[Meta] Improving communication/feedback & the Community Council so far

Community WoW Community Council
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Before I begin I wanted to link to this thread, which, outside of the minor cat-related tangent, makes a lot of good points and slices into the subject of transparency I’ve been wanting to make this post about for a while and have been drafting it in my head for a few weeks, but might as well just post it. I rewrote it a bit to get rid of a bunch of stuff that’s already been covered in that thread, but it was still too long to be a reply, so here it is;

We’re only a 3-4 months away from the first batch of Community Council members being removed after their 1 year term completes, so with that I wanted to reflect on it and why, in my outside opinion, it hasn’t been as succesful of a fix to “improve communication” as it was set out/hoped to be.

I wanted to reiterate that this is based on my opinion and having closely observed Blizzard, albeit from the outside, for over 10 years now. I might very well be extremely misintepreting things and being a terrible backseat commentator, however, here goes;

The problem (as I see it); Feedback acknowledgement

Quote by Ion in this interview from February this year.

“Coming out of a lot of our discussions leading to patch 9.1.5, and everything else last summer, we all realized we needed to do a better job of communicating,” he says. “We’ve always been listening. That’s never been the issue. But if it’s not obvious that we’re listening, it’s not enough to just say, well, we’re doing it… I think we have more to do, but I think the conversations we’ve had over the course of PTR are something that I would expect to be a standard going forward.”

One of the major issues that Ion points out is that while they’re listening, there’s not a lot of communication coming out of that.

This isn’t really something I feel like being a Blizzard specific issue but an issue for many games of WoWs size. There’s no magic fix for this that I know of, but more acknowledgement of feedback, even a “we’re looking at this”, “yeah this might not be great” or “something is planned for improving this in the future” would go a long way.

While I’m glad to see a recent uptake in this when it comes to the class design/talent trees in 10.0, that’s probably the only example I can think of where that’s currently being done to this extent (and I’m not saying feedback is being equally handled/acknowledged for all classes – which, even though we’re still in Alpha, isn’t the case). For other parts of the game, including some recent controversial changes, there has been very little of this.

More blue posts or even more tweets from @WarcraftDevs are an obvious way of increasing communication. Acknowledging feedback on the forums, for example this forum, for as many topics as possible, would also help. There are many threads here without a blue post, while most have probably been read by several devs at this point. The possible reasons/explanations for there not being a reply I’ll delve into later, but having SOME sort of feedback to threads would go a long way.

One thing that can help (on the forums) is Discourse’s built-in tag system (Discourse is the forum software used for these forums), this gives devs a chance to quickly tag something with a status (similar to issue trackers on open-source projects) preferably while they come up with a longer reply/reasoning as to why.

It could look like something along the lines of this (concept, tags are made up):

This is just an idea, and while it would be something, it alone wouldn’t give context as to why a thread would be tagged like that. That problem can only be fixed with an actual reply/explanation, which I feel are currently rare due to (what I think) are bigger underlying issues;

Lack of public roadmap/willingness to talk about future things

UPDATE: This now exists.

This feels like it has become an increasingly bigger issue as the game grows older. Outside of tidbits of information dropped in interview bursts around content announcements (e.g. a new expansion or patch) there’s very little long-term stuff known. And no, this doesn’t need to be spoilers of any kind or any exact dates, but more of a generic roadmap/set of plans for the future, even if it changes often.

We’ve sometimes seen the explanation for this not currently being a thing because “plans can change”, which, especially after these few years, is absolutely fine AND expected, but I don’t think that’s a reason to not talk about it at all until it’s set in stone with the stone already about to hit us in the face.

On the other hand, for example, at the end of Shadowlands we heard that the expansion was always planned to take that long and have that many raids – so unless that wasn’t accurate, why not say something like that from the start? Going “hey y’all, this is the amount of major patches we currently have planned for 10.0, this is what we’re aiming for in regards to season lengths, etc” doesn’t hurt much, even if the plans change. There’s a balance to be found there for sure, but right now it feels like everything we hear has already been the case for a while.

