I’ve mostly weighed in on this topic due to my experience with technical stuff. I work in tech, I deal with databases, etc. However, my university degree is a Bachelor of Arts with a Specialization in Sociology.
As such, I did want to talk a bit about the communication and the problem I view here with the communication from Blizzard.
There’s a theory called Audience Reception Theory, by Stuart Hall. (Go to Wikipedia and look up Audience Reception.) In brief, it states that any message has a sender and a receiver and that the goal of the sender is to ensure a clear message has been received that properly conveys their meaning.
The possibilities for the receiver of the message are that the receiver does get the meaning the sender intended, or that they do not get the meaning the sender intended. It also essentially says that the sender has the responsibility/power to convey the meaning they want.
Let’s take an example and then I’ll talk about the Blizzard communication issue as it relates to the guild bank stuff.
Originally in WoW, you had four Horde races and four Alliance races: Orc, Troll, Tauren, Undead, Human, Night Elf, Dwarf, Gnome.
To look at them, you could easily classify the Horde races as “ugly” and the Alliance races as “pretty”. This classification also steers into “bad” vs. “good”, as, typically in our media, the “bad” characters are shown as “ugly” and the “good” ones are shown as “pretty”. (In The Wizard of Oz, the good witches were conventionally “pretty” and the wicked witches were conventionally “ugly”. (Apparently, I can’t post links? Check out all the tropes dot org and look up Beauty equals Goodness.)
So, one can read the meaning of the original WoW races as saying that the Alliance are the good guys and the Horde are the bad guys. Is this what Blizzard intended? Probably not. But it’s one of the messages that can be conveyed by the choices Blizzard made.
Let’s take this back to the message from Linxy, specifically this portion:
This single sentence has been, from my perspective as someone with 3 years of sociological theory under her belt, carefully written in order to confuse matters while simultaneously allowing people to read into it what they want.
Honestly, it’s quite clever, though this kind of cleverness has absolutely no place in an official communication to customers. Still, it’s almost worthy of praise.
In this part of the communication, which is a single sentence in length, the following conclusions can be drawn:
- Data has been lost
- Some guilds will receive an incomplete restoration
- There is not currently a way to restore other missing items apart from those that will be restored
All of that is fact, as per Blizzard. With those facts, we can draw multiple conclusions, which is where the problem arises. Here are just two of the conclusions one can draw from the above facts.
- Data was lost. Some guilds will get an incomplete restoration. Some guilds will not get an incomplete restoration, which means some guilds will get a full restoration.
- Data was lost. Some guilds will get an incomplete restoration. Some guilds will not get an incomplete restoration, which means some guilds will get nothing.
I think we’re all in agreement that those are two of the possible meanings, right?
So then we have questions.
- What will happen to guilds that don’t get an incomplete restoration?
- Do they get everything back?
- Do they get nothing back?
- Are restorations on-going or have they been completed?
- If they are on-going, by which point does Blizzard anticipate they will be completed?
And then we get into the questions surrounding the data loss itself.
- How was the data lost?
- Don’t you have backups?
- Do you really expect people to believe that you don’t make production backups before pushing a patch to production?
- Why can’t you restore the backups?
- What assurances do we have that other data won’t be lost?
- If other data is lost, will that be restored?
- Again, what assurance do we have that other data will be restored if this “can’t” be?
- If other data is lost, will that be restored?
As such, I find the original post by Linxy (and I’m sure it was just handed to Linxy to post, not written by Linxy) to be very disingenuous. An official communication should answer questions that are being asked as well as the follow-up questions, if not in the original communication, then in a follow up.
I think that Blizzard crafted this carefully to allow people to read into it what they wanted and avoided any kind of discussion (we haven’t heard from Linxy since September 20) about it since. It brought up more questions than it answered.
Had this been done appropriately, we wouldn’t have any question regarding the meaning of the original phrase, nor would we have several other follow-up questions. I believe that this was done intentionally to try to smooth things over without firmly saying “be happy with what you got, lots of people got nothing, because we’re either idiots who didn’t make backups OR we’re idiots who don’t think it’s worth our time and money to restore these items”.
What’s going to get less bad press? A bug that loses items in guild banks or Blizzard admitting that they either don’t make backups or they refuse to restore things even when they do have backups? Clearly, it’s the former, given the lack of many news items about it.
So there you go. That’s my view on how Blizzard crafted this carefully. That’s one reason I’m still upset about this. They had the opportunity (and every day is a new opportunity, too!) to put this to rest on September 20 and they did just the opposite, by deliberately (IMHO – which I think is proved by the lack of responses in this thread) sending out a message that could be interpreted in different ways by different people and their subsequent silence when it comes to the other questions the statement brought up.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk! 