It is clear Blizzard doesn’t care about the community as a whole. Doesn’t matter if we’re playing retail World of Warcraft or Classic World of Warcraft, we’re all still one community. I’ve heard it too many times from them, “we’ve been listening to the community,” within the Deep Dive for the Dragon Flight expansion, within the Wrath of the Lich King Classic preview, it is the same thing which is a lie. If Blizzard listens to the community, then why create the community council and ignore everyone else. Why only send out surveys to a small group of people?
We rarely see Blizzard really engage with the community on the forums, let alone we haven’t really seen Blizzard engage with the community in game since back in Wrath of the Lich King, since Activision bought Blizzard. So who is Blizzard really listening too? A small portion of players is not the community.
They hired diversity hires to come up with new ideas and designs for the game, and this is how you get fox races and dragon races, body type 1 and body type 2. Like open your eyes and see the team that works at blizz.
Not really sure… I don’t think anyone except the people that make those decisions know.
I think when they say they are listening to the community, perhaps they mean they have a team that actually actively watches reddit, forums, youtube, streamers etc, but I doubt it.
When the guy who hit you with the “You think you do but you don’t” still runs the show in many ways, you know very well there are ego’s that are getting in the way of listening to the community.
When I was a programmer, I saw two kinds of companies: those on the rise, and those on the fall. The ones on the rise tended to be creator driven (i.e., people with a vision of what they wanted and a team of designers, developers, artists, technicians, etc. to make it reality).
Those on the fall tended to be marketing driven (i.e., let’s call it new and improved even though it’s the same product and sell our customers additional, glitzy stuff to make them think it is.) The people replacing the former creators are now maintaining and enhancing someone else’s ideas but can’t create anything new.
people have been asking for playable dragons and Nagas for years, and for Sethrakk since they were revealed. hell, anytime there’s a race we can’t play there are a bunch of people asking for them to be made playable (tuskarr, murloc, centaur, ethereals to name a few) especially if they are friendly to us at some point
The company that was recently sued for having a culture of sexism and racism is now doing “diversity hires”? Really? What’s more likely. That it’s “diversity hires” doing this, or that they’re trying to keep up with FF14?
I mean, look at shadowlands. All the beta feedback was blatantly ignored. Hell, Ian directly argued with the community. Remember the “well pull the ripcord if people don’t like it” incident? It took over a year to “pull that ripcord”
And look, the final version of shadowlands is based on the feedback in the beta.
They do this every expansion. Release some horrible time gated player restricting content and take the entire expansion to fix it. They’ve done this three times in a row now.
Pfft, don’t think Blizzard could even do that, even if they created a completely new WoW. Aslong as they are puppets to Activision, there is no chance in hell they’ll keep up with FFXIV.