Note: An example of this that came up just now during writing is the post about the mobile AH coming back, which has been in development for “quite a while”. While this is great, this is something that could’ve been announced months ago, but instead was waited with until a week before 9.2.7 releases.

Walls of red tape…

The most logical reason for devs not communicating freely, is because they’re not allowed to for whatever reason, the most likely one is that the subject is something they’re addressing in the future, or thinking about addressing in the future, where “future” is anything longer than a week away, due to the above mentioned averseness of talking about things in the longer-term.

While some red tape when it comes to future content (especially to not spoil anything story-wise) is only logical, it being applied this widely seems to only create a feeling of not being acknowledged. That same issue extends obviously extends to beyond the community council as well, to the rest of the forums and beyond.

…but the walls have holes?

Then there’s places in the red tape that seem to be transparent cellotape instead, with the community often hearing stuff through third parties, for example through a content creator “teasing” or straight up relaying information they got from someone at Blizz. The fact some content creators/fansites have that kind of direct communication/access, but in a hush-hush manner also feels like a form of miscommunication as most of those things, outside of the obvious like exploits and such, could just as easily be made public through a @WarcraftDevs tweet or blue post/thread and are subject to an additional layer of miscommunication inbetween Blizz/the community.

In closing
If Blizzard wants to get better at communicating back to the community about their feedback, they need to come up with a better way of doing that. The current iteration of the WoW Community Council feels like it is not it, and I feel like most of that has to do with the incompatibility between the unregulated “just post stuff” feedback method and, primarily, their dislike of talking about stuff or taking stances on things that are further away than next week. In the original announcement of the WoW community council, it was mentioned that there would be regular live chats, “conversations” and separate discussions with devs about specific topics. That has yet to happen. Obviously changing any of that will require effort and probably putting more resources into actually having people reply to feedback and communicating more, but I digress.

I’m sure there’s varying opinions on this subject from other council/community members and I’m curious to see if there’s anyone who thinks I’m barking up the wrong tree/drawing the wrong conclusions, and why.

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I am actually realizing one of the reasons I was hopeful about my time on the CC was due to the presumed regular live chats, aforementioned at the bottom of the post. Representing roleplayers in the game, I haven’t actually made that many threads or posts, except for ones regarding feedback. There’s only so much that I can give my two cents on, and it’s usually been covered by dozens before.

Forums are not my strong suit.

But yes, I am echoing your points, and agreeing that communication could be better. Having an idea of what I’m supposed to do could have also helped, because it’s essentially felt like my duty is to throw input into the wind in gilded font with no idea of what the input should be.

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First of all, I think this in particular is a FANTASTIC idea. It would likely be unreasonable to have it implemented on all forums, but on smaller groups like the community council where we presume every post is read to at least have to acknowledgement that its being read and / or (not) considered.

I completely understand not wanting to commit to a change that has not fully been decided upon as of yet, but ( at least from my perspective ) I would much rather have information that changes, than no information at all.

I think we’re seeing this with the new Dragonflight Talent trees, the amount of feedback being listened to is phenomenal to see. Thats a clear example of “plans can change, but here it is, tell us what you think”. As opposed to at Dragonflight launch saying “here are all the new talent trees! Enjoy!”

Completely agree again, and again, things like balance changes, systems planned & updates to this system will either never or almost never apply to the story.

I do agree with you, but I will say that I do not in any way view the 9 months the council has existed as a failure. Even if its not to the level of communication we want, we have still gotten communication on a large variety of topics and helped make changes in the game to things like accessibility, motion sickness in areas like Grimrail Depot, tier set questions etc etc.

We have all had our own way of being on the Community Council since we were added, and none of them are wrong. Here’s hoping the CC continues to get better and better as WoW does the same.

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True for alot of us but the most worrisome thing is that it some of us will not be able to give feedback during the actual expansion or before our talent trees are even released (monks going to be last I know it). Makes me wonder if they will be giving a former council channel or tag us like the MVP thing for the forums. Im just mainly worried that certain things like more live discussions instead of just hoping someone reads my post will be offered later on and certain things will go unrepresented like PvP questions.

