Personally, I feel they are too reactionary. And swing too far in a direction. Example. Mission tables. They were huge money makers previously, and were tied to the class hall quest lines waaay too much. Just drawing out specific steps. People complained that the mission table felt too forced/mandatory. (both in needing to do it for the quest line, and for gold).
So Blizzard listened. They just swung the change so far in the opposite direction. The table then became basically useless, and you often wondered “why am I even doing this?”. It was something that had no real time commitment, yet “almost zero work at all” didn’t justify it. Granted its a little better with the treasure maps from Island Expeditions. I feel like there could have been some middle ground between " I feel completely obligated to do the mission table on all my toons, regularly, without missing one" and “next to worthless”.
I do think it would be interesting if there was more interaction between Mission Table / Warfront / Island Expedition (similar in how you get a Mission Table Treasure Map from IEs).
I’m not sure how active they used to be on popular topics, but they’re actively ignoring the portal conversation. Even though it now has TWO threads on the top of the list. Sure they might be active, but talking about your favorite battle pet or answering simple gameplay questions that other players have already answered while ignoring issues isn’t constructive.
And even if CM presence here has increased, it’s likely they’ve given the devs our feedback and they have decided not to listen to it anyway. Unless the CMs here are just straight up not giving our feedback to the devs at all, I really doubt it’s a CM problem. And I doubt that, too, because Ion makes it repeatedly clear that he knows what people are complaining about it, but then gives a reason why we’re actually wrong and here’s what they’re gonna do instead.
There will always be more CM responses on the “light” topics. Its because they aren’t devs. On the controversial type issues, they can only give Approved™ responses. They can relay the feedback all they can, but until they get a response from the devs, they can’t give further insight. That is above their pay grade.
On “light” topics, such as your favorite battle pet, they can talk more freely for obvious reasons.
That being said, in two particular threads they have talked heavily about the issue of portals. Whether or not we like what they said, is something else.
Here is a rather long thread they created
In this thread, they have like half a dozen posts last I checked
I definitely believe they relay the feedback. I just think sometimes the answer is “no”. Once again, not defending some of their most recent choices. But I don’t think we should expect every thing we want to be implemented. We (as a community) tend to ignore any time they do listen to our feedback, while acting like every single time its ignored is a personal slight.
To be fair, GD complains/suggests some really horrible things. And I would sincerely hate any game to cater to every whim of the loudest forum posters.
There is a difference in listening to player feedback and just doing what they tell you. Just because you might disagree with a decision doesn’t mean others don’t support them. Which is the problem with player feedback, it generally isn’t a consensus and what is expressed here is only a minority of the player base.
You don’t know that it’s the minority opinion any more than we know it’s the majority decision. But if they felt the need to make a long winded “we know, but we don’t care” post, you can bet there was pretty intense pressure for them not to do it. The vocal minority is ignored outright, not addressed directly.
I never said it was a minority opinion. I was pointing out that those of us who use the forums are a minority of the player base. There is a difference.
They always say that they have to cater to a lot of different players and styles, and that’s fair enough. However situations like the whole portal thing where it seems pretty obvious that they’re current decision is almost universally disliked sure do make it seem like that’s just an excuse for their arbitrary nonsense decisions.
Ah, my bad, I misinterpreted.
My point is still gonna stand, that if there’s this much negative reaction from the people who do use the forums, it’s gonna be ugly when it goes live.
In fairness, the only time they make changes is after they get kicked in the shins. Most of the things they are fixing were known problems since the BFA beta… They didn’t care until people started leaving.
Lore said that they don’t relay all the feedback - just what the CMs deem important. Remember when he said that they didn’t think it was important for the devs to know that some of the Alliance players were feeling that there was horrible Horde bias? So how do you know that these thousands of posts are being relayed to the devs?
This isn’t something we want implemented. We want the portals that have been in the game to stay. If they decide to make a new portal room for SW and Org, so be it.
GD didn’t suggest for portals to be removed. But once some of us saw that they were going to be removed, we have posted thousands of posts telling the devs not to do it. Posts which are being ignored. (Or as Lore likes to say, “You’re not being ignored; you’re being disagreed with.”)
The problem with a statement like “the devs ignore feedback” is that there are so many people at this point that want completely differing things from the game. Listening to one group can easily make it feel like another is being ignored.
I’m willing to bet that there were complaints that the world feels trivial and small at this point (I feel that way myself actually). In this case, I don’t feel that the “fix” is the solution to the problem.
Too many people confuse “They don’t listen to us” with “They don’t do what we tell them when we tell them to do it.” I’ve questioned tons of decisions they’ve made in the last 14+ years I’ve played this game and I’ve never once felt like they didn’t listen just because I didn’t get what I wanted. Reading what you guys say, its like you honestly believe that Blizzard shouldn’t have a say in how their game is designed…that it all comes down to what you want. I don’t think that’s how something like this should work.
This downward trend started when Dear Leader took over along with the diablo devs. The older devs would not purposely try to hurt players fun in the game like this current crew are doing.
True story: the idea to nix flight in WoD got its genesis from the OG devs. Chilton, Afrasiabi, Pardo, Stockton, Holinka…that was their idea. Ion was in charge of raids.
Legendaries were built into legion. There’s nothing they could really do about them at the time.
The GCD change over all is good, I understand why they did it. Was it a bit clunky on the roll out? Sure, but they are still tuning it based on player feedback.
As with the GCD change, classes are under constant scrutiny and have multiple tweaks as time goes on.
The gameplay has been the same or similar since day 1. Not sure what you’re trying to say here.
Azurite is the expacs end game progression system. They can’t remove it without killing the entire thing.
Artifact power is good, not sure what you’re getting at here.
Islands were overhauled due to player feedback.
I’ll lump drop rates and RNG together. Once again these things not only have existed in WoW since day 1. They are part of the mmorpg style in general. And finally
Portal rooms. This was actually a request, or you might say player feedback, in the past. Funny how a vocal minority turns on it now.