Heya, I just wanted to detail an issue I’m having with how the feedback process works and provide a point of view from a player and Community Council perspective. I want to say up front that Kaivax, Linxy, Ian, and everyone involved in what I might say are really great people. I’m only writing this to hopefully start a conversation about how feedback might be better collected and acted on in the future - a systemic problem, not one resting on any one person’s shoulders. I’ll also try my best to see things from Blizzard’s PoV, and provide possible solutions.
Also, I tend to get rambly, sorry if that happens.
History
I think it’s hard for players of World of Warcraft to see how their feedback has directly led to big game decisions over the years. Even big decisions that were not received well were formulated from fundamental feedback. For example, the player feedback in Legion that artifacts were not customizable or missed the mark in satisfaction. This logically lead to BFA artifact power and probably even mini-systems like Benthic gear. When players then said in BFA that none of their decisions mattered anymore and everything felt meaningless, it is then easy to see how an epic Shadowlands plot theme with very strict covenant decisions was crafted. When things were dialled back and player feedback was that all of the closed-off worlds and newly scrapped systems were underwhelming, it’s pretty easy to follow that evergreen systems and permanent flight changes in larger open worlds were Dragonflight’s focus.
I think that every expansion can be explained by the feedback of the players before it. As any good game company might do, player feedback plays a critical role to the evolving game. As the market of games shift, preferences change, and the playerbase gets… uhm… not younger… things have to update! Yet, historically I think we see that feedback is collected almost incompletely or doesn’t really understand the core fundamental concern the players have. This has lead to endless azertie grinds, RNG benthic gear, covenant power swapping, augmentation evoker balancing, and other complications.
The usual newspaper motto of “if it bleeds it leads” remains true for videogames as well, the “public” (as in players and nonplayers) usually only hear of game drama and mistakes rather than any of the good things going on! I fear that missteps in game direction have led to a public opinion about the game that is overly saturated in negative viewpoints, which has led to old players not returning and new players not being interested. Thus, the game remains with struggling new player numbers and old player retention being low (source: just vibes, feel free to tell me if I’m wrong here).
All of the above is to describe that we seem to be in a cycle where the game industry is changing and the game is changing but the feedback-to-game process seems to be pretty much the same as it always has been. Unlike the common motto, this process seems broken, so we should discuss fixing it!
Universe of Feedback
Our feedback collection feels futile. When we talk about “player feedback”, what we really are talking about are current players, who know how to give feedback, and actually have given the feedback. Just those filters alone, and that specificity of what feedback brings is intense. I did a thing in Paint to show it better:
I think it’s really easy to look at something like this and “no duh” it, or assume that things are fine because we should only care about current players but I actually don’t think that’s a good way to approach feedback collection. I think when we only focus on current players, and those passionate enough to give feedback, we end up in a sort of vacuum where things become so specialised that from an outside point of view a game or community seem completely unapproachable (sound familiar?).
If we only focus on feedback from those who give it we’ll miss out on a ton of good qualitative (meaning non-numeric-data, or emotional, experience-based accounts) data and quantitative (data in numbers) data! For example, here are a list of real feedback I have heard from friends, coworkers, and people quitting the game that likely were never recorded because of the fine-scope of the current process:
- “I’m quitting the game because my friends moved to a different game and I feel like this game isn’t worth it alone.”
- “I last played in Cataclysm, I had an okay time but the game wasn’t like how it was in Wrath, I loved Wrath. Me and my friends used to [insert some story about the olden’ days, and how those don’t exist anymore]”
- “They released Classic again? God, that’s tempting… but I can’t play again, I just can’t commit all the time it would cost.”
- “MMORPGs aren’t really my thing, I just want a game I can play for a little bit and go about my day.”
- “Things just seem to complicated, if you play a new MMO let me know though we can both go in blind.”
If our goal is to get new players, or returning players (as Chris Metzen said, “It’s time to come home”), then I think we should seek to collect feedback from them. If the answer is “we do!” well then players never see it. Beyond this, it’s difficult to see how that feedback has been weighted to make any change in the game. However, with current players and especially the top players in the game, it is easily evident how both their feedback was taken and how it led to a game-changing decision. My mind spins trying to calculate the number of times I’ve seen Liquid members, Echo members, Method members, Max, and even Dratnos in a chair or on a screen with Ian or other game developers over the years. These instances of feedback are good, we shouldn’t stop them, but it really feels like the feedback gathered from the top 0.01% of players are oversampled to the point where it’s made poor game design decisions.
In contrast to the current perception of feedback, we players never hear of exit survey data, player survey data, we rarely ever hear about what is learned from the forums we write. and have to try and connect dots to see our feedback making it’s way in game - and if it does it’s almost by magic that it occurred. As a Community Council member, we are never spoken with, responded to, or asked of. A pessimist would say we’re co-opted into a role with no strength, an optimist would say we’re on a stage with a microphone that might not work. In either case, and in any reality, the truth remains that it just feels bad to give feedback as a normal player when it’s so massively overshadowed by top players or influencers and we don’t feel heard.