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I even feel that the listening part is not really doing that well. The reply I got about Sinful Brand being a “preferred playstyle” shows that they haven’t been listening at all, they are so out of touch on certain parts.

I have a cannister of hopium next to me for when the DH trees are released for 10.0, and I have 2 cannisters of copium with me because I have no faith left for Demon Hunter and how it’s treated right now.

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I think you bring up a lot of great points, but I think it’s important to keep in mind that this Council is fairly new and Blizzard is learning how to navigate the feedback along with us. Lately I really have felt that Blizzard has been keenly listening to us and implementing viable suggestions we have proposed. At least on a personal note, I have felt that I have been heard by them since I’ve been on the Council.

I think it’s important for us to keep in mind that what we feel may be right may not always be feasible, and just because Blizzard doesn’t change the game to the way we desire doesn’t necessarily mean that they have not listened or reviewed our concerns. Improving communication with their player base will always be a welcomed notion. I really do feel like they have been trying lately though, and I’m hoping we will continue to see these improvements through Dragonflight.

Considering the sheer size of Blizzard as a company, World of Warcraft as a game, and the amount of subscribers providing feedback, I don’t think we will ever be able to have responses to every topic we present. I’m sure there are a lot of different voices in the company that will influence a response on certain topics, so it makes it difficult for a single developer to provide us with an accurate response. Perhaps Blizzard can employ some type of Communications Department for World of Warcraft, but those representatives would have to have their hands in a lot of departments in order to even provide a decent response. There are a lot of hurdles for the company to overcome in order to provide the type of feedback we desire. Hopefully they can figure it out, but I’m glad to see they are at least trying.

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Glad to wake up to some discussion/opinions here, thanks everyone!

Oh, definitely. Without some of the responses we’ve had in the council forums, communication would’ve been even worse and we might not have had some of the changes you mentioned. And I think as a council we’re definitely doing our best with the direction/input that we have.

As we get closer to December and if Blizzard wants to keep it going, I’m sure there’ll be other representatives from different playstyles/parts of the game that will fill up the spots that we free up.

The council has been around for 9 months now so I do feel like we should’ve seen a notable improvement, or at the very least get closer to what it was set out to be from the start. I’m hopeful threads like these will help it get there and improve it for newer members going forward, but I do think the thread was neccesary. Maybe there even need to be meta-threads like this every few months or so to gather opinions on how it’s been going, what can be improved and such, just to keep the council idea ever-improving.

It probably varies by playstyle/which part of the game you’re representing to feel like you’ve been heard or not. From a class design perspective (and even then that differs per class as Linaori mentioned) it’s definitely been a huge improvement recently. at least in my book, starting with the tier set feedback/breakdowns from 9.2 and now with the talent trees going into Dragonflight.

Yup! Not all feedback is good feedback, actionable feedback or maybe just something they don’t want to work on right now – but I do think even that should also be replied to (or tagged) as such, at least within the subset of feedback posted in the council forums.

Yeah, as I mentioned it’s a tough problem to deal with for any game of this size, but as it stands right now, to take the council as example again, this forum gets around 3-6 blue responses per month on average going off the blue tracker, which feels very low, especially with what they set the council out to be at the announcement of the program. There aren’t that many threads in this forum, so I feel it’s reasonable to at least expect an improvement there, even if it involves having to allocate more resources to communications, like you mentioned.

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This is basically something people need to accept. Feedback doesnt mean they will just change it because you want it

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When I joined the council, I did it expect it to be a bit more interactive with blizz. It does feel like all we do is make forum posts that on the odd occasion gets a response from blizz.

I do think that there should be some way to see if blizz has even read someone’s post maybe, even if they haven’t replied to it. This would help us and others see that yes blizz is indeed listening to us, even if they aren’t making changes.

I know that when I first signed up to be on the council it wasn’t meant as a way to say “Blizz we want this, we want that” and just demand things. Though, I do think a lot of good ideas have been expressed here and in the other parts of the forum that should be looked at.

I get that blizz are busy with various things and aren’t here to answer all our comments and questions, but it does seem lately there has been a somewhat increased silence from them over maters.

