Post: The Future of Warcraft Announcements -- Professions Update
The communication and interaction being provided by Drough in this thread is the best we have seen since the inception of the Community Council.
I’m thrilled to see this level of interaction and communication and I sincerely hope it will transfer into other threads from other developers.
What do you think? How does this thread stand up to the expectations?
Personally, my expectations have always been pretty low, given their track record. There was an announcement video that made it seem like there would be more involvement on Blizzards end, they talked about chats and whatnot. I may have missed those but I haven’t heard of any upcoming livechats and actual discussion.
It’s nice to see them interacting more. I feel like the CC members have been doing their part, it will be nice to see Blizzard do theirs in all this. This thread you’ve shared is probably what people are expecting when it comes to Blizzard and communication.
It’s nice to see a discussion with a blue without fifty responses asking for X, Y, and Z, or responses just being sassy or insulting towards Blizzard. That’s not something you’d see in GD. In my opinion the players and Blizzards lack of communication are to blame for that.
I hope they keep it up! I’m sure they are busy not spending a lot of time on the forums but it’s great to see them actually engaging in a discussion and answering questions.
Yeah I feel like we’ve had some great one-off communication posts over the past few months, but this thread is the first real back-and-forth we’ve had, answering specific questions, and it’s great to see.
Everything that he said is pretty much already being said in the announcement, and i never understand WOW community’s weird obsession for dev’s attention.
Im going to be honest, profession gear will never be an engaging content,
not BIS enough then its “crafting is dead”, BIS enough like legendary then it’s P2W or “Blizzard just want my money!”.
It’s good.
But bursts of communication mean nothing when the issue is more long-term. Though even long term issues have to start somewhere and threads like that are a good start.
The test is whether Blizzard can keep up communication when it’s not easy. Because hyping up something as interesting as the profession revamp is easy. There’s lots of questions about the system, and generating hype is as simple as answering them.
As for the system itself? I like a lot of the changes of it, specifically the work orders. BiS professions were never fun, even if the concept of professions being useful in increasing character power was cool.
The Work Order system lets crafting be stronger without making being X profession feel mandatory. And that’s a good thing, especially if crafting ends up being kinda like “bad luck protection” gear, where even if you don’t get loot, you can get some materials to craft BiS pants or whatever from raids or other high end content.
Hopefully being able to craft bonuses ontop gear remains (preferably utility bonuses). I always felt that was a cool part of SL crafting, even if it isn’t really super well utilized.
I’m less warm to the idea of Inspiration and Crafting Gear to improve Inspiration. That feels like it’s gunna add a huge wall to actually being an efficient crafter, or introduce RNG to how you make money. I’m not a fan of either of those things.
For the former, I’ll point to legendary crafting in the current expansion. It created a pretty big wall to actually being able to sell legendaries for a profit since Rank 1-3 legendaries for a large portion of this expansion were worthless. But having to craft X legendaries just to unlock the rank 4 recipe meant that you’d have to put a huge amount of money on the table and rank 4 legendaries never really had a huge profit margin to begin with (on Frostmourne at least).
For the latter, I’ll point to BFA alchemy. Because you could get procs, the profitability of alchemy varied MASSIVELY. You could buy 2000g worth of herbs and get 800g worth of pots at the low end or 8000g at the high end. Losing money because you had bad luck never felt good, and similarly to legendary crafting, it made crafting everything that wasn’t a rank 3 an automatic gold loss.
It’s every game really, it’s just that for WoW it’s more pronounced since the only games where the devs are more reclusive are ones crafted by one dude living in a basement somewhere in eastern europe.
That thread is good, need more of that in other threads to give more credibility to the Community Council.
I’ve said it before that the CC will live or die (in terms of relevance) based off of the first CC, big shoes to fill but threads like that help out. To be frank, when its just long essays between yourselves discussing whatever it is most people will not care to read it, and when those long posts seem to get no traction it hurts it even more. That Dev attention is needed to make it more than just “WoW Forums but with Orange Text”.
I hope more discussions like that one happen so players can see some communication between Blizzard and actual players.
Remarkable thread tbh. I’ve never seen that amount of communication, ever, on these forums. Tons of good information and I’m actually excited about crafting being able to fill in pieces of gear I can’t get from M+/vault. Very nice.
^this.
I’ll never understand why so many WoW players think they are entitled or deserve to be addressed by Blizzard. It’s nice when they communicate but it’s crazy to think we are entitled to it. Communication is good and I hope that it continues in the CC area since actual conversation can be had there without the immediate trolling and hatemongering that would happen here.
