LOL, sure. They have all the data they need, that’s why they’ve lost 75% of the playerbase since wod.
Sure they’re being responsible.
Being unconcerned about the long-term health of the game puts you squarely in the corner with the devs.
Analytics that are done long after disaster strikes are clearly not serving the investors well. Perhaps if they decided to do research before making those development decisions rather than waiting until it’s too late to change any plans, which are now set in stone?
They still don’t know why so many people have left. And all the evidence is that they still don’t care.
Perhaps if you understood how market research worked. But clearly you think it’s not necessary to find out in advance what the customers are willing to accept. I’m sure you’ll fit in fine in the dev department.
Sure. You’ve worked in “marketing” for 2 decades, but you think companies should go ahead and spend millions of dollars on projects using only post mortems as their research. Right. LOLOL.
Your focus on subscription numbers and changes to the game made over the longer term show you certainly aren’t informed either.
The actual question should be what has changed from Legion to BfA? Legion didn’t have complex stats, force you to group, give you all content at once, or have a slow trickle of gear.
I could list the actual problems out, but where’s the fun in that.
Data isn’t some kind of crystal ball. We all want it to be but it isn’t. Analytics are entirely after the fact. Market insights only tell you what the trends are, not what’s guaranteed to happen.
That’s the rub isn’t it? That we know they have the data but doesn’t seem like they are willing to roll back things that they introduced that are being negatively received. Sure they may tweak things here and there, but they refuse to ever be like ,“Well guys the data shows this was a bad idea. We will try to do better next time.” and then delete the changes. It’s almost like a change for the sake of change mentality.
I mentioned that I work in the online user experience industry. How do online businesses improve their user experience? They don’t just make an assumption and roll out a change. They present a hypothesis and create a test experience to present to some of their users, and then the rest get the Control experience. Or alternatively you put 100% of traffic to the test experience and do a before and after analysis. THEN once you get the data of actual user response with the live product, not in a testing environment like beta or PTR, then you have your usable data that you use for your long term solutions.
Now here is the key: if user response to your test experience is negative, the correct response is to do 1 of 2 things. #1 is to just junk the whole idea if it did monumentally bad for a lot of reasons. #2 is to update the test experience if it is just a couple changes away from being the winning variation and you can clearly identify why it did poorly. HOWEVER…if you go with #2 you always, always, revert back to the Control experience until you have the polished test experience ready to go.
If Blizz has to take something that is not working down after two months in an xpac, polish it up, and revisit it again with the next content release or next xpac, then that is the better solution. Not keeping a steaming turd of a product running and feverishly try to patch it up with hotfixes and patches. They need to let the data retroactively affect what is CURRENTLY live. Not just collect data for an entire xpac and be like, “Sorry we will try to fix that next xpac”.
Take Path of Exile for example. Every single season they try something new. Every single season they release to the public what element they are keeping, what elements they are not keeping, and their rationale for doing so. And these decisions on what to keep are heavily heavily influenced by user feedback.
I’m sure that whatever personnel the dev team answers too definitely cares about the sub numbers as well, which is why I brought it up. WOW, just like any other business is a money machine.
Also the change from Legion to BFA is definitely something they should take a close look at, but they also should look all the way back to BC and WOTLK.
That data is just a handful of years old, and therefore still relevant. Post WOTLK is when the sub numbers first took a gigantic nosedive, so their entire business from the ground up should be VERY invested in figuring out what caused it and if it is anything they changed swiftly removing it from the game.
While Legion did very well compared to most xpacs since WOTLK, it is still a far far cry form the “Golden Age”. So their data analysts and devs should be feverishly trying to identify which changes are specifically responsible for user frustration, making no assumptions, but going 100% off of data and user feedback.
You are partially right, although typically designers and developers do some of their own research into things like industry best practices and user behavior.
i actually work on a user experience team as an analysts, working closely with designers and developers. And I can tell you that a huge part of the analyst’s job is not only identifying important data, but translating it to designers and devs in a way that they will understand, and provide them with direction on what they should be trying to accomplish.
So here’s my question. If I log on to these forums, and then to Reddit, and see walls of complaints about something like let’s say RNG heavy loot systems…then where is the data showing why they have not rolled that back yet? Are there some hidden surveys I don’t know about? I certainly haven’t been presented with a single survey and I’ve been playing the game and on the blizz site heavily since BFA launched.
Doesn’t mean they don’t happen. In fact, Customer Support somewhat regularly fields queries on things saying “is this survey actually from Blizzard?” So I know they exist.
There are multiple sources of information. One of the most simplistic is “what are players spending most of their time on in game?” It’s data we don’t have access to and they do. Is it the be-all and end-all of data points? Nope. But it’s an idea of things. It’s skewed by how rewarding certain content is, but not completely so.
The whole thread is pretty much a giant “they aren’t listening to me” rant. Which is OK to a point, but really doesn’t communicate a lot about what you want to see.
It’s easy to hate on things. It’s hard to be a catalyst for change. Or to even communicate constructively what you want. Do the hard stuff.
I am being clear on what I want to see. I want Blizzard to transparently announce to the public what issues they are actively addressing, what direction those changes are headed, and (while not using specific metrics) what kind of data and rationale they are using to inform their decisions.
And I want them to remove systems that are not working out until they have been polished fully.
The Dev team just does what they’re told. It’s not like they get to create content on the fly, they have to adhere to a strict set of guidelines, usually laid out by someone in management.