I do hope if the council does continue, that more improvements are made to how we can express ideas / comments etc other than mostly just a forum

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Love this thread. I was expecting more from the council idea. Right now, to me it feels like a subset of the same thing going on in the General forums, just like an extra forum for the same things to be posted. There is no indication anything really is getting through and it seems like the same amount of dev feedback goes to other forums as well as this one. I wonder what is the true impact this council is having.

Personally, I was expecting more of an interaction as well since they seemed to stress they wanted to include a variety of playstyles, but what does that matter in this current feedback setup? Where is it indicated in the forums that we have a certain playstyle? Unless stated by the poster, no one really knows what angle they are coming from, its the same as General posting. Do the mods have a sheet where they can point and read through the posts here and say “from the council forum, collectors don’t like x and they do like y” or “raiders were affected by y more than we thought”?

I think my main pain point here is if a council member doesn’t make posts on the forums, they aren’t heard. That’s not a way to get more voices involved. I really was expecting more in depth questions/directed type feedback. Like sort of how they have for the Alpha but that’s open to all testers and not directed to playstyle. I don’t know what info we are providing that they aren’t already getting? I think its sad that it feels like the council could have not existed for the past 9 months and it wouldn’t have made a difference. Its such a good idea in theory but I don’t feel like I’m adding any value because I don’t post on the forums.

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I feel like I read like 90% more things now and usually comment only when it matters. Im sure many people feel this way and generally only respond when it is something they feel they need to say

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I do like the idea of the Community Council as a whole, but it’s definitely not going the way they gave me the impression it would.

I understand they cannot answer every question, respond to every single post and thread, but it feels like 99.9% of the time that I’m talking to a brick wall.

The whole concept is relatively new, but I’ve been a member for six months now and have not seen the kinds of discussions and feedback from the Devs that were mentioned when telling us to apply.

There’s been a lack of communication about many things over the last several weeks, or even as a whole, the communication from them is not where it should be as far as I’m concerned.

To me, it almost feels like all of this was a PR move. I honestly don’t feel that anything I’ve said, feedback that I’ve offered, many posts and discussions that I had haven’t even been read by the developers, I’ve certainly received no comments, remarks, discussions, feedback or anything, so it makes me feel like, what’s the point?

What is the ultimate solution? How about the Devs actually participating in a forum that they made specifically for all of us to apply to and actually have discussions like they wanted us to participate in. If I wanted to just make a thread to discuss with other regular players such as myself, I could do that in the general discussion forum, in here, it’s the same end result, so what’s the point, I ask again?

I think the suggestion about them being able to inform that they’ve read our post and discussions, even if they don’t respond it at least makes us feel like we’ve been heard to an extent. Because right now? I don’t feel like I’ve been listened to, I feel like I’m talking to a brick wall. I’ve been saying that for weeks now and I won’t change my opinions until they change the way they handle things. That’s all I have to say about this, I’m just frustrated and I hope it shows, that’s the point.

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I’ll preface this by saying that I pretty much only pay attention to threads related to Classic WoW.

Why don’t Blizzard reps post more?

Most notably: time. A Blizzard rep posting on this forum has a lot more to lose by not being careful than you do, because they represent Blizzard and their respective dev teams. Therefore, there is likely a high pressure for them to produce only the highest quality of posts to explain their stances, which take a lot more time. This is time taken away from actually working on the game (maybe not for every rep, but certainly some of them), when they could simply discuss a given topic internally with much less pressure or time commitment.

Could also be mindfulness of “blue tracker” websites. Some people use these to get news about the game, so maybe Blizzard reps feel inclined to only post when there is new/important information to be presented. Also kind of plays into point #1, as blue tracker websites equate to high visibility for any blue post.

Re: More acknowledgement of feedback

You only mentioned responses when the dev team doesn’t necessarily disagree, even though you’re advocating for acknowledgement to “as many topics as possible”. What should they do to give brief acknowledgement in the case that they don’t agree that something is an issue? Say “sorry, we have discussed this internally and don’t really see it as an issue”? That could probably come off as dismissive and deter discussion. What if they don’t think a suggestion is a good idea? “Sorry, we discussed this and we don’t think it would be a good fit for the game”? To me, in both of these cases, not responding seems better than a very brief response with no reasoning attached.

