You (the WoW devs) use that thing for all sorts of free ideas like it’s a one-way mirror, but you don’t do your part on the other end of things by actually staying current with and, most of all, appreciative of your long-lasting community.
Instead, you’ve used that suggestion box for free moneymaking ideas to cherrypick from as you leave the souls of suggested ideas behind to dry up in the sun like deferred dreams.
It’s sad that you’ve decided to hide away from your own community, so I’m basically suggesting that you at least admit your policy in a true fashion by getting rid of the in-game suggestion box and creating an official Suggestion forum exclusively for all fan feedback.
At least that way when you get a massive money making idea from your fans it’ll be in some way obvious who gave you the idea… although obviously that might be detrimental to your current business model of combing through a sea of feedback and grabbing at the fastest money you can.
There’s no getting around what you’ve done here, Blizzard, and that’s coming from someone who’s done a lot of things that have come back threefold.
Just remember, it’s all going to have to balance at the end.
It’s there to maintain the illusion that our opinions count. It’s been quite a while since anyone at Blizzard actually gave more than gratuitous lip service to what any of their customers think. They care about our wallets, and nothing else matters.
We had a suggestion forum at one point. It was removed in favor of suggestion threads being placed in the sub-forum most relevant to the topic.
I don’t see a return of a suggestion forum being a thing, it’s nice to just browse the arena forum, for example, and get feedback and ideas for arena things, rather than attempting to sort through a forum filled with suggestions for all aspects of WoW to try to find an arena thread.
This is very true. Sadly, far too many ascribe virtues to companies that they simply don’t have. When Blizzard was young, they made games for gamers because they were mostly all gamers themselves. Today they seem to make games for accountants and financial analysts. In the business world, this is called growing up. As someone who was a huge fan of both Blizzard and Bioware games, the current state of both developers just makes me feel sad and old.
no, i use that to suggest to blizz that they kindly remove their foot from their … erm, well, to suggest things NICELY about things i don’t care for in their game and how they could make them not suck for everybody.
for the most part they are good ideas i would like them to consider. free of charge. definitely the foot one…
We used to have a suggestion forum and it was basically full of spam from people constantly reposting the same few “ideas” over and over and over again.
in other business areas, the suggestion box either was eliminated (or rebranded “complaint submission,” etc…) or there is alot of fine print around suggestions.
I’ve noticed in the last couple days, the refrain “I got no credit for submitting an idea” or some such… this might be an upcoming meme or something on the forums. No business acknowledges suggestion sources for good reason. It’s a shti-storm legally and PR-wise, with non-affiliates that will start fighting over “who’s idea it was” and suing for compensation, even copyright claims. Often, the “ideas” are obvious ones, ones that are also related to other ‘ideas’ already available, so aren’t unique anyway, though the person submitting them will feel alot of ownership and ego tied up in them.
Except for very small, intimate/niche businesses, none will risk the suggestion box acknowledgement.
No, they already did that. It did not work as a forum, so they got rid of it.
The in game suggestion feature is much better, though a lot of people don’t even know it is there.
The reason why the web one was bad, was that everyone would just say “hey, why not?”, then you’d have 30,000 “I agree!” in a thread, since it is very easy to post “Me too!” That made it not really indicative of what people actually want.
So the in game one gives them much more of a feel of what people really want, without them just adding “me too!” People can suggest their own, if they’d really like something like housing and guild housing (for instance.) Then that lets them see, “hey, 100,000 users want this thing…”
Plus, they once stated that only 4 percent of the game players ever come to the forums and post. So they don’t find that to be a very good sample. Many users only come here and post if they have a game issue.
That’s what suggestions are. They’re little ideas that you throw in there in case the devs haven’t thought of it, or are on the fence about it. And all those ideas and all the ideas the devs generate get stuck in a cauldron of simmering idea-ness and out of that they draw the ideas they think work best as a group.
Making a suggestion does not oblige them to use it. Making a suggestion does not oblige them to give you some kind of recognition or credit. If you make a suggestion, it should be because you honestly think it will improve the game, not for fake internet points. Your reward - if they agree and implement that suggestion - is that the game is better.
It’s fine to take ideas from fans who give them willingly, and I think it’s interesting that this part of the OP was sort of glanced over, because…
There’s a level of inherent responsible give and take that occurs with any situation that isn’t just… outright exploitative.
You can take and take and take until the taking becomes less useful and the giving goes away, and then you can say “well, we took all that was given, and that was all fine.”
That’s true!
The thing is, you can take in a way that allows for continual taking, because if you give back just a little bit here and there you can really make a feedback loop of self-perpetuating communication.
There’s all these statements about legality and how that gets in the way and that’s fine, but the thought occurs: why accept the ideas in the first place if acknowledging that you accepted and used them could get you into some sort of legal trouble?
In other words, it’s a silly approach to begin with that’s bent on the idea of exploiting players with a sense of hopefulness who want to see things improve. That’s essentially Blizzard’s model and what it’s been running on for years.
That faith is almost run out, I personally am just done but I also can’t help but say something because of all the energy that’s been left… to wonder why it was so mistreated when all it wanted to do was help.
That’s been all of it.
So many players just wanting to help and Blizzard gobbles them all up.
I don’t like the in-game suggestion box because it has only space for a short snippet of a thought. Just try to flesh out an idea, or describe a scenario…
Winklevoss twins thought they deserved a reward too. They didn’t really do much of the work tho so…they did get thier fair share I guess. Goodluck with that.