Doing my best to understand Blizzard’s point of view here, when forum posts are responded to, or opinions are stated in various channels across the globe, scrape any blue post or statement imaginable and proliferate the internet with it. It’s like whack-a-mole with the world’s scariest auto-hammer looming overhead. Blizzard has played their cards so incredibly close to their chest for so long that seems like it’s the safest way to operate, or the way things always have been -and maybe for good reasons! In this case, how is it that player see other game companies openly talking with players, responding to posts, letting loose on Discord, or even openly advertising player voting for features? My only guess, and it really is a guess, is that there is some monetary complication that comes from the fact that Activision Blizzard is a publicly traded company, and with that genetic makeup - a stock price that must please stakeholders. Being so connected with profits and quarterly reports has lead the company to be so risk-avoidant down to the level where player feedback seems worthless. I would love to be wrong about this conflict, but the fact is that I’ll never know if I am because Blizzard is unable to respond less an article comes out that may influence a bundle of boomers to sell ATVI rather than buy.
So here we are, the only seemingly collected feedback is those of current players and the only public feedback is that most smilie-faced, risk-avoidant, socially acceptable, pre-planned dialogue (edited down), from top 0.01% players. It is very reasonable that players might feel bad about this.
How Do We Please a WoW Player?
A question as old as “Will my laptop get heavier if I put more files on it??”. A difficult question, one that will likely be answered before we ever figure out how to please such a gamer. The fact is that people log in to the game with a variety of expectations: some want to be challenged, others to learn something, others to meet a friend, and many more to just to relax. I wonder what someone who doesn’t play WoW would want from it, and I wonder even more what it would take to have some of the million players that quit during Cataclysm return. Sure we could sit and opine different things, I’ve done a lot of that in my previous forum posts, but what we should really start to do is shift focus to listening to those players.
If this is a big corporate hold up, isn’t the argument for increased subscription numbers more powerful than milking the existing playerbase?
Here’s a handful of options:
- Send broad surveys, ask if they have ever played WoW in the past and gauge interest and what we might do to welcome them back.
- Take more seriously the feedback of leaving players, and test changes to increase response rates when players leave or unsubscribe.
- Talk with a larger number of influencers in the World of Warcraft community to collect various components of feedback that can help paint a bigger picture about why some feel bitter whereas others seem universally optimistic all the time.
- Engage and mobilize players to vote and answer polls to record feelings about features in game. If players can see the results of these polls it can lead players to feel like their feedback matters or is actionable.
- Have more visibility, state what you are learning from the community more frequently. The only instance where we hear from you is like Blizzcon and sometimes those get canceled and stuff and it sucks
- Invite Community Council members to conversations. I’ll sign an NDA if I have to, but the fact is that we have a well formulated diverse group of people in a focus group together but with no moderator or anyone really checking in on things (from our point of view). It feels more like concurrent monologuing rather than like helpful dialogue or all the good stuff that comes from the focus group methodology.
- Data! Let’s see the subscription numbers, let’s see what you’re looking at to understand why decisions are being made. I want to feel like we’re all on the same team in steering the game in different directions rather than feeling like I’m screaming from a sinking ship with a captain unviewable through one-way glass.
Maybe you’re sitting there and saying “we already do a bunch of that” or “we tried it and got burned” or “we can’t because XYZ” - if these are the reactions, then I wonder how retail WoW is doing in terms of subscription numbers and player engagement. I wonder how long of a shelflife the game has and how it compares to the players that want a more Classic experience. Maybe listening to difficult player feedback (like Classic was) or the endless changing of directions in retail will subside when the only feedback available comes from the small crowd that remains willing to give it.
I’ll close by saying I was watching a video the other day of a crowd of people at a midnight release of TBC. I miss midnight releases they were so cool and new gamers today just missed something awesome about that. But I wonder how many of those cool people are still playing or what their opinion on WoW are today. It doesn’t strike a happy feeling, but a sad one. Maybe we can change that. Here’s the video:
(So I got bored and my burrito was delivered at the end of this post so sorry if things were rushed or unfinished thoughts. It smells so good I had to split. I wanted to mention somewhere though that there’s a TON of history in these forums… I wonder if anyone has ever scraped all the data and plotted it over time to show like key issues, topics, and words used. Might show something interesting. Okay bye)
Edit:
pps: Wanted to add that I’m a data scientist from a Fortune 50 company, I have an ABD Ph.D degree in quantitative methodology and I love WoW. If you have an opening for work in anything I mentioned above I’d take a paycut and move to California to help do it.