It’s good that they are more communicative, that’s always good, but at this point it doesn’t matter how much they talk, what I want is to see the results.
I love that we have a Dev willing to talk directly about professions with us. While I don’t like some of the answers, I appreciate that they are being direct with their current thoughts. It helps set reasonable expectations.
Like, I know they won’t give us multiple main professions (I am not giving up on gathering as secondary yet), I know old patterns may not be part of the work order system up front, I also know (GOOD NEWS) they are looking at the storage system for crafting so we have more space.
What I am a bit disappointed about is how GD demands Dev interactions, CC interaction, etc - but when we have a real meat and potatoes conversation with a Dev giving feedback, CC folks engaging in multiple GD profession threads - posters are not really interested. Instead they are arguing about lore or trolling 
IMHO, I think most players feel it’s a publicity stunt they announced to try and get some positive attention during a very bad time for them… not something they’re taking seriously at all. Since its creation, there’s very little evidence to challenge that idea.
If threads like this become the norm, I’ll reevaluate.
Honestly…this just reaffirms in my mind that the implementation of the Community Council is absolutely farcical. The fact you have to link it here in GD to get any sense of community feedback to the community council is antithetical to the very definition of the word “community”.
What this system should have been is a forums where you guys have these discussions with the community(not in General Discussion, an actual COMMUNITY COUNCIL), then the Community Council conveys that feedback back to the developers. Not the system we have now where every individual member tries to promote their own ideas over every other member of the council in the hopes theirs is personally addressed by the developers.
The Community Council should absolutely be a neutral middleman party.
This has nothing to do with me, and everything to do with you. You don’t need to be told what to think. And, any people upset because Blizzard “isn’t communicating” or “listening to feedback” aren’t going to change their minds, because they’re overly emotional and already have no idea what they’re talking about.
I’ll be honest, nothing so far seems innovative: the crafting “revamp” is just turning professions into jobs like how the garrison work orders work (no glyphs for character customization, opening up multiple profs on one character, reorganizing some of the professions so they actually make sense based on difficulty of involvement etc), the talent tree is just our current talent table reskinned to include the class ability UI (nothing new is seemingly being added to the classes themselves like: hybridization of specs returned, old ability/talent animations or maybe remastered new versions of old animations, etc etc).
They say much… but do little in the same breath.
he isn’t interacting on this forum so it is meaningless because most of us can’t share our thoughts.
I’ve had a look at the new profession updates (at the profession journal in particular). I can’t say I like it. It feels too complicated.
I like that they’re listening to players and trying to make professions more relevant but I feel like they’re now more complicated and fidgety.
I guess they can’t please everybody in the end and, as always, I just have to take the good with the bad (and there’s a lot of good in this expansion … Shadowlands, that is… I’m tentative about DF).
As for increased communication, I like it. Though I understand why they shy away from it at times seeing as I’ve been on the forums since about Wrath so I can gauge the general atmosphere around these parts.
It does feel a bit insular at times though. Like when politicians have a debate in parliament, regular folks like you and me are not part of it because we aren’t necessarily considered special or important enough by Blizzard’s standards to be considered good enough to sit at their table so to speak.
So we all sit quietly at the kid’s table far away in the corner while the grown ups (CC members) all get to sit and talk to the big boss, even though many of us simple folk have demonstrated our ability to have polite, respectful conversations on the forums as well as our ability to pitch our ideas (many of which are quite elaborate and well-thought-out).
Just take a look at the Void Elf customization thread for instance (or any of the other customization threads). So much love and passion have gone into those threads with regular players practically doing upaid work, from sketching and rendering images to coming up with brilliant ideas on how to improve customization, rendering, story, themes and more.
I mean, it’s great (the whole Blizzard and CC communication thing)… but I kind of feel like I, and other dedicated players and forumers, are grossly undervalued.
(Sorry for any spelling or grammar errors. It’s quite late here where I am)
With you but not with us.
I see where the problem lies with this approach because I would have loved to make a suggestion for the developer “Drought” with the limited backpack space:
https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/cargbags-nivaya-mop-update
→ Categorized bags where people can find everything without having to struggle
Because we are not involved and part of it. We’re just the “bad people” who are not worth looking through the postings. Nobody wants to be treated as second class citizen and it only festers resentment.
This post sounds like you think we should treat you like a substitute for blizzard - people can’t even be bothered to read what I post in a thread and instead want to make personal attacks (yes CC members). I am really doubt any of you are even capable of conveying people’s concerns, especially if they are at odds to what you think.