Remember when a highly influential blizzard developer said “you think you do, but you don’t”?
Now today we look back at classic, all its versions iterations and the vibrant community of people that are thankful and grateful to have it. Sometimes a business decision loses site of the customer’s happiness and I think we can all recognize that this was a moment in time where the development team was so focused on A they completely missed the opportunity in front of them.
I think of things right now with so many addons being squashed and redeveloped every few weeks and it makes me wonder what the customer satisfaction numbers are showing? As a customer, we are actively asking for visibility and data to help us play better. Showing tank CD’s or interrupts so that our gaming experience can be done more effectively / efficiently. Today’s latest update of MiniCC talks about how the API changes in the next content patch are likely to break the functionality that the community keeps clawing to create.
Imagine another business providing a service or product to a customer. If you are a car manufacturer and people want a feature. Perhaps you as the manufacturer can not deliver due to time constraints or financial limitations. But then your community of customers finds a way to enable that feature after market. And then the manufacturer comes through with a mandatory patch that actively breaks that functionality. This kind of thing would be asinine in other fields, yet this is currently what we are seeing here with Blizzard’s decision making process.
We seem to be so focused on our dream of creating our own blizzard UI or making encounters perform a certain way, we have to crush these addons. Not recognizing the situation as an opportunity to deliver on customer satisfaction. I want to be able to see my tank’s cooldowns. You are telling me no that’s not allowable. I know it is because its been a thing for years and does not actively harm the game or enable me to cheat any encounters.
I am not threatening to quit, but I am sharing this as an example. People don’t quit playing for one reason, its not often one single change to the game that causes people to stop logging in. But why not take the opportunity to grab a win, especially when so many people in the community are trying to help offer their time and expertise to bridge some of the gaps that were created by the company.
To be so brazen about squashing these addons , blizzard is taking an opportunity to really develop and enhance their product further, and instead just taking their ice cream and shoving it in the sand.
