How about ACTUALLY listening to the community?

Community General Discussion
63

Another problem is that the default position on the forums is that “the sample of players that I play with is representative of the playerbase as a whole.” So when they say “the majority want this”, what they really mean is “the majority of my personal bubble wants this”, which ignores both players outside their bubble, and that their bubble might not even be the majority of the designation they choose for themselves.

To use an example from that world player thread, the question of “do self described open world players want better gear from the world” was asked, and there were multiple players saying yes and multiple players saying no.

Also, blizzard probably don’t need to survey players to see what they do in game, because the internal metrics are probably better than the public ones.

1 Like
64

This right here is where it all falls apart and why it won’t be done. As long as not everyone is participating, you can never know how accurate the representation is. There are ways to get info and data sets without a survey, which are the methods they currently employ, but i don’t see this ever happening. Plus this isn’t a crowd sourced democracy. It’s a company putting out the product they want and we choose to engage or not. Feedback is one thing, but i think your suggestion is a bit unrealistic.

65

It doesn’t matter. Because in the biggest issues, Blizzard will always remember the words of Ricky Nelson:

“But it’s all right now
I’ve learned my lesson well
You see, you can’t please everyone
So you got to please yourself.”

66

Again though, I wouldn’t suggest using surveys to arrive at data that Blizzard already has from player activity metrics. A survey for example that asked “Do you run Mythic dungeons?” would be pointless, because Blizzard already knows who does and doesn’t.

A survey for example on player housing could ask not only whether a player wants us, but as a follow up, how important do they think it is. This is information that Blizzard absolutely does not have right now.

I disagree completely. If a player is not interested in completing the survey, then they clearly don’t care one way or the other about the survey topics being polled on.

For example, if a survey came up for PvP, which I more or less ignore, then I wouldn’t bother completing the survey.

As for this not being a “crowd sourced democracy”, well, of course it isn’t, but it’s patently stupid for a company to deliberately ignore an easily collected segment of customer feedback.

67

There are other reasons outside lack of interest that could prevent or deter people from responding to a survey. It just doesn’t make sense from a business standpoint to approach it the way you’re describing. There are too many holes in that method.

There are currently numerous avenues for blizz to view and collect feedback. Why would they devote additional resources to it when they don’t have to pay for youtube, reddit, etc.?

68

a game developed by opinions of people with 0 experience in game development would be a pretty terrible game.

1 Like
69

This is what would happen, the elitist jerk doesn’t like people questioning his perfect vision.

70

OP you’re 1000% right!

For the longest time Blizzard has had an “Us Vs Them (we players being them)” attitude! There was this elitist thinking of what they created was art, and we the"unwashed masses" we’re too stupid to understand it!

However a few of the announced features for DF like no more borrowed power systems, nothing about any sort of Pathfinder, going back to talent trees, and adding more Race / Class Combos has me hopeful that they are seeing that telling their customers to “F right off”, has resulted in us “F’ing right off” to other Games, and their Sub numbers being in the toilet has them worried!

Now let me be very clear; I don’t believe at all it’s the actual Sub Numbers that have them freaked out, because they still have been making record profits from Whales with more $$$ than Brains. I honestly believe the Microsoft acquisition has them worried. Once the acquisition is done; I believe that if DF is another turd, that MS would be very inclined to show up in Anaheim, and start telling the Senior Management to “F right off” to the unemployment Office.

Heck, MS owns a bunch of Studios; if DF bombs, MS could take away the WoW IP from Blizzard, and give it to another studio they own! Before anyone says “that’s not possible” or “that will never happen”, let’s not forget that a lot of people, including many inside of the Industry, said that Activision / Blizzard would never be sold, especially to Microsoft. So anything is possible!

In my opinion, the MS acquisition was the best thing that’s happened to Blizzard in YEARS, because now they’re back into a Corner to either produce success, or face terminations after the acquisition is done!

Also think about one more thing; MS has a high possibility of putting WoW on GamePass. They want to attract more customers to GamePass, especially since it would be a GIANT “F-U” to Sony and Nintendo. Not to mention WoW had 10 Million Subs at one point, and you’d better believe MS is drooling over the opportunity to add MILLIONS of new Subscriptions to GamePass and having WoW come back to “Form” would be a damn good way to start moving the Numbers in that direction!

In short, “HELP US, MICROSOFT; YOURE OUR ONLY HOPE”.

1 Like
71

Games going to hell lol.

1 Like
72

Because youtube, reddit etc are not representative of the community of course!

Blizzard has the opportunity, indeed Blizzard are the only ones who have the opportunity to poll the entire active playerbase of WoW as it stands right now. And I’m not talking, as hinted at by say Annastasi, that Blizzard put game development into the hands of those poll results, but instead that Blizzard actually ask the communitys thought on various broad topics related to the game.

After all Blizzards banging on about listening to the community, which strikes me as just pure PR BS, Blizzard could actually do the first step involved in listening, which is asking.

73

My belief is that this is exactly why Blizz generally avoids much in the way of clear and direct polling. In other words, they don’t really want the answers such polling might provide and they surely wouldn’t want to have to publish such answers.

They have their internal metrics they can massage to give them whatever answer they want. Polling and publishing might force them in a direction they don’t want to go.

1 Like
74

OP: Because you are not a game designer. You are not a game developer. You probably don’t understand what it takes to develop games nearly as well as you think you do. “listening to the players” is usually terrible idea. Because the players who are squawking are usually not informed enough or too self-serving to have a valid, objective opinion.

1 Like
75

This attitude just amazes me - it’s literally saying that the customer is always wrong. I’m not - I’ll say yet again - suggesting that Blizzard involve the playerbase in detailed game mechanics and the like, but merely suggesting - quite logically - that they cannot know what players do and don’t want, without asking them!.

76

It is a process unlike throwing darts at a dart-board. In the dark.

77

I would state Rhane’s view point as this: that they believe themselves either so inarticulate or so lacking in self-awareness, that their opinions about what they might like to see or not see in the game would be worthless, and, that their opinion of the entire rest of the playerbase is such that they believe the rest of us to be equally inarticulate or equally lacking in self-awareness.

I mean come on, you don’t need to be an expert in game theory to have a worthwhile opinion about general things you would or would not like to see in the game!

78

Why?

You just seem to be forsaking all current avenues of feedback because you don’t think it’s being listened to and that somehow asking directly in a poll will change things. I just can’t see that it will.

79

Do they even need to take a poll with any official statistics? Or just mine the information from the tons of social media?

80

You can’t separate that from publishing polling results on what the people who decided to answer said they want.

81

To some extent, yes, I will concede that, because not everyone participates in youtube or reddit commentary. Hence, they are not as representative of the community as in-game polling would be.

82

Same goes for ingame feedback. Why would it be any different?