One of my biggest problems with WoW over the years has been either the lack of open communication, or the vagueness of communication, between the game designers and the player base. I’d like to use this opportunity just to discuss a few of my thoughts, and also open the question up to others about what they would like to see, and what things have already been done that they think have helped.
I’ll break it down into 3 chunks, past present and future communication.
There’s been a recurring pattern in the recent expansions that goes like this. Expansion release, everything is hyped, but quickly players realise flaws in certain progress systems (time gating, inability to fully catch up if you miss a week, RNG power creep, forcing content on players progress), and Blizzard won’t make any public comment but will be working internally on a “solution” that is then brought into the first patch. This continues until the final patch of an expansion where Blizzards game design and how players want to enjoy the systems get a lot closer to meeting, and the game is more enjoyable, more playable, but a lot of these systems we’ve been forced to grind out for power creep that even with them now being much more interesting we’re too done with them to try them. A good example being torghast, what torghast was at the end of shadowlands was great! But it took so long getting to that point, where active communication with the player base - both through beta, ptr AND early patches would have made this A much more loved and well remembered feature. This happens over and over and is how we end up with so much dead content (Island expeditions, scenarios, warfronts, torghast, etc) that if done properly could have been (and could still be) fantastic “evergreen” content.
To put this now into current communication. Blizzard have definitely improved in some ways. but there is still so much to be done. Looking at season 3 I think the release and amount of content has been fantastic, and I love the “prepatch catchup” events that are regularly in the game now, but there needs to me more ongoing discussion with the playerbase about things that are generally universally agreed as just bad game design. One example, why do lashers in everbloom interact with m+ affixes such as bursting? Just to clarify, I’m not even asking for fixes to things, I’m just asking for communcation. Blizzard seeing these comments and discussions and actively communicating with the playerbase as to either why it is the way it is, or what they hope to do to improve it.
And as for future. At the time of posting this PTR has just been released for season 4 and there are already a lot of questions being asked by the community. Will there be a raid rotation for awakened? what is awakened, is it just an affix like in shadowlands? What does “bi weekly” rotation of dungeons mean? All of these things should already be actively communicated with us. Leaving things open to interpretation and letting people speculate is always going to lead to disappoint and blizzard underdelivering. For smaller content updates like 10.2.7 with the “pandemonium” I think its fantastic that there is surprise content, but when it comes to the core content of the game with M+, raiding and seasonal changes I think Blizzard would benefit a lot more from listening to the community and communicating openly with us.
I’d love to here other peoples thoughts on this.