Let the professionals do their job. If you aren’t an actual game dev, you don’t get to design the game. Don’t like it, either quit or get a job at Blizzard.
Very little should be left to public polls, especially when it comes to actual game design. The vote for S4 M+ is already a fantastic example of why the community at large cannot, and should not, be trusted to make design decisions.
This is not different than a Karen telling me what settings to use on my professional camera. One of us went to school, has a degree, and work history in this industry, and the other person has no idea what they’re talking about.
I think what the OP is asking for is wildly different from the S4 poll. Unless I’ve misinterpreted, he’s saying Blizzard should send out polls and surveys for the purpose of collecting information that they can then act on, not polls and surveys with explicit end goals like the mount poll or S4 dungeon poll. And I agree, collecting more information would help them design a better game. The one point of disagreement from my perspective is just that I don’t think they should publish the results.
To use your camera analogy, I would tell you I want my picture to have a specific effect, and you would take that information and apply it technically - ie: fisheye lens, or whatever.
Such a strange attitude. Wow, by the way, is not a profession, it’s a game, a hobby, and if Blizzard doesn’t deliver what most of the player base wants (whatever that might be since no-one, not even Blizzard knows!), then it’s a game destined to fall over at some point, sooner or later.
Nor am I suggesting that Blizzard should be polling the community on, say boss mechanics for Boss #3 on Dungeon #5 or such, but on general issues, of regular comment and concern to the community, such as we see pointlessly hashed out over and over again on these very forums, without any resolution, since no-one (again, not even Blizzard themselves), has data on what the community is actually thinking!
Nothing new here, Blizzard will ask you for some things that won’t change the game, like what mount you want for free, or most recently what dungeons we want for S4, but Blizzard only asks their ‘top players’ (being streamers with a big audience, top PVP ranks or those 1% raiders) about what they want because they can bring in the biggest revenue stream.
What can we bring? If I want X and X never happens than I walk out, who do I take with me? No one, because I don’t stream, I don’t push 1% raiding so my guild will just replace me and I don’t PVP so the rankings won’t matter.
Let’s face the music here, whilst it would be perfect for Blizzard to ask what the 80% playing base wants, I’m talking about ignoring the bottom 10% and top 10% and get the bulk of the playing base, asking them would be nice. Fact is none of us will ever really want the same thing for Blizzard to work on, we will be all over the place and it will ruin the game.
Sure it would be nice if they asked us, but I doubt we will ever get even a dozen ideas that we all agree on. Guarantee you whatever you are thinking would be good for the game there will be 1000 players who will instantly tell you you are wrong.
Do you honestly think Blizzard are going to ask the masses what we want for an entire expansion? No chance.
Blizzard has an enormous amount of behavioural data. Every moment we spend in the game is practically a questionnaire. The question is whether what we do always reflects what we want and whether what we say we want reflects in what we end up doing,
To be fair Blizzard will have this as some form of meta data. They don’t really need to ask players what they do because they will have that information somewhere. (For example back in early Cata Blizzard released a sub 30% completion rate on Heroic dungeons, so clearly they were data tracking)
What those statistics show, and what Blizzard decides to do in light of those are entirely different things.
Blizzard has many times sent out questionaries to players asking them stuff about how they played the game and general feedback. They also taken the feedback seriously and put it into action into the shape of the game.
On this point I wouldn’t have such a problem with it if Blizz would stop making us wait until a later patch to finish I and earn flying. Honestly I would lay odds that majority of people wouldn’t mind Pathfinder if you could complete it and earn flying in the first patch cycle, not have to wait until they feel like letting you finish it.
On the rest of it, Blizz really needs to diversify their content, and make enough fun content for everyone. Also maybe reconsider the whole 3 pillars of progression idea, it seems a bit outdated in this day and age.
If Blizz wanted feedback with terrible samples, they can just use the forums.
The real problem is they’ve listened to too much and are trying to please everyone. The playerbase is too varied for that to ever work without a massive increase in resources dedicated to the game (and probably a corresponding cost increase)
I have to agree. They can ask every 5 minutes if they like, but publishing the raw data results would drive a bigger wedge in this community than we have in this country, and this is a PG-13 MMO, not an election. There will never be a universal agreement, but at least there can be a universal understanding. And, much like elections, we can’t be sore losers when our guy loses.
You’re not super familar with modern, Agile software development are you? Actiblizz likely has several hundred data analysts working on stuff like this. Just looking at their career page right now shows they have around 40 openings in their data analytics department.
Maybe blizzards data just doesn’t fit the GD narrative of “99% of players only do world content and nothing else.”
I see you are saying you are an employee working in the HR department with access to confidential information that you are sharing with us.
If what you are saying is true, they should fire all those people, because it was their incompetence that resulted in this expansion losing more than half of wow players.
Wait, you’re telling us they don’t need to ask what players think and feel because they collect data by ESP?
Nope I just looked at their career page for data analytics openings. I work in enterprise software development that uses the same workflow operating model (Agile business framework). This relies heavily on analysts working through every nook and cranny of a project.
A company of around 10k employees (like Actiblizz) will have hundreds of analysts at least.
You can google “Blizzard data analytics department” or “Activision data analytics jobs” to see this as I’m not allowed to share links here.
I would guess that the issue is that what players think they want, what players actually want, what the game’s designers want, and what the company’s bean counters want are all very different things and so outside of trivial/surface level things, direct player polling isn’t likely to make much difference because player opinion is just a single factor among many.
Additionally, even if Blizzard were to go all-in on direct player polling and publish the results, it’d basically handcuff them to poll results because any decision that doesn’t align with those results will be decried as ignoring player desires, even if the player selection doesn’t actually make sense. Same deal if they pare down poll options to those that are compatible with other decision making factors.
So while I do think that the company can and should do better in terms of player outreach and integrating feedback, it’s also a kind of damned if you do damned if you don’t situation with keeping decisionmaking relatively opaque being the least painful option.
Except, that, no, they don’t. It seems to be a common misconception from people opposed to in-game surveys.
Blizzard does not have community wide data on some aspects of player preference.
Does Blizzard know how many people want housing? No!
Does Blizzard know how important housing would be rated by those that want it? No!
Does Blizzard know whether people love or hate the current Pathfinder system? No!
Does Blizzard know whether the community did or did not want LFR removed from Classic Wrath? No!
Why don’t they know? Because despite being able to fairly easily do so, they still haven’t asked!
In-game survey data could be - with trivial ease - collated automatically assuming the surveys were simple questions with multiple choice answers only, yet 18 years after the game launched Blizzard has still failed to poll it’s customers in this comprehensive way.
While player-activity data is indeed very important, it is not the be all and end all of important customer data.
If Blizzard really truly does want to “listen to the community” then, they actually should.