Sorry, I think I’m actually taking your posts too literally. So I apologize when it reads hyperbolic with the title and how you are framing things.
Why do you see the opinions of the council as elevated above others? I consider us more a sample of the greater audience nothing greater.
I guess I would want you to point towards things that have worked or you believe would work. What should we be as a council and how would that make you feel less of a publicity stunt?
It’s fine I have a severe difficulty of being able to translate my thoughts into written words that are easily understandable which is why a ton of my posts you see me edit A LOT. Sometimes I don’t use the right word and it makes me smack myself in the head for using it because I meant something else instead.
Classic case of me not using the right word to portray what I mean or using the wrong phrase to get a point across. I should have caught that earlier and thought of a better way to express how I see the Council which is to be a voice for the community in a sense that we take their concerns as a whole, add them to our own and then display them in hopes the devs see it and pick up on the fact we as the ENTIRE WoW gaming community do not accept it as it is.
For starters the discord we few 100 share. When I first joined I thought we’d have more interaction with the CM’s who would relay to us points of inquiry that the developers want our opinion on and the CM’s would then relay our thoughts to the developers. But as I see now having been here almost a year that was far form the truth.
The application process made it seem like this was to be the case but since joining I haven’t seen a shred of proposed inquiry brought to us by a CM from a dev personally.
How would you feel if at some point down the line we found out exactly how much of an impact our discussions or comments had on the game and its policies.
If you knew that there were 30/50/100 instances of subjective change that were addressed on some level and applied to the game. Would you think at that point our purpose here was worth it?
I feel “Some point down the line” would be too late of a turn around response. In a game as active and played as this, the responses need to be seen and felt sooner to create a lasting impression that we are being heard.
A response cannot just be thrown out into the raving mad pack when something they do has such a strong negative reaction that it snowballs so greatly that they feel they are forced to respond to it to calm nerves and ease tensions before people start thinking about intentionally breaking the game by causing mass server invasions to high pop realms to crash them or other forms of intentional sabotage. (This is a thing that’s happened in the past on Wyrmrest whether as a form of protest or to simply annoy us.)
To me the latest response was rushed and forced because they once again proved they did not take 6 months of feedback when the problem first arose and instead made assumptions on what they alone saw when we’ve been commenting about it for some time, waiting for a meager scrap of information on what they plan to do to fix the problems we saw.
I’ve been spending some time in the GD forums during this unrest, seeing peoples views on the matter and the common consensus is they saw a problem that wasn’t there/created a problem that didn’t exist and decided to fix it without further reading what we’ve been talking about here in this separated portion of the forums and the forums everywhere at large.
It would be worth it, again, if it was a two way street in discussion rather than these one sided conversations, going back and forth with ourselves when we SHOULD be going back and forth with the developers and CM’s.
I was attempting to imply is the idea of responses, regardless of actual change. More important than any result where change is made behind the scenes without current knowledge.
Ah, my mistake. I’ve been staying up later than I should be this entire week due to discourse on these forums and trying to respond to everyone (cause I’m just like that for some reason) and frankly I’m tired. lol
Edit because I’m more awake and can understand this properly (I failed the homework lol).
Having ongoing and continuous responses cements that they do understand and they are hearing us. One response saying “We hear you!” and then going radio silent is like “Do they really hear us?” But having an ongoing back and forth response means they can understand us better and see where we’re coming from and make changes based on that constant back and forth feedback. More engagement with the people that populate your game is never a bad thing now or in the future.
In my eyes, consistent back and forth discussion promotes better change rather than giving us what YOU think is right instead of reading the 20 point post of what the populace thinks is right that you’ve somehow ignored for 3 months despite it being an extremely hot topic.
I made a major edit to the bottom of my last post because once again I failed the homework but I do understand your statement more clearly. (at least I hope I do)
We are the HOA
I see where you were coming from, but I always felt that the Community Council was more of a way of allowing minority voices to be heard — or, in a different way of putting it, act as snapshots of the community.
On the forums, it is easy for some voices to get drowned out. That’s why I applied for the Council; I saw it as an opportunity for the deaf players to get heard, for the “casual” players (due to limited gameplay time) to get heard, and the same for the other things that I’m somewhat interested in.
At first, I was uncertain with the low post activity by Blizzard on the forum, but then I looked at the actions that Blizzard has undertaken ever since; I’ve seen small (but significant) steps being taken here and there. I am optimistic — some people might say that’s a personality flaw of mine, but that’s just my nature. I’d have my cynical moments but I always revert back to my innate optimism — but I also know that actions speak louder than words.
Sometimes I do think that it would be a good idea for Blizzard to say, “Yes, we hear you and we’ve been discussing this issue. It’s on the table, but we don’t have a solution or timeline yet.” I think that that does a LOT for player frustration.
But it also doesn’t bother me particularly much to not to get “validation,” since like I said — actions speak louder than words. Yes, Blizzard absolutely has made bone-headed decisions this expansion, but compare now to before! They’re reverting their decisions faster than ever before, and they’ve been quick (compared to the past) to respond to unexpectedly poor receptions.
I am a little surprised to hear this. I’m curious, how did this expectation came around? Was it because Blizzard specifically asked for certain feedback on PTR? Or was it because of your own optimism? (In that case, I relate!)
The reason I’m surprised is because I don’t view the Community Council that way. And actually, literally just now do I realize how that misunderstanding could’ve come around — the word “council.” Ahh, that does makes sense. But back to my point — I just saw this as a way to get our minorities to be heard.
At the end of the day? I believe it would be very helpful to have Blizzard clarify and define exactly what the Community Council is, and what we’re expected to do.
We have been given the opportunity to share crucial errors, flaws, problems we as individuals and those put forth for the community.
We do not have obstruction, derogatory, flaming and pure obstinance to combat when presenting the ideas we have.
The conversation that we need direct responsiveness for most or all posts made seems a bit redundant when you think how many people have 5 follow up questions for every Blue Post immediately.
That would compound surprisingly quick.
I dont see that as a realistic scenario accepted from the team involved with us.
Regardless of any desire or factual belief we are owed responses or dialogue. The best we can hope to continue doing is present all information we have gathered with valid sources of any issue.
Things are changing. Patience.
They sorta said it here, with the announcement
Hm, did you mean the video? Because I read through the article carefully, and I didn’t see anything implying that Blizzard would “run their decisions by us” before implementing them. But, I’ll be the first to admit that I could’ve misunderstood the article.
I’ll go see if I can get subtitles to work on the video. The latest update to my smartphone has changed the subtitle setting so it’s been a pain watching videos. 
I was more aiming at
- In this new forum, we’ll ask members to share their experiences and perspectives on anything in the game, and some topics may be started by Blizzard developers and community managers.
- Responses and updates from Blizzard will be posted there so they can easily be discussed by the entire community.
- A private discussion will also be setup for Council members to encourage direct interaction between members.
- Separate conversations between smaller groups of members and Blizzard developers will be encouraged to ensure players with differing perspectives are being heard.
To me this implies more interaction than they have been
Ah, thank you for the clarification! I appreciate that. 
I did address the relatively low interaction in the first half of my post. The second half was specifically aimed at the statement that some members seems to believe that Blizzard would run their decisions by us before implementation. That is what I’m talking about — I’m trying to determine what kind of information I’ve missed. Because, honestly, I read the original announcement back when Community Council first launched and applied back then. I haven’t checked since then to see whether any information got changed. Hence my question…
The quote Cyrios posted looks all but straight forward. I dont see much indication, if any, that they would be conferring with or discussing with us in an open format.