you want” or “Don’t you have phones” etc., to your CEO asking for whole swathes of staff to be sacked and then telling investors - we aren’t even sure if sacking those people was helpful (and it turning out that people needed to be re-employed, but not offering it to the ones you sacked first). Once is too much - but you seem to have a culture of sucking at empathy and communications.
I also sat on a board of directors for a university in Australia twice. When we had such strategic flaws that surfaced we understood that trying to resolve fundamentally broken parts of our organisation need outside intervention. If I remember our annual budget was a 1/4 billion dollars - so we thought it was more than worthwhile to get outside help in sorting out our problem. Most of the time that seemed to work. I wonder if it would work for you gang?
You have lost what - around 10 milllion subscribers since peak? Is that over 80% of your player base? That’s profoundly amazing - perhaps there is a Darwin Award for Business you could enter in? I realise the vast majority of those losses were through bad strategic decisions on your devs behalf. I get a sense over the years that this has something to do with that thing of living in a bubble - certainly your over-dependence on analytics is a flaw (although I understand the potential strengths it has too). Whatever your defensive though the numbers speak louder, don’t they? How many do you think get chipped away by your company’s poor communications and community relations?
So my suggestion to you is get an outside organisation to audit the entire history of WoW. Give them every forum that has ever existed, give them all your announcements, give them access to every staff communication - internally and externally etc. I know you know you suck at this because you are always promising to improve, but so rarely do you achieve that in tangible terms. Make sure they are from outside the gaming industry, because honestly, the industry has been showing how much it sucks especially so in the last year with the monetisation models you all seem to think is going to make you loyal customers. But that is another discussion for another page.
I really want WoW to get those numbers back. There is little in the way of reasoning that suggests that you can’t do that, however you keep chewing through good will faster than army ants do invading another colony. People want to give you their loyalty, I think the reception of the announcement to launch WoW Classic should be opening your eyes to that. Stop coming up with ways to betray that loyalty, so frequently, and consistently.
s, have some green!”
Thanks for the discussion 