So much this.
I agree. I also sympathize with those people who feel slighted by some simple and easy to fix issue. They need a place to feel as they have at the very least, been able to vent this frustration and that someone, anyone listened.
This being said I also agree and sympathize with the customer support team who will need to make some kind of sense of these frustrated rants. The fact that there is no structured process to make a complaint or even provide detailed feedback is an indication of the illusion that Blizzard is promoting as customer support. Send us a tweet? I actually laughed when I found this out. This does work. My issue was resolved immediately and I was very happy, but using Twitter as a support tool is amateurish and reeks of unprofessionalism. Especially for a company that has such a large customer base. You need to be able to run querys against a generated database to be able to define current problems and predict future ones.
The fact that they do not have this ability leads me to believe that they are reactive and not serious about actually helping.
While a decent concept, the Class Leads tend to be the top 1% of players in a particular class. While useful for specific game play at the top end, it alienates play for the vast majority of players of a particular class. Outspoken Class Leads have often lead to serious balance issues where Class Leads of other classes were not as vocal or demanding. It’s how the vocal minority drive off the quiet majority.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. Companies use focus-groups all the time - from influencers and achievers, to customer segments and community coalitions - that help them obtain a snapshot of feedback that they can contextualize.
So some focus group said that azerite gear was a good thing and the devs put into the game?
Lousy focus group.
Yeah, I agree. The problem is not with the focus group, it’s with how Blizzard may have used the focus group feedback. You want hardcore raiders, casual raiders, the pug-and-run group, the social gamers, solo’ers, etc., all well-represented to build a product that appeals to (and is accessible by) the widest possible audience, and gives everyone opportunity for meaningful and enjoyable progress in their chosen playstyle. But it’s clear that with Azerite, the wrong focus group’s feedback on this game system was extrapolated and advanced in ways that were to the disadvantage of the entire game. I know of no one, in particular, who was happy with Azerite by the time the 8.2 reset came around - but there was excitement at the start of the expansion that the system would offer something engaging and new.
Put another way – many systems have been one-time use-and-discard systems (the Garrison from Warlords of Draenor; the Artifact Weapon from Legion; Azerite and the Heart of Azeroth from Battle for Azeroth; and, seemingly, Covenant Abilities in Shadowlands) – and so it’s clear that the WoW design team has given up on building enduring game-defining meta, and have settled on expansion-specific themes and constant game resets (which, in their defense, has been consistent with the gear and abilities resets since the transition from Vanilla to Burning Crusade).
It’s just a bit jarring to see entire systems in the game completely abandoned from one expansion to the next, rather than be built meaningfully upon.