People paying hundreds of dollers to attend and they wont even take Live questions. Instead they’re going to give manufactured questions post Blizzcon. Blizzard used to be proud of there products to the point where they would never consider doing something like this but I guess after Warcraft 3 reforged, Overwatch 2 and D4 all being reviewed into the ground they wont take any critical questions.
I wonder if they will also have “Applaud signs” and fake cheer audio in the background for the live stream. This is sad.
You know people would ask the hard questions like
Do you plan to further monetize the trading post?
Do you plan to balance the cash shop with non paid content in D4?
What happened to your promised content for overwatch 2, and why are you aggressively monetizing the game? etc
Any plans to actually play test the D4 expansion before releasing it and fix itemization feeling boring?
Nah they will answer softball questions like
What was your inspiration for adding Ysera back into the game???
Can you explain the new currency system you added?
When can I purchase the Tradingpost token bundle?
I really love the new Transmogs added to the WoW shop, what future plans do you have to add more cosmetics :)?
The new invincible Horse in D4 shop was awesome Blizz, any plans to add SHadowmourn as a purchasable Item on the shop?
Why would they have a live Q/A with all the negative press they’ve been getting? It would literally be an hour of pasty nerds standing in line to say “Bobby Kotick bad, checkmate Bliberals ” like it was last time they had one, and I think its a good move sparing us all from that.
Or maybe with them being bought by Microsoft they cannot give any meaningful answers because they do not know what the future holds so better not to waste people’s time. The softball questions are the only ones that can be answers. If this was any other time I would all be “They are dodging out of fear”, but this time I can see a valid reason for this.
This year, we plan to release a World of Warcraft Q&A video soon after BlizzCon. We’ll take the questions for the Q&A from you – both at BlizzCon and via forum threads that we’ll open on Friday, November 3. We’ll ask you to submit questions on the latest WoW and WoW Classic updates, and we’ll answer as many as we can in the Q&A video.
We look forward to hearing from you. See you at BlizzCon!
They haven’t taken Live non pre-screened questions in years. People will literally ask questions that the announcers will ask and have answers to 5 or 6 times over.
In reality, a live Q&A would probably have a large chunk of:
Painfully unfunny people trying to be the next “late april fools” guy by asking if whatever they announce is a late april fools joke regardless of what it is
Painfully unfunny people trying to zing wokeness by asking about pronouns, body type 1 and 2, fruit bowls, etc.
Some idiots rushing the stage to ask about Bill Clinton because they saw another idiot do it at the Game Awards (or maybe they’d say Bill Cosby to be more topical)
People asking questions about Microsoft that they wouldn’t be able to answer even if they knew what was going to happen because the merge hasn’t actually happened yet
Plus, we won’t have 30% of the time taken up by people going “hey I’m [player] from [guild] on [server] shoutouts to mah homieeez” before they ask anything.
This means that they will be surveying attendees for questions, but won’t be answering them in person. They’ll be cherry picking what they want to answer, and do so in the video following the convention.
The Q&A’s they have done in the past were not very well accepted by players. They would address some issue that was a really big deal for players by saying that they understood players were disappointed (thus not taking any responsibility while attempting to shift it to players), and then say they would take these things into consideration in the future (thus making no commitment to any change). True believers would jump up and down and scream, “They’re listening, they said they’d fix it in the next patch!” Which of course didn’t happen. At best players would see a band-aid fix with a new, pointlessly confusing system and 2 new currencies required to use it.
Then they would say something vague about some future feature that would turn out to be entirely unrecognizable from the current discussion, and spend the rest of the time joking about something players didn’t even care about.
” like it was last time they had one, and I think its a good move sparing us all from that.