So where does Blizzard actually get enough feedback to make changes to the game? I see Blue posts say “based on your feedback” but between twitter, the forums, Reddit, YouTube and other platforms, all with people expressing and complaining about what needs to be changed, What do they look at to make that final decision?
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I think just dwelling among the various community forums you get a sense of the vibes. They do watch and read that stuff. And devs do actually play the game as well, despite what some people think.
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Little A, little B. Watching population of engagement I think is how they really tell when they need to listen to feedback on subjects. It is very easy for anyone to point to a thread or Discord or whatever and show support or dislike for the subject but of course it won’t always be acted on.
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They don’t listen to the mass. They hear us, but they listen to the select few. I mean, they have their own discord with those players.
Been complaining about a mount bouncing like a ball on the screen in static flight, which was changed to do that. Of course nothing will get changed.
Always depends on who specifically is doing the complaining.
I’ve gotten the very occasional survey and stuff.
I assume they really listen to those, since they are confidential.
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streamers 
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Probably co-pilot that has been trained on fourm data
I think that blizzard does listen to our input but it takes a long time for it to get implimented so it’s easy to feel like they don’t listen at all or that when they do it is way late.
And I’ve come to this conclusion based on historical and allegorical recounts.
For instance, look at the state of covenants in shadowlands in season 1. People warned in ptr, people complained s1, got some QoL in s2, but by s3 or 4 the problems with covenants most people had were gone for the most part. People would rightly point out that’s a long time to wait to do something about what is upsetting the community dramatically.
So that’s historical context.
Allegorically, Metzen and other devs have talked about how they plan and build expansions in advance. So you have some of the team working on pre-existing stuff, people working on current stuff, people working on upcoming stuff, and people working on stuff that’s like 2 expansions away even if it’s only in the conceptual phase.
For instance Metzen said that they had the first 8 expansions planned out when they pitched the mmo. And it’s not just metzen’s word, because pointers and details about the planet of argus were included in the beta files of vanilla. Including the 3 zones and the descriptors of them. All of which were very very accurate come legion.
Another instance involving metzen was in an interview after he left the company where he said something like the last thing he was working on before leaving was the BfA cinematic during the end phases of WoD. So legion isn’t even out yet and hes working on the BfA cinematic.
So blizz has this encumbered machine that has to both fix bugs in old content, keep current content functional, refining emerging content, and then looking ahead towards next content.
When you have a work flow schedule like this, and I think it’s very impressive they’re able to do this, asking blizzard to completely break down and rework a system like covenants in a few months is a very difficult task. Maybe impossible by that point that it’s just come out and the team is looking forward and the team left to work on that current system doesn’t have the depth of tools or people to rework an entire system all over again. And over time emerging and future content take more and more people from their work groups.
have they reworked stuff before? I suppose kind of like corruptions replacing azerite armor or w/e but I really don’t think all that often. They tweak it, tune it, change it in small ways, but breaking it down and rebuilding it all over not really and that system had maybe 1-2 years of work on it and is integral to the gameplay so pulling out pieces like a jenga tower isn’t a good idea–probably.
It is aggravating though and people have called out blizz for it. I am sympathetic to them and know that the gm or mod or employee beyond the forums is an actual person working a job that they’re probably passionate about. So when I say things like “whoever created city of threads needs fired so they can realize their true potential as a dark souls developer,” that’s mean and I feel bad after but also I still think that because CoT is the worst dungeon ever created in the history of this game or possibly any game. Even randomly generated games produce better dungeon crawling experiences than CoT. I’d rather play Torghast 4 hours a day than play CoT.
But I understand it’s not like they can just DELETE COT FROM THE GAME, because that would waste so much work on the dungeon with NO STORY and NO UNIQUE ASSETS ONLY REUSED ONES and NOTHING FUN. So I know in reality they can’t do that but I can still give feedback on it and maybe next expansion we won’t intentionally get another CoT type dungeon again. Or maybe in 2 expansions, right?