Maybe this is a big point of disagreement between me and other WCC members, but based on the ratio of threads to blue responses in the WCC forum, I’m pretty convinced that most if not all threads made here are at least looked at by devs. Because of that, acknowledgement without any debate points or new information attached to it wouldn’t really do anything for me personally.

Re: Tagging system

Kind of like I said above, it just seems like an un-nuanced means of communication that I’m not really sure changes that much, or has potentially negative effects. Looking at some of these tags you made more closely:

“Not currently planned” - would probably just cut off discussions early, which I don’t really see as a good thing. And if a lot of time has passed after a discussion has died down and we haven’t heard anything from the dev team, I’m already starting to build up the assumption that it’s not going to happen anyway.
“Addressed” - already here with the “BLIZZ” symbol indicating a blue response.
“Improvements coming” - kinda seems the same as “addressed”, and also “improvements” is subjective.
“Need more feedback” - if they want to highlight a certain thread for more feedback, then sure, this one could be useful, although I feel like they already chime in to specifically request feedback on certain topics sometimes, so I’m not sure how much value we’d actually gain with the added ability to use this tag. I could see an argument though that people may see that a thread doesn’t have this tag, which in their eyes would mean that Blizzard doesn’t care about discussion on that topic.

And I get it; it’s a concept, and we don’t have to use your tags. But I think when your argument is that Blizzard isn’t communicating as well as they could be, it sort of falls on you to be specific about the ways in which you expect them to communicate.

What Blizzard should do to improve the WCC program, in my opinion

As others have said, there is not really a clear objective given to WCC members, or at least for me there wasn’t. All I was really told was that I should read the forums CoC/ToU, and that I can feel free to post about anything WoW related. It can be a bit intimidating and/or time consuming to make posts on this new high visibility forum with no idea what you “should” be making posts about, especially when there’s not really a way of knowing if the devs actually appreciate your contributions other than by them personally thanking you on the forums. The dev teams may want to keep the objective intentionally vague to not deter any potential discussion, though I still think they could be a tiny bit more clear on the expectations.

I like it when the devs say they “appreciate the discussion”, because that tells me that I’m at least on the right track, even if they don’t necessarily agree with what I’m saying. So maybe they could look for more opportunities to say that, if they do in fact appreciate a given discussion.

As mentioned a bit in the OP, I think another place where the devs could improve the feedback cycle is by prompting more discussions in the WCC forum about upcoming decisions, and the more time we have to discuss before official plans are announced, the better. Just a simple prompt would be fine and not require much effort, e.g. “hey guys, we’re considering doing X, what do you think about this?” Race/faction change in Classic is one example I can think of that probably would have benefitted from an early WCC discussion thread. Instead, we first heard about the plans for no race/faction change in an interview. As a result of that, the devs have now changed their minds later than they possibly would have, and lots of players have now leveled up new characters when they didn’t need to.

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There’s definitely a balance to be found between spending time on communication and spending time developing the actual game (don’t need it costing us a raid tier as the old saying goes), but I don’t think they’ve struck that balance just yet (except for the recent talent discussion for some classes, which has been great for at least the classes I play).

As for wanting to say the exact correct thing, that is just another form of red tape that we should work against as a community, as that only limits communication. Yeah, some people might get upset, but that’s often the case anyways these days (including within the council) and also why moderators (hopefully) exist. Arguably, that’s something that’s gotten worse over the years and might explain why they’ve gotten more careful in their wording and by extension leading to longer response times/less responses.

Nuance is important, but if nuance ends up costing us a lot of communication, less nuance would be worth it.

Yeah, I don’t think those are neccesarily a good thing, nor is some of the instant-newsing of every single blue post that’s the trend these days. While it does give a good overview of all of the comms that we do get, it automatically puts a spotlight on every single post. Granted, Blizzard has their own blue tracker implemented in these forums as well, so that does seem somewhat intended. I do feel like that problem would somewhat solve itself if there were more communication, as it’d automatically become more difficult to make news out of all of those posts or even track them in a useful manner.