At least this is how I cope and choose to believe they will actually listen to my feedback on mw and m+.
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Right here:
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They don’t. They use surveys and internal data.
Forums exist to make fun of stupid takes and so you can complain about something pretending to be heard.
They don’t need any feedback to tell some systems aren’t good. Like the Legion legendaries being all out rng with caps or Shadowlands covenants. They KNEW it’s bad. They didn’t care because that was the design paradigm they wanted, as according to whatever data that was the way to get more player engagement.
You can often see it in Ion interviews when he’s asked about some objectively awful system. He’ll go like “yeah it’s bad we are aware it should be different we’ll gather the data, we hear you, we will make it better” and then nothing gets done and in 2 months he says the same thing in slightly different wording in an interview. And eventually enough time passes and they DO the fixes they had ready for months.
Nobody cares about your forum feedback. Nobody cares about any of your feedback if it’s something they just refuse to do for whatever reason.
There’s no good will there at all.
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The best feedback they get comes from sensors they have in the code that tell them what we are actually doing when we play the game. We know this because people like Ion are always talking about seeing players do one thing or another, seeing players having one problem or another, etc.
As for the Content Creators it would make the most sense if Blizzard looked at what they say as advertising. If popular CCs are saying positive things it will help the product. If they are saying negative things it will hurt the product.
Now they may or may not be looking at those CCs that way, it’s hard to tell. It also includes positive notes with people generating “How to” videos.
And finally they look at the forums but that being said, forms represent a small percentage of the player base. Let’s face it, we are not seeing millions of people adding notes to the forums. We are hearing regularly from a few thousand at most which is in the 1% range.
Also that 1% is not a representative sample. Internet forums tend to be biased toward people who have something to complain about.
Anyway that’s my view. The views of others may vary.
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The one place I’ve seen them really pay attention are the PTR forums.
I disagree with you fundamentally. They knew it was a problem and read the feedback but I already explained in my post why change didn’t come or came much later than desired for most people.
Maybe here.
Blizzard we need thicker Bloodelf female in game design.
In 16 years I have never played a female hero. Maybe you will let me RP as a Silvermoon guard, next expansion.
For Legion legendaries, they knew it was a problem from the first month of release.
They did nothing for the entire expansion while admitting it is in fact a problem.
Azerite had this happen in the exact same way too, they knew since PTR that the system is bad, they got tons of feedback pointing out that it’s bad, I bet they had internal data showing it’s bad as well and they did nothing for however long because that wasn’t something they WANTED to do due to whatever reasons.
The change doesn’t come because they don’t want it to come because of whatever metrics they are chasing.
They also don’t exactly care about PTR feedback. There are major spec flaws and bugs still present in the game that were pointed out on PTR. And it’s not even the first time that happens.
This is the correct answer.
They just throw things to the wall and see what sticks.
From what I’ve observed Blizzard appears to listen to 2 demographics above all others:
- The hypercasual, cozzy-game levels of gameplay, who are only here for the vibes but even the story can’t be too hardcore or serious.
- The mythic raiding pro-players who put optimization before fun, and who would let an Addon play the entire fight for them if that allowed them to kill the boss 2% quicker.
Players who like a little bit of everything, a somewhat mature story, and an interesting journey and progression curve from level 1 all the way to high-level dungeons… Well, we can keep hoping.
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I just hope they don’t cherry-pick feedback from this forum. I’ve seen several with such barbaric opinions or comments that it makes me want to pull my hair out.
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Blizzard mostly responds to players’ actions - not so much their words. They have data on everything players do in the game. They know which parts of the game are popular and which parts aren’t. They also closely watch subscription numbers.
Which game elements players engage with and whether they keep or cancel their subscription are both types of player feedback in the form of behavior. Verbal feedback is a distant third in importance.
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I assume it’s some combination of runecasting and examining bird entrails.
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