While explaining something with reasoning is almost always better, I still think there’s value in saying “no” in some of the ways you described. Giving a hard no is probably generally a bad thing, but saying something along the lines of “we’re not currently planning on doing this but welcome further discussion” is still acknowledgement and actually responding to feedback as well as letting people know to not expect anything of the sorts in the near future, even if it might not always be what people want to hear. If anything, that only spurs on more discussion with, at least on these forums, hopefully good and respectful arguments as to why they should reconsider down the line.

Yeah, I pulled those out of thin air based on some experience with other projects, “Not currently planned” probably can be reworded, but it has the same meaning as what I described in the quote above. “Addressed” isn’t necessarily the same as a blue post being there, as not all blue posts are by devs or address feedback. “Improvements” could also be made into “changes”, or whatever. The exact tags don’t matter much, but tagging the threads would still be an improvement in my opinion, especially if they plan on communicating more and we’d have to click each thread to read the blue post and figure out what the status/response is. If there’s no blue response but still a tag, that still gives some indication of what they’re thinking without needing to write out a carefully worded reply, which as you mentioned takes time. But again, just a concept, not really something worth to go too in-depth on.

If there’s something I’ve picked up in giving feedback, its that you don’t need to provide solutions to a problem just to call out the problem or note that it’s there – that’s up to Blizzard.

The tag thing is something I came up with based on my experience with other Discourse-based forums. I was hesitant to include it because my other council threads also had possible solutions, and the unofficial backchannel feedback I got on one of those (again, red tape, yay) was that providing solutions isn’t always the best way of giving feedback as it limits the actual solutions the devs can come up with as they’d not be able to implement them 1:1 (might be a legal issue) and having to end up creating an alternate solution, which might seem inadequate compared to the proposed solutions. The tag system is pretty safe from that argument as it’s already something they have through Discourse, which is why I decided to include it anyways.

Exploring ways to solve a problem, especially an intangible one like “improving communication” is something only Blizzard can really do, all we can do is call it out and keep it in the forefront of their thoughts.

100% agree with this. For the future plans part, I know they have a survey team that sort of does this for some decisions, but it doesn’t allow for an actual conversation or detailed feedback, and the surveys usually show up on Reddit/Twitter/news sites anyways (regardless of the confidential note at the start) which automatically makes them lose control of the situation, something they’d still have were it done on the forums.

Also – thanks for you reply, there’s some good points in there and I’m glad there’s points you didn’t necessarily agree with. That only promotes good discussion (and hopefully giving them more input to find a fitting solution).

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I would certainly hope that they let us know sooner rather than later if suggesting solutions creates a potential barrier to making changes, since people are giving suggestions on this forum all the time.

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It probably depends on the problem/solution, technical problems with technical proposed solutions (which is what the post I got that backchannel feedback on was) are likely the kind where things could get problematic, but IANAL so no clue if that even extends to game/whatever related solution proposals.

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Figured I would link a couple of previous threads on this topic.

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Before my tenure in the community council ends, I just want to note that in the last few months since this thread was made we’ve seen a lot of improvements when it comes to communication and I want to specifically call out this part of the OP.

Blizzard has now done exactly this here and posted an image version of it on Twitter:

This is pretty much exactly (and slightly more than) what I was hoping to see and I’m glad it exists now and hope this is the standard going forward as well. +1 Blizz.

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Completely agree. This level of communication and this kind of a road map is really awesome to see.

Really excited to see stuff like Trading Post, Heritage Armor, Professions Updates, etc on here as well.

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It might be time to revisit some of what’s in this thread some more.

While there have been improvements in areas, such as the road map discussed above there are still some glaring areas of poor to outright terrible levels of communication and engagement.

The biggest area that I see everywhere is the community clamoring for feedback and information on class tuning, or more specifically lack thereof. Lately I hear A LOT of the people I play with complaining at a level I haven’t heard in a long time. People leaving the game as a result and talking seriously about leaving. This loud chorus of questions around classes is for the most part being met with out of touch meaningless changes followed by crickets.

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